In the Image of Tibet: Tibet Painting After 1959

Description

A study of the ways in which the idea of Tibet has been imagined by Tibetan artists both in exile in India and under Chinese rule in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of the People's Republic of China. Taking the year of the Dalai Lama's flight from Tibet in 1959 as its starting point and an indicator of the rupture which Tibetan society underwent at this time, this text shows how exiled artists and their audiences negotiated the reconstruction of Tibet in India whilst in the TAR, the visual landscape was colonized by Chinese depictions of Tibet, and what the Republic now saw as national "minority" - Tibetans. Using the result of fieldwork conducted over six years, in which Clare Harris interviewed and photographed Tibetan artists at work in their communities, this book shows how "Tibet" - real, remembered and imagined - came to be envisioned anew. Following the Chinese invasion and the creation of a Tibetan diaspora, politics and questions of authenticity and identity have, for Tibetans, been inextricably tied to the more familiar artistic problems of style, tradition and modernity.

Clare Harris is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a curator at the Pitt-Rivers Museum.

In the Image of Tibet is the first major study of the fate of Tibetan art since the Chinese occupation and colonization of Tibet. In a richly detailed analysis, Clare Harris provides a fascinating portrait of Tibetan art produced in two parallel, but connected, worlds: the world of Tibetan refugee painters living in exile and the world of Tibetan painters who remain in Tibet, and she explores the problems encountered in crossing from one world into another. Harris has written an important book that will be of great interest to students of Asian art, history and religion -- Donald S. Lopez