Theresia Peng • Slade School of Fine Art

An investigatation of questions concerning the cross-cultural analysis and utility of images in Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art, as opposed to political conflicts that often arise in the media now.

The Victory of Venus, Theresia Peng, 2007, oil painting on canvas

Chongqing Wooden House, Theresia Peng, 2012, oil painting on canvas

1st Winner Prize, the Second 'Landscape' Painting Competition, Leading Artist Gallery, UK, 2012

Red, paintings, conceptual photography, sculpture & video installation, Theresia Peng, 2010

Tibetan Tantric Buddhism is today considered one of the most important and controversial forms of Asian culture, using a rich and somewhat complicated range of methods and materials. The perception of the ‘mystical’ nature of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art in the world beyond Tibet has changed and evolved significantly and profoundly over the last three decades. However, contemporary Tibetan artists feel confused about how to develop a Tibetan art tradition within the context of a globalised world.

Against this background I am interested in exploring the mysterious nature of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and its art through grasping its religious values, historical context, and artistic qualities. In so doing I try to investigate questions concerning the cross-cultural analysis and utility of images in Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art, as opposed to political conflicts that often arise in the media now.

As an exploration of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art and its contemporary significance, this research seeks to fulfill three important goals: first, to introduce Tibet’s mystical and magnificent art within its historical and religious contexts to those unfamiliar with either Tibet Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhist art and its cultural background; second, to examine the influences of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art tradition on some contemporary Tibetan and non-Tibetan artists’ art practice; and third, to embark on combining theoretical research, methods of meditation and my own art practice as a way of exploring the trans-cultural translation of Tibetan Buddhist art in Chinese and Western contexts. The aim is to explore the potential of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art as elucidating common ground between the meditative mind and the creative mind for engaging in an open conversation of faith, spirituality, religion, and aesthetic experiences in the contemporary period.

Career Development after PhD

I returned to Chongqing at the beginning of 2013 and soon after was recruited as one of the researchers in the ‘One Hundred (Young) Talents’ programme’[1] at Chongqing University. In the spring of 2014, I was appointed as the Deputy head of Art Theory and History Office and Discipline Construction and Key Project, College of Arts, Chongqing University.

My new role provides me some advantages for developing my research and art practice, such as an academic connection between Chongqing University, Sichuan University and Tibet University,[2] geographic closeness with Tibet, research funding, and supports from leaders, colleagues and students. As a continuation of my PhD thesis and research, I am developing a new project From Classic to Contemporary: Paintings from Tibet after 1982. This project is about contemporary paintings engaged with the vestiges of Tibet’s heritage and made by (different generations of) Tibetan, Chinese and other non-Tibetan artists in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China (mainly Lhasa). In this project, I would take the initial experiment of reshaping the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism by Han Shuli in 1982 as its starting point. This project explores the tension between Tibetan and non-Tibetan artists in Lhasa, and Tibetan artists in exile and the unsettling problem of their cultural identity in between ‘the two external forces that dominate culture in the Tibet Autonomous Region: the globalised West and China’ (Harris, 2012: 229). I hope it will offer a new interpretation of contemporary Tibetan art based on modes of art-making characterised as Tibetan style, as opposed to a more readily suggestion by some politically motivated Tibetans that ‘Tibetan contemporary art can only be created by Tibetans’ (ibid.: 228). Personally, pursuing this study of more recent developments of art world in Tibet will also engage me with artists in Tibet more closely, and (hopefully) help me relocate myself among Tibetan and Chinese artists within and beyond Tibet in a more fluid and network-oriented manner with freedom of the individual.

[1] It is a nationwide plan of attracting elite young researchers who are working overseas and willing to return to China.

[2] Many Tibetan, Chinese or biethnic artists born in 1960s and afterwards studied art at The Fine Art Department of Tibet University.

web: theresiapeng.co.uk

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