ART

M.A.T.T.E.R.S

0.315 in

Sushma Joshi
ART
M.A.T.T.E.R.S

Sushma Joshi
 Sansar Media
148 Hattimahankal Marg
Handigaon, Kathmandu, Nepal
Ph. No. 4411378
Email: sushma@alumni.brown.edu

Published with the support of

Alliance Fancaise, Tripureswor

© Sushma Joshi 2008

With thanks to Phillipe Martin, director of Alliance Fancaise; ECS

Magazine; and the former Nation Weekly magazine and staff.

Printed and bound in Kathmandu, Nepal.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retreival system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recordings or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publication.
CONTENTS
Author’s Note 7
How I became an Artist 10
That Mystic Smile 27
The Marlboro Nomad 31
School of Thangka 34
Obsessed by a Vest 38
The Buddhist Behind the Camera 42
Pink Urinals and Broken Plates 45
Who Art Thou?, 49
Swayambhu Artist 52
Shooting Karma 56
The Work of the Wind 61
Pantomime in the Himalayas 66
Of Cabbages and Men 72
Rai Ko Ris 79
A Gift of the Heart 83
How to Build a Nepali Temple in Thirty Days 88
An Animated Life 95
Connected Centuries, Connected 103
En vogue: prabal gurung, bill blass Continents 109
The Universal Language of Music 117
End Note 122
 ART MATTERS | 7

AUTHOR’S NOTE

W hy a book of art reviews, you may ask. My answer is simple: art is the pulse of a nation’s
heartbeat. New York is the symbolic capital of the USA not only because it hosts the biggest
institutions of finance, but it also hosts the largest number of artists, art events and art institutions
per square feet in the United States. I have come to believe that the vibrancy of the art world is a
barometer that can used to measure the health of democracy and freedom of a nation-state.
So what’s the state of art in Nepal? This book of art review is a first tentative attempt to
answer the question. Why did I put art reviews from 2004, you may ask. The reviews are there
for a reason—2004 was the height of Nepal’s civil conflict, and the art events of that moment
often reflected the concerns of that time.
Half the reviews, and one interview, are from the Nation Weekly magazine, a political weekly
that came out from April 2004-February 2005, and in which I was staff writer. The selection is
arbitrary—the artists are people whose paths I crossed as I went about my life. There is no special
judgment attached to the selection. I did not seek them for any particular reason—and in any case,
8 | ART MATTERS

I do not believe in hierarchies in art. I wouldn’t be able to tell you, if you asked me now, who the
foremost artists are in Nepal. That is the work of an art collector, or a gallery owner—not an artist
who loves art. The reason why I feel the reviews work well as a book is because they capture the
diversity of the art world, often unlisted and undocumented, often hard to access, inside Nepal. Many
of the art events I write about were held during the conflict, and the art that is produced under such
political moments, of course, have their own unique concerns.
The Bhaktapur event of “Broken Plates”, for instance, was organized by artist Ashmina
Ranjit and featured the work of many artists—in my review, I only covered those who I
happened to see during the course of that visit. The public art event was transient, and there is
no permanent record of it. “Who Art Thou?” is dated—Salil Subedi has spun off to become a
sophisticated media artist who uses video, sound and performance in his work, but the review is
no less interesting for that. I have included an article about Prabal Gurung, a friend who works as
a fashion designer in New York, because I believe that fashion design is an underrated art. I have
also put Sarina Rai of “Rai Ko Ris”, a punk rock band, in the mix: I have no doubt Sarina will
hate to be included, but her work and her commitment to music carry the mark of a true (non-
commercial, stay out of the limelight) artist. Also included are reviews of visiting international
artists—even the ones that appear fly-by-night draw deep inspiration from Nepal. I’ve also added
 ART MATTERS | 9

two personal essays: “How I became an artist”, and “That Mystic Smile.” I hope these essays will
give some answers to questions often asked.
The twenty reviews are just a patchwork, a small glimpse of the mosaic that makes up the
art worlds of Nepal. I have hardly touched upon the vibrant world of theatre, both street and
stage-based, which has been operating in both Kathmandu and outside of it, for the past decade.
Also missing is folk culture—songs and music, which make up such a large part of the Nepali
imagination. But a book of this nature doesn’t attempt to be comprehensive—it is, in a way, just
a small offering that gives a taste of the arts that can be sampled and feasted on in multiple forms
in Nepal.

Sushma Joshi
Kathmandu, Nepal
sushma@alumni.brown.edu
10 | ART MATTERS

HOW I BECA ME AN
A RT I S T

E very once in a while, I am forced to write a little biographical note about who I am and
what I do. In one notable introduction, I was introduced as “writer, filmmaker, artist, journalist,
playwright and magazine editor.” Undoubtedly, that’s a stretch of generosity—one human being,
after all, cannot be all of these things at the same time.
I do acknowledge that I have, at one point or another in my life, worked as a journalist:
for a year as staff writer of the Nation Weekly Magazine of Kathmandu, and in-between as a
freelancer for various publications in Nepal and abroad. I have also started and edited a journal,
re/productions, which was an attempt to culturally analyze discourses of health and rights in the
subcontinent. This online journal, brought out by Harvard University, ran for two years or so,
and is still remembered by enthusiasts worldwide who enjoyed the sudden collision of cultural
theory with the rather dry discourse of development.
 ART MATTERS | 11

I have also made some documentaries, and short films. These films were shown in peer
reviewed festivals (Yamagata Documentary Film Festival’s New Asian Current; Flickerfest in
Bondi Beach; the Berlinale’s Talent Campus) and also on CNN International. So I guess, by
having paid some dues, I am also a filmmaker.
The hardest for me to justify is “artist.” After all, unlike working artists, I have yet to
show my work in an exhibition alongside other peer artists. A hypertextual installation I did was
accepted to the Art Institute of Chicago’s International Symposium of Electronic Art, that was
almost a decade ago. I have yet to receive a grant or a fellowship as an artist, or boast about my
sales. Admittedly, three paintings of mine sold in an art auction in New York, but that was to
raise funds for a domestic violence shelter. The women who bought the paintings, highly paid
professionals, were eager to support not just the shelter but also appreciated the female-inspired
faces of my paintings. So why, people wonder, do I persist on calling myself an artist? The
paintings that hang in my bedroom are my own, and after a brief solo exhibition at Gallery 9, I
did not exhibit again.
And yet, like Orhan Pamuk who I heard speak in New York’s PEN International Literature
Festival, and who insisted on talking about his past as an artist, I too feel like I cannot talk about
my evolution as a writer and filmmaker without talking about the art lurking in my past. Art is a
very special expression of any individual. For me, it was the medium that gave me the grace and
12 | ART MATTERS

strength to speak. One of my earliest memories is about art. And not just any art, but naughty
art. I must have been around four when I ran into my grandparents’ room with a sheet of paper
in which I had scrawled my masterpiece. The masterpiece in question was a human stick figure,
peeing in a giant fountain. “See, see, Baba peeing!” I screamed. The sudden akward silence that
followed in that formal atmosphere was one I would never forget. Like all conservative Brahmin
families, my grandfather held court in his room, and his four sons sat in a long line, according to
the hierarchy of age, down the long bedchamber. My uncle, I remember, tried to get me out of
the room by telling me my picture was wonderful, and I should leave quietly now, but I was not
to be intimidated and went around wildly waving my beautiful art at the elders.
The social injustice which I was trying to talk about was this—my grandfather, despite
the existence of a perfectly good lavatory in the yard, persisted on using a little chamber pot to
urinate. He used the landing outside his room to perform this act of ablutions, and the women
who had to walk back and forth carrying water, food and little children often had to wait till he
emptied his bladder, shook his genitals, and then stood up to go back to his room. The grumbles
of the women, while low voiced, was something I was keenly aware of. And yet nobody, it
appeared, dared to tell our Grandfather (Baba) that it was the Seventies and time for him to
toilet-train. This, then, was how I started out making art—knowing from the very first moment
 ART MATTERS | 13

Faces Series (1998), Sushma Joshi

14 | ART MATTERS

Transformations, (1998), Sushma Joshi

 ART MATTERS | 15

that art was not just a pretty thing, but one which could make powerful statements, and address
those things never said aloud.
My Enid Blyton books are scrawled with pictures of feisty girls with wasp-like waists
and curly hair. Figures dance along the margins—somebody had taught me to make cartoon
flipbooks, and all my books have these figures falling through the air. No doubt this was the
incessant desire to doodle which made my teacher in Kurseong (where I spent four years
in a boarding school, from age seven to eleven) choose me to represent the inter-school art
competition. I sat there amongst all the children of Kurseong and drew a giant, serene yellow
lion surrounded by a garden of extraordinary beauty: it is a lion I will always remember.
My best friend in high school, coincidentally, was from a Chitrakar clan, and she too drew
figures—indeed, it seemed to draw perky girls in gorgeous outfits was the natural thing to do at
age sixteen. After our SLC exams, with time on our hands, I and two other friends went to Bal
Mandir, where they gave free art classes. A thin, balding teacher taught us how to shade spheres and
cylinders. In-between, he also taught us to paint, with the minute patience of the thangka painter, a
beautiful Buddha sitting on a many-petaled lotus. The sky was blue, the lotus was pink, and there
were curliqued white clouds in the background. I don’t think I could draw this Buddha again—the
details are so intricate, and the steadiness with which I must have held that watercolor brush so
fine, I wonder where that patience came from.
16 | ART MATTERS

Meanwhile, in the apartment that my parents owned, a young American woman called
Claire Burkett had come to stay. She had come with a special mission—she had won a small
grant to start a project that would eventually take the beautiful art that the Janakpuri women
painted on their walls and floors and transform them into objects of contemporary use. As a
teenager, I saw the piles of Maithili art in many forms—as paintings, as pots, as wall hangings,
even bedsheets. My interest in folk art would grow, and later in life I’d try to imitate the
imperfection and rough charm of the Maithili women’s handmade shapes.
During a rather troubled moment in my relationship with my parents, an acceptance letter
arrived. I had been accepted to Brown University. Claire (who coincidentally had also attended
Brown for graduate school) had just come to rent the apartment. When I told her I was going
to a college called Brown, she didn’t believe me. I don’t blame her. It must have seemed odd to
cycle into a dusty compound into Kathmandu, looking for a house to rent, and being told the
shy, fat teenager with the giant glasses and terrible hairstyle was going to attend the same Ivy
League as you did.
At Brown, I wanted desperately to take classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. RISD,
(pronounced “rizdee”), was just down the hill, and one of the best art schools in the nation. This is
the same school that Manjushree Thapa, now a writer, attended as an undergraduate. But a Brown
 ART MATTERS | 17

student had to take Art 10 first to prove his/her commitment to art. Art 10 turned out to be a
dud—the professor was boring, the classes were boring, and I felt I learnt more at Bal Mandir.
The next semester, I haunted the halls of RISD till they let me in. The class was taught by a
dynamic young woman who looked like an Italian Madonna. Her critique was so sharp it terrified
all the would-be artists in the room. She would take my charcoal from me, and with the slightest
pressure of her wrist, modulate the darkness until it appeared the same human profile was flowing
from fat to thin, from darkness to light, from an outline to a living, breathing shape. I stuck it out,
although I knew I was far out of my league—the students in the room had stamina, they could
draw for six hours with the silent attention of young Picassos working on their masterpieces.
The nude art models, an initial, titillating draw for engineering majors looking for some skin,
soon faded into shapes and forms as we drew haggard old women, wrinkled old men, and every
conceivable other human type that passed through that giant room. Shadows suddenly took on
prime importance. I had to lose my dependence on an outline, a backbone, a structural form I
could fill in, and just look at pure light, shadow and space. At the end of the semester, feeling worn
out by the pressure of performing with such professionals, I never handed in my portfolio—and
although I did not get a grade for this class, I don’t regret it. To have a B or C for such effort
seemed wrong—for me, art had always been a fiercely felt, deeply emotive experience.
18 | ART MATTERS

After college, I briefly worked as an art model. The friend who told me about this job
was a staunch feminist, and she assured me that the power one felt after feeling the beauty of
one’s body was a special feminist enterprise. The first time I modeled, I sat between two of my
friends and were drawn by a roomful of quiet artists. All I know is that it was so cold the artist
put a lamp near to our body, and the clock melted. This particular surrealist scenario may not
be all that significant in the scheme of things, and yet, in my memory, the melted clock remains
the time during which I finally transformed, from a young girl afraid of her own body to one
who understood the profound simplicity and beauty of the human body. And indeed, later as
I roved around and looked at the figures the artists had drawn, I was amazed at what they had
seen—perhaps Ruben, or Da Vinci, may have made that simple body look as divine. People not
involved in art always imagine that there is something sexual in art modeling—that it may be like
a dance bar, perhaps, or the red-light district of Patpong. Indeed, having been in all three, I can
assure the uneasy reader that art modeling is none of these—there is a reverence for the model
that the artist never violates. After all, the models are the muses, and to disrespect this in any way
would mean an end of art.
Of course, there is no figure drawing in Nepali art schools. Indeed, at one particular
literary gathering, a rather well-known Nepali cultural commentator attacked me on my
 ART MATTERS | 19

sophomoric plans to “sell oil” (aromatic oils decorated with flowers from the flower-shop
below our apartment and put in oddly shaped glass bottles; a hippie enterprise hatched during
junior year with a roommate with a penchant for making gorgeous glass bottles in RISD’s
glass department and which he had come to hear about through a secondhand source)—in his
imagination, this was a disgusting, clearly immoral enterprise. I can only imagine what he might
have to say about art modeling.
These days, I draw and paint when I feel like it. Unlike writing, which is my vocation, art
is my passion. After my first Vipassana meditation retreat, I came back and poured my heart and
soul into six big paintings. No doubt people find them ugly. Indeed, looking at them now, even I
find them strange. They are misshapen figures of women with musical instruments inside their
bodies. Another eighteen watercolors show faces inside faces inside faces. They were expressions
of the strange feelings I felt inside me during meditation, and at that time they made sense.
Perhaps I need to go back into retreat to learn where those particular forms came from. Three of
them, gigantic mother goddess figures bleeding blue on canvas, eventually gave me the name for
my exhibition I held at Gallery Nine: Blue Nepal. During the height of 2004, when all of Nepal
was hurting, this derivative title seemed appropriate.
20 | ART MATTERS

Of course, it is not just the making of it, but also the consumption, that makes one
an artist. In New York City, I was so poor I lived on wine and cheese. This may seem like a
paradox, until one realizes that wine and cheese is what they served at art openings. From Soho
to DUMBO, I somehow found my way there. Sometimes I even ate crackers with my cheese. I
was so slim I looked like a fashion model (except several feet shorter and with an unacceptable
amount of body hair). People stopped recognizing me: “Did you use to have a fat sister with
curly hair?” I found my way into Andy Warhol nostalgia factory openings. I was there for
the upscale upper East Side Asia Society opening for Shazia Sikander. I found my way up to
Spanish Harlem into unlisted art spaces where illegal artists from Cuba and Mexico showed
colorful landscapes into cavern-like rooms. I roamed through the Harlem Studio Museum,
and the MOMA, with equal ease. I’d take the train into Brooklyn to see paintings of gigantic
dogs in small, obscure lofts, where transvestites sang operas as they opened the show. I found
my way into rusty barges for magazine launches held by the river. I always knew when the free
Shakespeare plays would take place in Central Park, and when the African dance festival would
happen by the piers. I went into each and every one of the open studio events, and saw the range
of strangeness labeled art. I filmed crazies who attended the “Howl” festival. I had strange friends
who made sculptures from nails and broken glass. I visited a hidden seaside villa in Montauk
 ART MATTERS | 21

where Andy Warhol used to spend his summers. My social calendar was so packed I was
scheduled to attend four or more events in a single day. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to half of
them. People said I was unreliable. I was merely, in my own way, learning to be an artist.
I’ve also had the good fortune to travel around the world. My first stop is often an art
gallery, a museum, a wall filled with graffiti. In Berlin, the walls filled me with awe—which city
would allow this level of graffiti to remain intact in the main streets? In Brazil’s San Paolo, I went
to the museum and was amazed at the rich mixing of Europe and Africa. In Tokyo, I went to
the War and Peace Museum, run by women who wanted to ensure that the atrocities of the war
would never be forgotten. One wall of their museum they had covered with photographs of sex
slaves—one couldn’t enter the room without feeling moved. In London, I seem to remember
trudging through miles of old paintings, and finally coming to rest before Damien Hirst. Or
perhaps those smelly, rotting offal of half-cows was in the Brooklyn Art Museum, where a
Madonna made of elephant dung also caused a big ruckus. In Mumbai, I always go to Jehangir
Art Gallery. In Milan, I missed “The Last Supper” and still regret it. In Paris I made time for the
Louvre, in Barcelona for the Picasso Museum, in Amsterdam for the Van Gogh Museum.
I always had a special affinity for Van Gogh—during college, one of the first paintings I had
imitated was his sunflowers. They came out looking so fat and rich I felt immediately satisfied, as
22 | ART MATTERS

if the flowers had plopped down from some heavenly source. The girl who helped me to stretch
the canvas and gesso was named Anaa—her parents were Russian Jews who had fled Russia and
come to Providence to start a new life. She lived next door to me during freshman year. In her
manner, her being, her entire persona, she exuded what it mean to be an artist. She, in a way, was
the one who took me from my shell and introduced me to this new world—one of splendor and
richness, one where performance and body art, reinvention of the persona and the art of life were
all tied together into one giant whirl. She was the one who took me, freshman year, to see Frida
Kahlo’s exhibition in Boston. After the show, she got so inspired she broke off with her high-school
boyfriend and cut off her hair. She drove men and women crazy because they were never quite
sure what she was thinking. But they all met up at her place on Hope Street, surrounded by her
paintings and her strange French bulldog, and lived, for a few brief edgy moments, in the makeshift
aura of a transient salon. I remember going to the beach with her, to a New Year firework display, to
“Angels in America” in a draughty auditorium at Trinity Rep. Each event was unique, each moment
memorable. This was art as lived, moment to moment.
In Kathmandu, finding the art world took more time. But its there, moving beneath the
surface of unlisted events. Whether it is the Dashain celebrations with bulls in Bhaktapur’s
square, or the goat stolen for Nasa Deo, whether it’s the sudden upsurge of plays in Gurukul
 ART MATTERS | 23

or the small disks of DVDs handed out by filmmakers who share their films outside the formal
circuit, art is alive in Nepal. Of course, I should explain, rather late in this essay, that I do not
simply consider a painting, a drawing or a sculpture as art. For me, the entire gallery of visual,
aural, literary and performance art strike me as art. Anything that moves beyond the literal,
anything that captures magic and transcendence, anything that works with material objects and
immaterial ideas, for me is art. This may be the reason why people have difficulty with what I
do—after all, should we all not move in these narrow, linear channels of clearcut definitions of
what we are and what we do? Doesn’t blurring it in this manner really confuse things? Aren’t I a
pseudo filmmaker because I never got my work in Film South Asia? Aren’t I a hokey artist cause
I never sold a painting? And those two plays I wrote—why don’t I just stage it? I have no answer
for all this, except to point to my guru, a grey-beard white man (although some people suspect
his mother may have been an Arab slave.) His name was Leonardo Da Vinci and he did a lot of
things in his own day. Many things remained unfinished. Many were just sketches and ideas.
But he was able to move beyond boundaries and shake up the definition of what an artist was
supposed to be.
Nowadays, I mostly draw with my four-year old nephew. He comes and bangs on my door
and cries if we don’t paint and draw. It is a very personal thing for him—apparently I have been
24 | ART MATTERS

drawing and painting with him since he can remember, even though in my imagination we only
started a few days ago. We have come to an agreement that I will keep the Italian pastels in my
room—he’s realized I’m possessive about them, and wisely, gives me my space. There is a special
magic of drawing with children because everything is allowed and nothing is fixed. There is no
right or wrong. The lines can be red and blue and pink, or only red. The entire painting can be a
gigantic scrawl of black. I can use his square of paper to make a little dog, and vice versa. There is
no time to begin, and no time to stop. There are no circles, or squares. A blue line can be a ghost,
and a couple of squiggles can be an airplane. Everything is as it should be. There are no mistakes.
And in that primordial disintegration of meaning, finally, art comes to rest in its perfect place.
 ART MATTERS | 25

Faces Series (1998), Sushma Joshi

26 | ART MATTERS
 ART MATTERS | 27

T H AT M Y S T I C S M I L E

A rt remains in people’s lives long after their creators are gone. These material artifacts, ironically,
weather time better than the people who shaped them from their imagination. The miles and miles
of art objects that adorn the Louvre, France’s and possibly the world’s most well-known museum, are
an aching reminder of how the material world outlives the human one. But even when an artwork
survives its artist, there is no guarantee that it will be loved and appreciated as it was in its own time
and place. Art, torn from its maker, becomes subject only to the ruthless criteria of the present.
Take the Louvre. It is filled with floor-length paintings of emperors and empresses,
monarchies and royal families, rebels and guerillas, national wars and civil conflict. It is filled
with the grandeur of the Church. It has room-sized tableaus of hunting, gladiator fights, and
meetings of religious and political leaders. It is filled with portraits of unknown beauties who
modeled their life away for a few brief moments of immortality. And yet, of all the riches
inside it, the ones people find immortal are (among others): a sculpture of a dying slave by
Michelangelo. The Lace-Maker by Vermeer, a painting of a plain woman engaged in the task of
28 | ART MATTERS

making lace. A seated scribe from Pharoahnic Egypt. Sculptures of Pharaohs surround the scribe,
but people walk directly past, wanting only to see that intent look of the world’s first writer
before heading out for coffee.
As a first-time visitor to the Louvre, I found myself unexpectedly taking the most banal
and expected route: I asked for the two other immortals. The pyramid, and the Mona Lisa.
Admittedly, I had just read the Da Vinci Code (I finally bought the book after ignoring it for a
year on the bestseller’s list). Where was that goddamn pyramid? I.M Pei’s modernist pyramid
sunk in the middle of the courtyard, oddly, sparked my imagination more than all the riches
of Western civilization (and the stolen glories of Eastern civilization) put together. I hated
modernist architecture. I hated new architecture mixed with old. Or at least, that’s what I
thought. And then I saw the pyramid, and the post-modernist in me rose to the fore. The
pyramid is stunning - the steel and the glass lose any innate ugliness and transform into lace in
that beautiful courtyard.
How could I have imagined the Louvre, housing all of the world’s treasures, could remain
in a petrified, mediaeval shell? What had made me think that a new form would not add to the
old? Change is inevitable, a law of nature that no human or policy can stop. Ask the Buddha.
This artist made a life talking about change, and yes, his artwork survived him two and a half
centuries after he was gone.
 ART MATTERS | 29

A cheap reproduction of the Mona Lisa had hung in my room when I was a teenager. How
did it find its way there? I don’t remember. All I remember is that Mona Lisa disturbed me.
Not only was she ugly, but she also had that exasperatingly ambiguous smile pasted on her face.
Or did she? The ambiguity drove me crazy. The misty colors, the sense of space falling away
into nothingness, the feeling of a human subject being anchored to a fabulist space - all of this
unmoored me. But I didn’t throw the poster away.
A decade later, when I found myself in front of the bored museum docent, asking her to
guide me towards the Mona Lisa, I knew why. The Mona Lisa is nested in the corner of one large
room that hosts 26 large paintings. And yet none of the hordes of tourists - from the stampede of
Japanese with the latest cameras to the Spanish women who prefer to chatter in the back - none
of them gave a second glance to the other 26 paintings. Nor did they give much attention to the
long corridor one has to walk through to get to La Giaconda - a catwalk of Italian paintings from
the 13th century to the 17th, featuring everything from bloody head on platters to tortured bodies,
from the grief of war to the frenzy of men burning books during the Inquisition. Black paint
predominates this four hundred years of Italian imagination. These, for sure, are the Dark Ages.
Mona Lisa, when she emerges at the end, is like an egg – a small egg of hope and promise
for a better world, an egg made by a man who could imagine a new world, one where darkness
could give way to sfumato - that ambiguous misty light of future change. A transient moment
30 | ART MATTERS

where anything and everything was possible. One where flying machines stood on the same level
as a painting of the Last Supper.
Leonardo Da Vinci could see immortality as easily as he could see the hooves of a horse,
or the petals of a rose, or the strands of his own beard. A Renaissance man, Leonardo reinvented
himself, and in the process, reinvented the world he lived in. Another inventor of the present,
Bill Gates, now owns all of Leonardo’s folios, hoping some of the greatness will rub off on him.
Da Vinci needed to leave the world a portrait of himself - and many people have indeed seen
remarkable similarities between the ugly La Giaconda and the grand old man. This portrait of
a visionary, unlike great personages of his time, remains immortal precisely because he could
envision a world beyond his time, one which was not black and filled with pain, but which
contained the mystic, ambiguous smile of the future.
February 2005
 ART MATTERS | 31

THE M ARLBOR O NOM AD

G ill Goucher’s exhibition brochure of the Khampas started with a photograph of a nomad
with a wry smile, holding a baby who pops out of a pouch inside his half-open woolen jacket.
The baby, wrapped in sheepskin, looks less like a kangaroo and more like a wide-eyed alien.
Goucher is from Australia, and that down-under sense of humor pops up more than once in the
portraits of nomads with a very contemporary sense of style.
Keith Gardner, the Australian Ambassador to Nepal, who opened Goucher’s exhibition in
Kathmandu, followed up the theme of the alien by remarking, “Khampas look like people from out of
this world.” He went on to talk about their elaborate hair-dos and love of jewelry (could the Khampa
ambassador, if such a personage were to exist, have used the same words for an exhibit of photography
about Australians?: “These warm, humble people have a great love of tattoos and eye-brow rings,
which they love to show off along with their mozzy bites on their sickies on Mondays”?) Before
anybody could groan at the diplomat’s exoticization, Mr. Gardner had already added: “But they are
very much of this world.”
32 | ART MATTERS

Khampas, indeed, are very much of this world. Nepal knows little about the Khampas other
than the fact that they were once going back and forth between the Nepal-Tibet border, fighting
against the Chinese with funds from the Americans and the tacit approval of the Nepalis. After
Nepal’s relationship with Beijing improved, it started to get tougher on the famed guerillas. Many
of them eventually found their way down to Kathmandu, where they today live on the fringes of
the Tibetan refugee economy. Others lucky enough to get identification papers found themselves en
route to foreign countries, especially the United States. The cultural capital of New York remains
the sought-after destination for many Khampas who find themselves stranded in a legal void.
Nepal, while culturally welcoming, remains a place where passports are impossible to extract from
bureaucrats without generous bribes, not just for refugees but also for citizens.
The communities in Boudha and Swayambhu remain the main hub of the Tibetan refugees.
Many of them are now second generation immigrants with a Nepali identity. While the community
remains tightly-knit, its members continue to be influenced by the emotional impacts of the outward
flow of migration. The Tibetan diaspora has now become as global as the Chinese and Indian, and it
comes as little surprise that the people left behind want to join their friends in the US and Europe,
even though they are fully aware of the hardships they will encounter there as low-skilled workers.
The Kathmandu reality may be very different from the nomads Goucher met in Kham.
Or perhaps not. The global desire to travel, it seems, hits nomads wherever they might find
 ART MATTERS | 33

themselves, in the high desert or the congested heart of a capital city. But these desire to move
and flow goes both ways, with style making its way into the heart of Kham as quickly as the
Khampas find themselves in Fifth Avenue.
Scholars have been quick to point at the similarities between Native people in the
Americas and the Tibetans of the high plateaus. Not only do they look similar, they even have
similar rituals and rites, processes and worldviews. Some scientists posit that the new landmass
that drifted off from what is now Asia and became the Americas was one big mother-continent.
Whether it’s that pre-historical link between continents or the simple migration of new media
that brought John Wayne to Kham, there is no question he has arrived, along with the Marlboro
Man. The tilted hat of the cowboy is more than an aesthetic – it’s a lifestyle. The cosmopolitan
adaptations of nomads in sheepskin sporting fedoras may seem out of this world. But no more so
than middle-class folks in Sydney sporting tribal tattoos.
February 2004
34 | ART MATTERS

T H E S C H O OL OF T H A N G K A

T hrough one of the many winding lanes leading off the main shrine of Boudha, you can walk
past craftsmen hammering delicate silver jewelry, past workshops which manufacture wooden
boxes, past a dump-heap where an old woman scavenges for recyclables, and into a large and
spacious monastery.
This is the Shechen Monastery, one of the many monasteries that dot the land around the
main shrine. But Shechen, which is based on the Ningmapa tradition, has something different
to offer. This warm February morning, a scattered line of animated foreigners carrying scrolls in
their hands exit out of the building. As we climb up the stairs, we see photographs of thangkas
framed and exhibited on the walls. On the second floor, monks rush about carrying trays full of
tarts adorned with fresh fruits as students with diplomas are photographed.
At the threshold, we meet Matthew Ricard, of “The Monk and the Philosopher” fame.
Ricard, originally from France, is as famous as Richard Gere in some circles. He greets us, and
shows us around the room adorned with fresh, ornate brocaded thangkas. It’s the graduation day
 ART MATTERS | 35

of the first class of the Tsering Art School of the Shechen Institute of Traditional Tibetan Art.
Charlotte Davis, a slim woman dressed in a Tibetan bokkhu outfit, is part of the graduating class
of 13 students. Charlotte, who has a degree in Fine Arts from Australian National University, is
from Sydney.
“I was a Buddhist, and I wanted to practice art that would incorporate my spiritual
practice,” she says. Charlotte arrived in Nepal in 1998, when the Shechen monastery had just
established a new building. “I didn’t really know how it would go,” she says with a smile. “But
the teacher Konchog Lhadrepa is very warm and humble, and very hospitable. This place became
my second home.”
Charlotte, who volunteers as an administrator and has her fees waived, says the school is
still very affordable even for foreign students - the tuition ranges from Rs. 1300 (Rs. 65=US $1)
a month for day students to Rs. 3500 a month for boarding students. The locals pay Rs. 650 a
month for tuition, and Rs. 2000 a month to board.
Pema Tsering, a charming young man with bleached hair and white clothes fit more for a pop star
than a thangka master, says he was always interested in paintings. He spent a year learning from another
teacher in Boudha before he found out about the school. Originally from Kalimpong, Darjeeling, Pema
says: “My parents were very religious, so we would go to monasteries a lot. I used to take my pen and
paper and draw what I saw. Foreigners liked what I drew. Eventually I found a sponsor.”
36 | ART MATTERS

After a year in Boudha, Pema Tsering joined the thangka school, and has been there for
six years. He points out the thangka he did for his final examination for me. The Buddha, made
with gold paint, is elaborate and beautiful. “It usually takes students 45 days to finish a painting,
but I had to go to Bodh Gaya with my parents, so I had to finish it in 30 days,” he says with a
mischievous smile.
Tenzing Oser took all of 45 days to finish his thangka. Originally from Khasa, Tenzing,
dressed in the robes of a monk, says: “We’re trying to revive the Karshoma tradition back.” He
explains to me that there are many styles of thangka paintings, and the Karma Gadri paintings
derive from the Karshoma School. The paintings are in high demand - three of the graduating
class have already been sent to Hongkong to execute a painting there.
The third floor is filled with old thangkas recovered from Shechen Monastery when the
monks fled Tibet in 1959. A particularly striking one, rectangular and covering an entire wall, has
details so minute and perfect it would require a microscope to see the details.
Outside in the open-air balcony, students eat chocolate cake and fruit tarts as they meet the
international guests who have come to attend the opening. The school was started when Matthew
Ricard got together with a monk who volunteered to teach thangka painting. The school feels like an
institution with Western-style funding, not the resource-poor institutions of Nepal. Funded by the
Dutch government and a private donor, the school has many international students, including those
 ART MATTERS | 37

from Japan, France, Korea, Australia, US and Denmark. Many locals hail from Mugu, a remote part
of Nepal. Besides Sherpas and Tamangs, there are also a number of Bhutanese monks at the school.
“One of our monks had a good relationship with the Bhutanese Queen,” Charlotte
explains. “That’s why we have many Bhutanese monks.” The students, Charlotte says, don’t
necessarily have to be artists, nor talented. But they do have to be Buddhists to keep the art
within the context of the practice. Will Charlotte continue to practice when she returns to
Australia? “ The art gives me the opportunity to combine my practice,” she says. “Its very
meditative. I was here for six years, but I feel like I’m just the beginning. I can deepen my
practice a lot more. I will return to Australia and continue my painting there.”
Sechen Institute is an example of how the unequal balance of intellectual exchange
between the East and the West - now skewed in favor of the West - might be rectified. Most
young people from developing countries long to go to North America and Europe for their
education, whether it is in the sciences, arts or humanities. Institutes of this nature, by offering
an international and quality education grounded in traditional arts and indigenous knowledge,
blaze a trail for new institutions to develop and flourish right here in Nepal.
February 2004
38 | ART MATTERS

OBSESSED BY A VEST

T he sight of a priest proudly displaying a tiny vest at the bhoto-display festival has been etched
into our national consciousness. Why this little vest became of cardinal importance for our national
imaginary is beyond the scope of this article - there are probably a dozen anthropologists who can
explain this much better. What this article can do is speculate on “On the road with the Red God:
Macchendranath”, a documentary made by Kesang Tseten, where he takes a hundred and ten
hours of footage of various acts of human ingenuity and devotion to what seems like a lost cause-
-namely, the construction of an unwieldy hundred foot chariot that gets tangled up in the electric
wires of the city of Patan and tilts drunkenly as it is dragged and pushed and pulled by enthusiasts
across flood-washed roads every twelve years, and where men get roaring drunk and get into fights
all the way from Bungmati to Patan, and then repeat the process all the way back.
Behind the vest rests a red god, known as the Red Macchendranath. This is the divinity
worthy of all that work - painters, artisans, rope-makers and carpenters donate days of their time
to build him that sky-high vehicle. Thought to be a manifestation of Avalokiteswor, the Buddha
 ART MATTERS | 39

of Compassion by some, and Shiva by others, the Red Macchendranath (and his shiny vest)
enjoy a popular cult following. While we have all seen this god in one form or another - postcard,
photograph, television appearance, or real-life presence - what is not clear to most Valley residents
is why this god in general, and his festival in particular, took on such national significance.
Tseten’s film, by carefully documenting the entire process from the beginning, brings us
a rare behind-the-scene glimpse of a production involving uncountable actors and decision-
makers, from the guthis of Bungmati and Patan to the hundreds of people who materialize to
drag the chariot back and forth between the two cities. “You can’t coax people to come out for
the other festivals, but during the Rato Macchendranath festival, all these people just appear out
of the woodworks,” one man says wonderingly in the documentary.
The festival can appear, on first sight, to be a classic excuse to get drunk and get into a
good fight. Buff young men fight each other to get on the prow-shaped steering brake. The
ousted men are unceremoniously pulled off. Acrimonious exchanges involving everything from
the division of meat to the dogs (another form of Bhairav) at one aspect of the festival, to the
assigned blame for the tilting of the chariot in another, is apparent. Scenes of conflict abound,
and after a while you begin to wonder how people even manage to get that goddamn chariot
upright, let alone drag it all the way from Bungmati to Patan.
40 | ART MATTERS

If the chariot falls down and touches the ground, bad things happen. Kings can die,
royal families can get massacred, and the guthi people can mysteriously sicken and die in mass
numbers. It also has to be rebuild anew in the event of such a calamity. So there rests a level of
national responsibility amongst all the people involved in the venture. Some measure of co-
operation amongst all the different people - from the men who run alongside and swiftly put a
piece of wood in-between the wooden wheels to brake their impact, to the men perched on top
who give the navigational directions, to the buff young men doing the steering, to the hundreds
of volunteers who pull the ropes - has to exist. And don’t forget the women who brew all that
potent alcohol.
After a while, the seeming chaos and loose organization takes on a logic of its own. In spite
of the overt conflict, while gets hashed out at every level, it is apparent that the co-operative
nature of Newar society remains the core spirit that guides the enterprise. While it started out
as a local Newari festival, the discourse makes it clear that all Nepalis think of the festival as
their own. When the chariot finally makes it into Durbar Square in Hanuman Dhoka, the level
of mass participation and work involved in the process comes to fruition. When the priest takes
out that tiny vest and displays it so proudly to the country, he is not just taking out a medieval
garment - he is also taking out the symbol of a process in which, inspite of the conflict that exists
 ART MATTERS | 41

at every level of society, the spirit of co-operation again triumphed over small differences and
created a structure in which such a mind-bogglingly complicated event could take place.
In both a literal and a symbolic level, the festival is an analogy of any large structure -i.e.;
our nation-state. Conflict exists at all levels in every organization. The trick is to find a way to
resolve it without major calamity.
Tseten, by actively editing footage to show the reality of conflict and its day to day
resolution, follows more than an chariot. He is following the god behind that vest - the god of
compassion that can allow society made up of a diverse and heterogeneous group of people to
come together and work on a national project without getting crushed.
42 | ART MATTERS

THE BUDDHIST
BEHIND THE CAMERA

T he oft-repeated complaint about Buddhists, especially Western ones living in Nepal, is that
they are so engrossed in their meditation practice they have a difficult time naming the Prime
Minister. The outside world is perceived through a transcendental blur. Wayne Amtzis is a
welcome exception to this stereotype.
“That’s an interesting shape over there,” says Wayne, pointing to a crack in the concrete
with a twinkle in his eye. “It looks like a Buddha. No, more like a rabbit.” The first impression of
irrepressible Wayne is that he does not have any holy cows tied up in his backyard.
In the garden, Wayne shows me sheets and sheets of his old poems which have been eaten by
insects. When the poet, who kept no backups, found his old poetry in such shape, he did not get into a fit
of depression. He went inside, fetched his camera, and took photographs of them instead. Those pages
 ART MATTERS | 43

were placed with other objects: garden cans, prayer beads and bowls, leaves, street signs, a torn vest, a
rubber doll and other random street treasures found by the artist, and digitally remixed in the computer.
This series, featuring the reincarnated poems, was exhibited at the Siddhartha Art Gallery this April.
Wayne looks at the darkness and light that makes up Nepal with the same clear-eyed and
unflinching gaze, the same steady equilibrium. Unlike the aid workers purring by in their air-
conditioned Pajeros, Wayne Amtzis moves down the crowded lanes and streets, slowly and on foot,
pausing to catch snatches of dialogue, facial gestures, the sound of street static. He has time to listen to
a tired coolie over here, watch the spit come out of the mouth of a supposed madwoman over there.
His poems start gently enough, leading you down a modern space full of cars and corpses,
technology and organic decay. The dénouement, when it comes, comes abruptly, shocking the
reader out of complacency - the suicide of a sixteen year old girl. The almost unbelievable story,
reported in the Kathmandu Post, of a child suckled by a bitch.
His photos, taken in black and white, are moved and angered by the same existence that
troubled Prince Siddhartha—stark portraits of a little girl struggling with a heavy steel bucket, a
man slumped tiredly over himself holding the stub of a dying beedi, a body sleeping beneath wall
graffiti which proclaims a national conference.
Wayne has been writing poetry and creating photographs of Nepal for many years. His
deep commitment to social justice is palpable. Unlike the Beat poets who came, saw, conquered
44 | ART MATTERS

the turmoils of their soul, and then left Shangri-La for greener pastures, Wayne Amtzis has stuck
around for more painful times.
Wayne’s contributions to the Nepali art field cannot be counted by the number of his
publications or exhibits alone. He has translated poems of Nepali poets, and is currently at work on
a book of poems about water written by a Newari poet Purna Vaidya. He, along with his wife Judith,
who works for the Cornell Nepal Study Program, are also behind the scenes mentors to young
Nepali artists and writers, providing vital and generous support to the burgeoning arts movement
in Kathmandu. More importantly, he has allowed a sense of playful experimentation to creep into a
world otherwise tightly regimented by gallery requirements and canonical dictates. After all, who but
Wayne could dare put a torn vest found on the street up as an art object at a Nepali art gallery?
At the opening of his photography series, Wayne read aloud his poems. “Listen to the
sounds,” he urges us, “don’t try to assign meaning.” Like his photographs, which have softened
with the passing of time, his words are full of compassion. Tears rise to my eyes as I listen to his
voice. Outside in the streets, protests are raging. Blood flows and fear moves beneath the surface
of the country. Listening to the impassioned voice of Wayne Amtzis, it is not difficult to hear that
dukkha still stalks the people and land of Nepal.
Nation Weekly Magazine, 2004
 ART MATTERS | 45

PINK URINALS AND

B R O K E N P L AT E S

L ife intersected with art as your critic came down with food poisoning on her way to
Bhaktapur to see the first international arts workshop in Nepal. As I rushed past an inexplicable
brick wall in the middle of the square to get to the bathroom, there it was! An urinal in that
peculiar shade of pink so beloved to middle class Nepal.
When Marcel Duchamp first took that profane object, the urinal, and put it into a sacred
space, the gallery, and signed it: “R.Mutt”, he was not just being perverse. He was going against
centuries of history of representational Western art that insisted that the mode of realism, which
sadly still rules over Nepal’s gallery scene, was the only true art. Duchamp’s contempt of the
art market and its machinations, which took art objects and turned them into commodities, was
another reason for his brash, in-your-face display.
46 | ART MATTERS

If the idea of urinals as Art churns your stomach, and you’re wondering what was going
on at Bhaktapur, there is no need for panic. Although the art exhibited at the historic square
- clay pots arranged in nine circles on the courtyard, a brick wall with an umbrella resting inside
one of the openings, origami birds flying over a dry water-tank - very clearly broke accepted
traditions of realistic art within Nepal, there were no signs of profanity, transgressions or taboo-
breakings. Indeed, in keeping with the Newar dominated art scene (6 out of the 7 Nepali artists
were Newars), even the undertones of political protest had a civilized texture to them. No torn
sidewalks and stone-throwing was in evidence, although projects about instability, militarization,
and desperation of civil conflict grabbed the crowd’s attention.
The seven Nepali artists, along with seven international artists, spent ten days at the Shiva
Guesthouse in Bhaktapur, creating art, explaining to the befuddled locals about their process and
logic, and writing beautifully copy-edited musings about their philosophies. The art, displayed
at various points along the square, draws curious crowds of Indian tourists, children in scout
uniforms, and farmers. “What’s this?” says a farmer disbelievingly, pointing to the blue pots on
the ground. “Art, Art!” says a volunteer impatiently, before breaking into a stream of Newari that
hopefully explained to the curious woman all about innocence, and how children do not know
the difference between right and wrong, and how those pots, some facing the sky, some the
earth, attempted to grasp that ambiguity.
 ART MATTERS | 47

Rajesh Lohala, a thangka painter who’s waiting out the recession of the civil conflict while
watching 1500 domestic tourists walk by his shop every Saturday without a blink of interest,
admits that the locals initially did not comprehend how people got permission to put a brick-wall
dab-smack in the middle of the famous square. “It took us a while to understand,” he says. “Its
modern art, that’s what it is.”
But is it really modern? “Modern”, an easy term to stick on all sorts of phenomena, from
women with mini-skirts to computer playing children, may or may not be the appropriate word.
Lets rewind a few hundred years to see where we might be now.
Modern art happened in the West between 1100 to early 1900s. The phase of “modern”
art of the West – the experimentation with perception, the screaming of Dada, the surrealistic
melting clocks of Dali, the abstractions of Piet Mondrian, Weimar Bauhaus, Italian Futurism,
Russian Constructivism –were triggered by powerful historical events like World War I and
II and the Bolshevik Revolution. These movements, which included explosive changes in
everything from architecture to poetry, literature to visual art, built upon, and in opposition, to
each other. They were global movements, as our own modern littérateurs like Balkrishna Sama
and artists like Lain Singh Bangdel testify. After the end of modernism came post-modernism,
with its anti-Grand Narrative drive. No grand myths are allowed, only pastiches and references
of previous glories.
48 | ART MATTERS

In Bhaktapur, it is hard to shake off the feeling that post-modernism is still very much
resting on the grand narrative of Malla glory. This dramatic relationship was best demonstrated
by “Bhoj”. Sitting in an open pati, Kalapremi invites curious locals to his “Bhoj” (feast) in
flawless Newari. Some young men decline and move off, others jump up to sit on top of
newspapers to stare at earthen plates with black and white designs on them. The plates, broken,
are woven together by yellow wire with perfect craftsmanship. “You’re sitting on the news,” the
artist announces. Kalapremi reads his poem, a biting elegy to the political conflict, addressing
the audience in equally flawless literary Nepali. The poem and the art, explains the artist,
was inspired by the greed (daridrata) he sees on the faces around him during this moment.
Everybody’s plate is broken, he says. The bhoj, a moment redolent of abundance, has become
one of emptiness and despair.
The process may have befuddled the art-savvy locals, but not for long. The lines between
post-modernism, modernism, and tradition are not that demarked, after all, especially in Nepal
where things tend to go around in circles. One of the artists, who has woven straw circles
to celebrate the notion of life cycles and completeness, has added a red string to denote the
continuation of time. One hopes that time will continue to take art to new and different places.
Nation Weekly Magazine, 2004
 ART MATTERS | 49

W HO A RT T HO U ?

B ig signboards painted on fabric greeted the viewer with this question this Sunday in Babar
Mahal Revisted. Usually, the answer would be: Thou art part of the expatriate crowd, the upper
middle class and the poor journalists who frequent the openings at the Siddhartha Art Gallery.
This gathering, fortunately, was a bit more mixed – it had attracted a substantial number of the
Nepali art world, along with little girls decked out in fashionable outfits who had come to view
their cousin’s art opening.
Sujan Chitrakar, the artist, has published an entire text to accompany his artworks. The text,
titled “Utopian Introspection: Random Expressions within Defined Periphery” is heavy reading,
but as you read along you get flashes of insight, kind of like a hammer hitting a nail on the head.
Sujan Chitrakar, along with colleagues Salil Subedi (sleepless in Kathmandu instead of Seattle),
and Saroj Bajracharya (who has published his own equation on life of a traveler/life- a traveler)
seemed to have spent a lot of time introspecting in front of mirrors, musing on the concept of nails
50 | ART MATTERS

and hammers, and arranging votive earthen diyas in perfect formation. In between, they thought
long and hard about the question of life, which seems to have led them to the “mystery of man”
as envisioned by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Even Dostoyevsky, however, might have been alternatively
baffled and amused by what his words had inspired. The final art products, which must be seen to
do them justice, are polished, technically sophisticated and full of the chutzpah that would make
them equally at home in New York City as they do in Kathmandu.
The excitement of installation lies in its novelty, its use of mixed media, its daring breakage
of narrative. In Kathmandu, installation is still a new art form, still destabilizing the supremacy of
painting. In Western countries where art has fallen over the edge, climbed up and mutated every
season since then, installation itself is starting to take on a dated look and feel. Walking through a
gallery in New York City, one starts to see installations that evoke deja-vu of a genre, like seeing
yet another Monet inspired painting on Mc.Donald’s walls.
Painting may be “sooo last season!”, but in spite of it all, old media (paint and canvas,
photographs, film) are here to stay. Perhaps the reason why traditional media has stuck around
for so long is its coherence, and accessibility. The challenge with installation, as with any other
art form, is to capture this magnetism that keeps certain media like paint, photography and
sculpture solidly entrenched in the popular imagination.
 ART MATTERS | 51

The other challenge is more difficult—indigenizing a borrowed form. Chitrakar makes

liberal use of recycled tinned milk cans as prayer wheels. In a corner of the gallery, one can find a
panel pasted with objects that inspire memories – trinkets and junk one can only find in Nepal.
As a viewer, I wished there had been more of these playful, juxtaposed forms that play with the
notion of Nepal and Nepaliness, and less of the shiny hammered and nailed works that carry the
stamp of generic transnational art that fill the main gallery.
The enthusiasm of the artist dispels any confusion. Sujan Chitrakar is directed, engaged and
intense as he talks about his art. Meditateonself.com, he says, an online website that is part of this exhibit,
is a satire on how meditation is being commercialized and being brought straight to the home, like take-
away food. His mixed media work include within them symbols of four religions—Islam, Hinduism,
Christianity and Buddhism. He feels it is important to be introspective, and create an utopia within
oneself, and not look outside for this divine place. He wants to share this ideas with his viewers.
A work of art is the interface that allows a viewer to commune with the thoughts and ideas of
the artist, its creator. Like being John Malkowitch, Chitrakar’s Utopian Introspection often gives the
viewer entering the cavity of his thoughts more than what they bargained for. Taking the advice of the
artist then, perhaps the best thing to do after viewing is to sit down, take a deep breath, and introspect.
Nation Weekly Magazine, 2004
56 | ART MATTERS

SHOOTING KARM A

T sering Rhitar stands by the reception area in the Sherpa hotel, directing his film. The film, titled
“Karma”, is a story about a nun who walks down from Mustang to Pokhara to Kathmandu to track
down a man who owes money to the monastery. The nuns need the money to do a puja. The film,
says Rhitar, is about the paradox of the co-existence of materialism and spirituality.
“Use your own language,” Rhitar urges his actor. The director is wearing a brightly colored
Nepali topi as he directs his multi-national crew – his cameraman Ranjan Pallit is from India, his
actors are Nepali, and he himself has a partial Tibetan background. His shooting script is written in
English, with scribbled notes in Tibetan. Little storyboards has been drawn in stick-figures next to
the script. The dialogue is being translated from the only shooting script as I enter.
“We don’t have to be politically correct,” says the director, as a discussion about the usage
of the word “aimai” ensures. “We want to speak like people speak,” he says. The actor finally
decides to use the colloquial word.
 ART MATTERS | 57

The actor, who has worked with the director before, translates the gist of the dialogue into
his own words. The crew waits patiently for the director to finish. Then the grip and gaffer move
in with lights and translucent paper that act as filters for the low-budget film.
Ranjan Pallit, the cameraman, says working with Rhitar is: “Very democratic. We can
always make suggestions, and he will listen.” Pallit says he loves Nepal, and has been here ten
times already. A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of Pune, Pallit has also worked
with other Nepali filmmakers.
The clapboard says: scene 73, shot 12, take 1. By the end of the hour, the take will have
increased to 7. The sign of a good director is pefection. Rhitar is a perfectionist who works his
scenes meticulously, getting take after take till he’s ready to move to the next scene. Pratap, the
actor, is working on a comic scene where he leers at the nun and asks her for some Mustang
apples. The line is said over and over again until the director is satisfied. In-between takes are
long moments of lagtime as actors try their lines, check their postures and gestures, listen to the
feedback from the assistant director. The process could try the patience of a saint, but the crew,
remarkably, seemed to hold up well to the process. “And by the way, give me some Mustang
apples,” the actor says, leering at the nun. The crew bursts out laughing – the line, finally has
punch. “Don’t cut me!” the actor jokes as the director finally says: cut.
58 | ART MATTERS

“Karma” is being shot in digital video – which allows for the flexibility in multiple re-takes.
Unlike 35mm film, video is cheap to shoot. Film scripts have to be more tightly rehearsed in
order to get maximum mileage out of the budget. For Rhitar’s working process, which involves a
lot of impromptu directing and rehearsing on set, video allows the flexibility of making mistakes,
and correcting it on location, without a lot of expensive re-shooting. Digital video is becoming
the medium of choice for many indie filmmakers who don’t want to be tied down to commercial
constraints, and who can experiment without having to lug expensive and heavy equipment
around in remote places.
Padam Subba, brother of Nabin Subba, who directed “Numafung”, is assisting on the set
of “Karma”. “Tsering helped us a lot during “Numafung”, he says. This reciprocity between the
small and tight-knit film community has worked to its advantage – people share resources and
networks, and this has allowed for a better working relationships between the different directors.
Rhitar has been shooting for 25 days in Mustang. They lived and worked closely with the
nuns at the Tharpa Cheling nunnery. The process, said Rhitar, was very moving, and the nuns
made good friends with the crew. The nuns cried when the crew departed.
Like many independent films produced internationally, Rhitar’s film is being personally
funded by the filmmaker. The thirty lakhs budget just includes the production and post-
 ART MATTERS | 59

production costs. The rest of the funds, including the telecine transfer process, will be raised by
the filmmaker later.
“I am not thinking about distribution at the moment,” says Rhitar. “I want to make it
first, and then think about it.” He says he would like to have it widely distributed in the Nepali
market, but that he also wants it to be available to the international market. Rhitar is a rare
breed -- an indie filmmaker who follows his artistic vision and avoids the dictates of the market.
Unlike many of his Nepali compatriots who spend their days hashing out virtual photocopies of
Bollywood hits, Rhitar spins stories out of his own experiences and community. This integrity
has brought him international recognition.
Rhitar’s previous films include “The Spirits Do Not Come Anymore”, about the dying
tradition of shamanism, which won an award from the Film South Asia festival. “Mukundo”, shot
in 35 mm by the same crew as the one shooting “Karma”, won international recognition in film
festivals from Japan, France, Sweden, India and the USA. It also won an award for the script from
the Producers Association of Nepal. Shown at such well-known festivals as the San Francisco film
festival, the film garnered respect, although it was never formally distributed on a commercial scale.
In the Sherpa Hotel, the phone rings, a group of German tourists enter with huge
backpacks, but the actor remains on his job. “Okay, another take!” he says enthusiastically. “Nice.
60 | ART MATTERS

Lights off,” says the tired cameraman. “Get into emotion, Pratap-ji,” says the director. “Don’t
talk, anybody,” the actor says as he closes his eyes for a few seconds, and allows the noise to fade
out as he enters his private world. A few seconds later, he opens his eyes and nods. He is ready.
“Rolling, and action,” says the director. The actor says his line flawlessly. The last take goes
fabulously well. The entire room of expectant spectators – burst into applause. A small miracle of
film-making has just taken place. But there is no time for rest – its time for the next scene.
Nation Weekly Magazine, December 2004
 ART MATTERS | 61

T H E W O R K OF T H E W I N D

G iovanni Battista Ambrosini is 59 years old, but as he crouches on the ground and assiduously
draws his signature image—a figure that could be a bird, a child, a spirit—with a white wax-stick
on a canvas stretched out on the tiles of Babar Mahal Revisited’s courtyard, he appears centuries
older. The white mane of hair looks familiar, so does the high forehead. Does Giovanni descend
from a long line of artists in Italy? Did his ancestor exhibit alongside Leonardo da Vinci in
some of Florence’s prestigious studios? This question goes unanswered. He seems as blithely
unconcerned with the vagaries of history and parentage as he is with the sacredness of the canvas,
which Nepali artists treat as a treasured space that would be sullied by the slightest disrespect but
on which Giovanni directs four young women to dance with naked feet.
Like the wind, the young women are his collaborators. He gets their dancing feet to make
shapes and patterns on the two squares of white canvas. Giant copper vats, filled with green,
white and red colors, are dabbed, thrown on the canvas, and then as the performance proceeds,
62 | ART MATTERS

sprayed on an unsuspecting audience. The four young women are joyous sprites who appear to
break the solemnity of an art opening with their sequined veils and silver anklets. Sequins gleam
in the strobe lights, and a small fog machine even exudes a slight exhalation of fog, turning the
floor, however briefly, into a modern disco. The dances, repetitive and clichéd in other contexts,
appear fresh and light when directed by Giovanni. For a moment the audience is mesmerized by
the beauty of the movements and the riveting shape of the female form, as they should rightly
be, instead of turning away from the mind-numbing ritual of yet another traditional dance. The
young women dance lightly, amusing themselves, muses as ethereal as those of Greece or Rome,
while the old artist bends, intent in creation.
This re-contextualization of the familiar, it appears, is Giovanni’s specialty. The
performance was part of the opening of Ambrosini’s exhibition, and like the performance, his
paintings have gone through a special process. The artist allowed his canvas to hang like prayer
flags alongside Maiti gomba, and the colors he spread on them bled and were washed out by
the wind and the monsoon rain. The wind, with its playful fingers, spread the paint. The silica-
sprayed cloth, dirty, exuberant, and as earthy as young women sprayed with Holi colors, were
then painted over with the same signature emblem—a bird, a child, a spirit.
Giovanni says he doesn’t see a bird, or a child. He says the image is his own, something
that will identify his work so that people will know who did it when they see it. Italian art critic
 ART MATTERS | 63

Enrico Mascelloni, who flew in for the exhibition from Italy, calls this image a “cell.” If these
images are cells, then Giovanni has constructed whole bodies out of them. One in particular,
with a large upturned eye, or a black olive standing perfectly upright, is surrounded with the
buzz of cells. Another one, orange and green, blinks on and off like a psychedelic body. A
plywood board printed with the Hindu swastika shows black and white cut-out shapes of cells
flying through brown wood. Upstairs, in the gallery, a red and black canvas seems to reflect the
red and black moments of Nepal’s democratic movement.
Ambrosini says he’s foremost an artist. His works are sold in Austria, France and Germany.
But to make a living he does other work on the side: He’s an advisor to FAO on how to grow
olives in the mountains of Nepal. “Do you know you have a wild olive growing in Nepal?” he
asks. The artist’s face darkens as he talks about the way the olive is being promoted in Nepal.
Pesticides and chemicals distress him. He likes to indulge in (and here I listen to catch the Italian
accent) “biological thought”. Biological thought? Through the meandering phrases of Italian, I
catch this wonderful line: “Even the olive is an art”. Unlike Nepal’s art world, which often sees
art as a bloodless expression of paint on canvas, Ambrosini is still in touch between the flesh of
food and the flesh of art. And the connection between the creation of the earth and the fire of
creation, it seems, is still firmly interconnected for him.
64 | ART MATTERS

Ambrosini says he went to university to study architecture, but he never practiced it. “I
went to work in the fields instead”, he says romantically. Well, not quite: He went to the fields
instead to test out an interesting scientific pursuit. He spent 10 years trying to develop new kinds
of “plants in geometric form that modify the landscape as they grow, like a sculpture”. Perhaps
this invention would only occur to an Italian. In Tuscia University he was a faculty member in
agriculture, and worked in landscape design.
In 1999, Ambrosini came to Nepal to work on olive production. But art was never far from
his mind. In Bajura, west Nepal, he experimented again. He built a ‘paint machine’, a wooden
box in which he allowed rainwater to collect. The tannin from the wood stained the water
brown, and when the box was full it flowed out, coming in contact with iron. The resulting
oxides—dark green, brown, yellow—flowed to the canvas. The villagers changed the canvas and
sent each to Kathmandu as the paintings were done.
Does the artist find Nepali art similar to Italian? He shakes his head. “Nepali art,”
he explains, “is influenced heavily by Lain Singh Bangdel, who trained in Paris with the
Expressionists. So Nepali artists are still working with Expressionism.” He doesn’t say much
more, but I get the impression that the varied experiments in which he himself has taken part in
are not something he sees Nepali artists easily indulging in. Which Nepali artist would take oil
 ART MATTERS | 65

and smear it on their canvas? And yet for Ambrosini the olive oil is, itself, the paint. Food and art
are indistinguishable, as are earth and rain. The land and water are not separate from art: They
are part of it.
If this sense of curiosita (curiosity) and experimentation is what characterized Renaissance
art, then Ambrosini has it in good measure. “Of course, he’s Italian, its part of him,” Mascelloni
says. Ambrosini’s son, who runs the Nuovo Marcopolo restaurant in Thamel, continues the
Italian tradition of art in another form: food. He’s married to a Nepali woman, and they have a
young son, making Giovanni a proud grandparent. The sense of exploration, it appears, has been
passed from father to son, and may leave its trace in Nepal in more ways than one.
As the performance comes to a perfectly timed and choreographed end, the musicians’
stop their flute, sarangi, tabala and guitar. The evening, though cold, was enlivened both by
a potent spiced wine and an amalgamation of the different arts. In the words of the artist, the
performance brought together “the tantric aspects of earth, fire and water”. And there couldn’t
have been a better way to spend a November evening.
ECS Magazine, November 2007
66 | ART MATTERS

PA N TO M I M E I N
T H E H I M A L AY A S

L ocation, location, location, said Hollywood, and made a billion dollar industry out of it. If
location was anything to go by, Cinderella, the annual production by Shakespeare Wallahs, was
going to be a miserable experience. The hall inside the British Embassy compound seem to lack
that great American invention—central heating. They had, it also appeared, spared no expense
to replicate the joys of England—draughty halls, inhospitable corridors, straight backed chairs
with meagre padding. A glare of great fluorescent lights shone in our eyes as we waited for the
pantomime to start.
The British may have inherited a chilly, dimly-lit island (no fault of theirs), but they sure
know how to make something out of nothing with it. Recent reportage claims Britain’s greatest
exports are its culture: literature, art, cinema, personalities. As soon as the wicked stepmother
and the two ugly sisters stepped on the stage, decked out in their atrocious outfits, the audience
 ART MATTERS | 67

knew that recent reportage was right. As long as the British provide the world with a Wicked
Stepmother, the sun will continue to shine on their empire.
English pantomime has some special features: the dame is always a man. Male roles are
sometimes played by women, and vice versa. The audience is prompted by signs to boo, ahhh, or
warn the actors to look behind.
The Wicked Stepmother, aka Baroness Hapless (BOO!) made a big entrance. So did the
two ugly sisters (BOO!), who arrived in a gracious flurry of fiercely clashing purple and orange
polka dots and synthetic wigs. David Lowen made a giggle-inducing wicked stepmother. His
brother is a professional comic, and this seems to have rubbed off on David. The two ugly
sisters, Marcia Chadwick and Jackie Creighton, were delightfully ugly and totally synchronized
as they preened their hair and swayed to the “party, party, party” Bollywood music.
Cinderella, played by beautiful Kavita Sreenivasan, is feisty, modern and insists on her rights.
She is disgusted with the word “Cinderella,” and demands to be called by her real name. None of this
wimpy, waiting by the kitchen in rags for this emancipated woman: she pokes her stepmother so hard
in her breast that it (an air-filled balloon, actually), pops.
Things heat up when Prince Charming, played by Adele Pennington, sweeps on stage with
some rather long peacock feathers attached to her head. From the moment the Prince opens his
68 | ART MATTERS

mouth and says: “Zees is the way I like it,” the audience is in love with this charmer. The Prince
has some special quirks— he likes to speak with a fake French and/or German accent. His father
points out that the fake accent is not the way to snag a princess bride, but Prince Charming insists
on doing it his own way. Sure enough, Cinderella is totally taken by the accent (never mind if
Cinderella’s the one who speaks perfect French, and the Prince has no idea what she’s saying), and
before long they’re hitched.
Greta Rana’s script, with its smart satire of contemporary mores, resonated with expatriates
and Nepalis. The stepmother is filthy rich because her ex-husband ran an NGO. She carries a
box saying SPAM, which has three meanings: the spam fed to British troops during World War
Two, which was meant to look and taste like real meat but which was made out of old bread and
tasted “horrid”; the junk one receives over email, derived from the same word; as well as the
spam (literally, junk) that the coalition government is feeding the people of Nepal.
There’s an off-hand mention of Green Cards. In the spirit of sibling rivalry, there is a
sly dig at the American embassy’s commissariat, which provides “alcohol to teachers.” And in
keeping with British obsession, there’s lots of talk of money and class: the paradox of all class no
money, all money no class is revisited.
 ART MATTERS | 69

“We planned to stage “Lady Windmere’s Fan,”” Greta says. “But then my father died, and
the actors were not going to be around in May.” Besides, Greta had had enough of Oscar Wilde.
Winter was the pantomime season. It occurred to Greta it might be interesting to stage one.
Pantomime dates back to Roman comedian Plautus, later revived as Commedia dell-Arte
in Italy during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The script is fairly open and actors can
improvise. Like Gai Jatra, the aim is to lampoon and satire.
The Internet unearthed a pantomime script—but it cost 1500 pounds and was written for
an English audience before Tony Blair stepped down. In other words: expensive and outdated. “I
can write a better script than this,” Greta thought. That’s how it started.
Pantomime troupes in the past traveled around European villages and towns, hung out till
they caught the local gossip, then spun their story around the locale. Greta thought she could try
to do the same. As a writer, she’d written pages of satire for her own amusement. She could write
a pantomime script with it.
Greta knew stock characters have an universal appeal through personal experience. She
wrote a satire of an imaginary country, titled “Guest in this Country”, in 1994. People said they
recognized so-and-so in the story. “You’re in the wrong country and the wrong plot,” Greta
70 | ART MATTERS

answered. People insisted they knew the characters. That’s when she knew she knew she could
create characters which the audience could recognize.
The actors were a mixed bag of nationalities: Nepali, Indian, Sri Lankan, British and
Australian. Yet they fit their roles perfectly. The secret: Greta wrote the roles for the actors, not the
other way around. The characters were constantly aware of the plot they were in—a self-reflexivity
shared by both pantomime and postmodern cultural theory.
There’s a Nepali edge to the satire. Greta says she watches Teeto Satya, a Nepali program,
on Thursdays. The actor she likes most is the young boy.
“That kid has a real sense of comedy,” she says. Greta enjoys watching school plays and
seeing retakes of Broadway plays, but she wishes that children in Nepal would have more scripts
based on their own experience. “Kids can be very satirical. They need to tell their own stories.”
The real audience of a pantomime, of course, is children. They’re supposed to get the
slapstick but not the double entrende. Like all good writers, Greta sounded nervous as she talked
about the audience on Saturday. In her case, the real proof of the pudding would come from her
grand-daughters.
As the central heating kicked in (so the British have figured out this great American
invention, after all!), and actors filed out to enthusiastic BOOs to the fish and chips supper, it
 ART MATTERS | 71

was clear that Harry Potter had competition. And pantomime had found an enthusiastic audience
in the Himalayas.
Greta says next year’s bag of laughs will be Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The Nepali
audience was priced out of the market (Rs.1000/ticket for charity), but perhaps next year there
could be a free show or two for children. Or better yet: a script-writing workshop to spread the art.
ECS Magazine, December 2007
72 | ART MATTERS

OF CABBAGES AND MEN

“W hen people ask me: why do you need to earn all this money? After all, you have no children
to look after, nobody to take care of. What are you planning to do with all this money? I tell them:
“Oh, I’m hoarding it so that I can have a shroud stitched out of one lakh notes made for me when
I die. So that all the passerbys will look at the body and say - oh, look at that. It must be some
grrrrreat person who has just died.”
The humor is infectious. Standing by the window of her studio, surrounded by paintings of
women that have transformed into mountains, and mountains that are in the process of turning
into women, Sashi-Kala Tiwari bubbles along with her usual mixture of acerbic and transcendental
humor. The paintings, representing a body of substantial work of one of the first contemporary
women artists of Nepal, show signs of the mischievous streak - there are Ganeshes with outlandish
trunks, Krishna playing his flute on the tree while the gopinis search, puzzled, for their vanished
clothes below, and even - wait, are those heads over there cabbages, or are they men?
 ART MATTERS | 73

The painting is small, and I would have missed the significance if the artist hadn’t been there to
explain. This is the painting that the artist has not sold even when investors from abroad have come
by offering generous sums. “I don’t show that publicly. I’m holding on to it, waiting for the time
when a Nepali who can appreciate the significance can buy it,” she says. The painting depicts one
of the most famous scenes of the Mahabharata - the fateful scene where Duryodhan tries to pull off
Draupadi’s sari in the middle of the court of Hastinapur. All the men sit, silently watching, not lifting
a finger to stop the crime. The heads of cabbages at the bottom of the painting could almost pass for
cabbages - until we go closer, and then we see that they could also be representations of men.
“I couldn’t help it,” says Sashikala. “How could they have sat by silently, without saying a
word when this idiot was committing an atrocity? That’s why I showed them like that - because
they acted like cabbages. So they deserve to be shown as cabbages.”
That sense of moral outrage imbues the work of an artist who lives in a culture where women,
whose values are still measured by their worth as daughters, mothers and wives, now have to maintain
the double burden of their public and private lives. Beneath the laughter, one can sense the paradoxes.
“My family has always been very co-operative, very supportive of my work. I can work
whenever I want. That’s the first place where I was encouraged.” she says. At a time when
everybody studied science and went on to become doctors (three of her family members became
doctors), her father allowed her to switch from science and join the fine arts college in Baroda.
74 | ART MATTERS

“People asked my father: Why are you doing this? It will be hard for her to live. But he understood
that people did well in the fields that they were interested in, so he let me go.” She believes that
doctors can be constructed, but writers, poets and artists have to be born with the instinct.
What is that instinct?
“Well, you have to be creative. Every time, you have to be different. You have to feel. You
have to get involved. You have to get into the work. Every time, it has to be original.”
This instinct for originality is not unmixed with the instinct for devotion: “People used
to create art before for temples and churches, as an act of worship. They never got paid too
much money. But now, people rarely create art for devotional purposes.” Now, art has become a
commodity whose value has become synonymous with its price.
“That’s why I don’t like to give my art away for free,” she explains. “People say to me:
Sashi, can you give me the ones that you are throwing out, ones that are just lying around on
your floor. But I never do. If I give them away, tomorrow, when people are moving out, they
will put it under the stairs. Or put it out in the rain,” she says, doing a grimly accurate parody of
an irritated man telling his daughter to throw out the trash. “But if people pay for it, they will
take care of it. My buyer and I have a relationship. They buy my work because I have expressed
something in my work that they could not express - their unarticulated emotions. When I sell a
painting, I know they are taking care of a piece of my affection.”
 ART MATTERS | 75

Although financial success is a pleasant spin-off, its not why she does it. “I enjoy it, that’s
why I do it, not because of the return. After all, a person doesn’t have to eat gold and diamonds,”
she laughs. “One guava is fine for lunch.”
“I don’t expect everybody to like my work,” she acknowledges cheerfully. “Not everybody
likes everybody’s work. People have particular tastes. If they like different books, different food,
different clothes, of course they are going to like different styles of art. But people who like the
feeling of my work, the way I have expressed things usually buy them.”
Her subject matter ranges from mountains and trees, birds and flowers to women with
many dimensions. But whatever the subject matter, most of them exude an inner emotion,
something so fragile and ephemeral they can only be sensed in the layers of mist through a
painting. She draws pretty flowers and birds as well, but after getting a sense of her whole body
of work one can see that they too are tinged with those layers of misty color that are a signature
of her style, layers of greens and blues filled with some of the same existential questioning.
“I don’t want to live my life like a cat or a dog,” she explains. “Most people just live their
life, eating and sleeping. I am constantly aware that time is short, and that we live only one life
- so we should use it wisely.” Metaphors are her weapons to subvert the banality of everyday life
- “I don’t want people just to see a stone in a stone. I want them to think, to see that mountains
are also like human beings, and that there could be a mysterious female form in there.” The
76 | ART MATTERS

anthromorphism is well done. In a recent painting, it is hard to say where the mountains end and
the woman begins.
The mountains are omnipresent. Lurking beneath the form of a Ganesh, or even on the wings
of a peacock, we can sense fragments of their presence. “Everyday, I see them differently.” she says.
Perhaps the illusions are also one reason why she has always wanted to go and visit the mountains,
one desire that has, uptil now, not been fulfilled. “People say that if your desires are not fulfilled in this
life, we will be reborn in another life to fulfill them. Maybe if I can’t go to the mountains in this life, I
will go in another.” she jokes. “I need many, many lives to express everything that I want to say. But I
know life is finite - so I don’t hoard for tomorrow. Because there might be no tomorrow.”
“My other desire is to be a dancer. That’s why I make all the figures in my work dance.”
Desires aside, she spends a lot of her time roaming and talking - but her mind is always busy
conceiving new ideas. The actual implementation of the work doesn’t take time, she points out.
It’s coming up with the ideas that take time.
How do people relate to a Nepali woman with a successful career and financial independence?
Most of all, how do they relate to an unmarried one? “It’s my life. Other people can’t lead my life,”
she says. “Women in the old days in Nepal had to depend on their families financially. They had to be
with their husbands. Sometimes, they got beaten. I’m kind of a homely person but I can’t take shit. I
have only one life to smile. I don’t want to spend that sitting in the corner of a room, doing nothing...”
 ART MATTERS | 77

She points out that married life is not ideal sometimes. Sometimes, both people are unhappy in
a marriage but they cannot leave because of the all important - “What will people say!” A woman also
marries the whole family, not just a man - which means that many decisions that affect her life can
only be taken with the consent of other people. Any problems that arise are blamed on the woman.
“Women are like bullocks,” she says. “They are expected to earn and do the traditional
housework as well, putting a double burden on the woman. And men cannot give a hand because
it is beneath their dignity.” The system is not ideal - it makes men suffer as well. She laughs as
she recalls a story of a friend, who upset at being yelled at by her husband, started screaming at
her four month old son: “You’re born to harass some woman!”
Women are made to live with double standards in their public lives as well - it is ok for a man
to talk to women in his workplace, but catch a woman doing that and she is stigmatized. “Women are
human beings as well. They can’t just shut their mouths and be wives and mothers and housewives
and minting machines. They also have feelings,” she says heatedly.
Financial independence means that she can live her life as she wants it. It also gives her time for
herself that most women in Nepal, taking care of the household and the children, doing the cooking and
running off to their jobs cannot afford. But single life does have its limitations in Kathmandu. “I can’t go
off to concerts late at night. I used to think: maybe if I was married, my husband would have taken me.
78 | ART MATTERS

But one of my friends told me: Sashi, don’t be too sure. Maybe he would have hated classical music and
broken all the strings of your instrument. Maybe he would have been ashamed to be following his wife.”
“But you cannot satisfy people.” she says. “If I don’t marry, people say: why didn’t you
marry? If I did and didn’t have children, they would say: why don’t you have children? If I marry
late, they will say: why did you marry with one feet in the ghat? You can never satisfy people.”
Then there was the time when she went to attend some conference of the arts and they put her
on an all male panel with a nameplate that said: Mr. Sashikala Tiwari. People asked her later: “Why didn’t
you ask to have it changed? She replied: Well, how come their big eyes didn’t figure out that I was a
woman? Maybe they thought I was a man because I earned my own living. If they couldn’t figure this
out by themselves at the end of three days, there is really no point in me complaining, is there?”
Which gets to the gist of the matter: “There are more important matters than for me to be
sitting there thinking about being a mister or a miss.” It may be a man’s world - and women are surely
marginalized, but for Sashikala Tiwari, this is not a problem that she cannot tackle. “Other women
say it is difficult to survive in a man’s world, but I’ve never felt discriminated,” she says. Besides, she
knows how to put men in their place in the vegetable kingdom if they start acting up. She can, as one
of her friends might say, take care of herself by being her usual dominating and independent self.
Earshot: A Kathmandu Alternative, published and edited by Sarina Rai in 1998.
 ART MATTERS | 79

RAI KO RIS

1. Why Rai Ko Ris?

Because it’s a typical thing we say out here and I am a Rai-nee so it was partly a good Nepali
name and partly a good joke. Nothing to do with how great Rais are or anything. All people will
behave the same...i.e. what benefits them. You can’t say you’re different coz you’re this or that
ethnicity in the end.

2. What were the three things that turned you into this punk-rocking guerilla artist?
I don’t know about artist...I’d say more music-person. I think guerilla is spelt “guerrilla”. I was always
surrounded by cousin brothers who played geeetar and I was not satisfied just being an on-looker. I
wanted to rock out too. And I was always screaming and shouting my own songs since I was tiny- the
squash racquet (guitar) and hairbrush (microphone) act. I loved loud, fast, rock music.
At 17 I had a band in high school called Skinhead Barbie. At 20 I formed a duo band,
Bruce Lee. Just me on guitar shouting and a girl, a really good friend Neng Mohammed (Malay)
80 | ART MATTERS

on drums. Our friends called our sound “canto-punk”. It was just a natural punk sound. Our
lyrics were very socio-politico... a lot about being “asian” in a western dominated media culture.
And then later Rai ko Ris. I was inspired by people like my ‘tikka’ brother Milan Rai (War
Plan Iraq, Chomsky’s Politics) who I used to stay with a lot in UK when I was a conflicted
teenager..ha ha. He listened to anarcho-punk and was the first to introduce me to the band Crass.
Today, Rai ko Ris’ lyrics are very socio-political, very ‘socialist’ in what we talk about, and down
right anti-capitalist.

3. A childhood memory about “home” - where’s that, and why? Were you ever homesick - for what?
Boeing 747 was home. My big sister throwing up on the plane and me disposing the air sick bags to
a tarted-up stewardess. (They get all dressed up to dispose throw up bags.) I was homesick homesick
homesick because in this situation you are a small child, without your parents and a home where you
can be you and where people genuinely love you.

4. Have you ever wanted to beat somebody up? Details, please.

Yeah, I wanted to so I did. They were bullying me and wanting to fight me so I had to fight back.
That’s why there’s something a bit suspiciously intellectual about “peace” sometimes. Like the
 ART MATTERS | 81

situation here in Nepal. Everyone, especially the educated elite and foreign NGOs saying peace
no violence. But if you saw your sister or mother raped and tortured and then shot in the head,
it’s hard to talk about peace (man).

5. Did people ever tell you you couldn’t become a musician because you were a woman? Or they
always encouraged it?
They just said I SHOULDN’T do it coz I wouldn’t be rich. I don’t want to be rich so fuck off.
I got encouraged a lot by all them cousin brothers I mentioned before. Women can take great
examples from men more than women sometimes.

6. What’s been your best moment so far as an independent, motorbiking, free-thinking chick?
I don’t have a motorbike (I used to borrow one from a friend), I use safa-tempo. It’s cheaper and
it’s convenient. I don’t know what free-thinking is. It must mean that you do what you think is
right for yourself instead of letting others decide, which is the same as independent I suppose.
I don’t think I’m very “chick” ish. I never wore make up (that’s one of the immediate thoughts
that came up when I saw “chick”, sorry)...and I’m really not good at fashion. My best moments
are when we’re playing with the band, rocking out and hopefully introducing another viewpoint
82 | ART MATTERS

of the world through our lyrics that move people to get off their arses and participate/be active
to not let bullies run our lives for a massive profit. I think I’m more of a guitar/bass wielding,
scruffy-looking, step-mother of two little French girls. Sorry to destroy the image.

7. If people were to ask you what you live for, what would you answer?
Same as above. Which for me I think means, live for today i.e. apply all the above everyday, not
just part-time, half-assed. Action means now. Can I just add, support your local farmers becoz
they feed you, not God.
This interview was published in suskera.com, a portal of Nepali literature.
 ART MATTERS | 83

A G I F T OF T H E H E A RT

Why Nepal?, I ask.

Pourquoi Nepal? Chloe translates.
Christian ponders, then shrugs that slight French shrug. He taps the left side of his chest,
where his heart is, with his right hand. “It is a small question with a big answer,” he says.
Why would an art dealer from Paris up and leave his successful business of dealing in
nineteenth century European paintings and antiques, sell his apartment, and move to Nepal?
Looking at Christian and Chloe, his wife, I see that shrug mirrored between the two of them
again. “It has always been a big dream of mine to move to Nepal,” Christian says, finally.
I dig a little further. In classic French fashion, the big answer is to be condensed in one
stylish answer: heart. Or to use Christian’s accent—it appears to be a matter of the ‘eart. “Nepali
people,” Christian says, “have given us a lot of love. A lot of friendships. There are other places
with mountains and landscapes. But Nepali people have ‘eart.”
84 | ART MATTERS

This, then, is why Christian and Chloe now live in a sunny bungalow in a housing
complex in Sitapaila, near a dusty bus-stop in the Ring Road. The house is furnished with
Newari antiques; pottery made by Kalapremi, a friend who they’ve known for almost a decade;
and a rock garden underneath the stairway. The sofa is designed by Christian, and so is the table
made of two upturned garden pots resting on each other and painting in bright reds.
Christian says he’s a self-trained artist. Upstairs, two rooms are filled with large, colorful
paintings he’s made. These paintings, which will be exhibited in Indigo Art Gallery in February, are the
way he’s going to make his living from now on. The couple own no television, and buy nothing but
local magazines. Any essential information about day to day life in Nepal, they get from neighbours.
After fifty years of a high-paced life as an art dealer, information is no longer their priority. “There is so
much information, it becomes disinformation,” Chrsitian says. Now, their priority is learning about
Nepal and its culture, and to make art that is a gift back to the people who’ve given them so much.
Christian and Chloe first came to Nepal in 1981. Or maybe its 1982. “It was a long-long
time,” one of them finally says, after a lengthy discussion about the exact date. They stayed seven
weeks the first time around. One week was spent with Thakali people in Marpha. A festival
featuring archery was in progress, and Christian took almost 800 photographs of that single
event. They liked it so much they came back a year later, and stayed for four months. Since then,
the couple have been have thirteen times.
 ART MATTERS | 85

Nepal changed Christian and Chloe. For almost twenty years, Christian had worked
eighteen hour days, selling to people all over the world, attending hundreds of openings and
events every year. “My life was only my job. I progress, I progress, I learnt a lot,” Art and
antiques, and its dealing, was his passion. And yet, he was very, very tired. “It wasn’t good for his
health,” his wife says quietly. And Nepal beckoned.
After almost twenty years, Christian gave up his fast-paced Parisien life and went to
Honfleur, a seaside town in Western France, and opened up a shop featuring Himalayan art.
He ran this for three years. “I had ethnographic, primitive art and antiques,” he says. He also
promoted Nepali artists like Kalapremi and Manish Shrestha.
Chloe started a handicrafts shop, selling Himalayan artworks, incence and other curiosities.
French customers were not familiar with the items, and Chloe found herself explaining the
meanings of the items and their usage. Today, this shop is run by their son, an avid Nepalophile.
Christian laughs when I tell him Nepali people want to leave Nepal. And yet here he is,
giving up a life in Paris to be in dusty Kathmandu. “The problems are the same everywhere,” he
says. “The life is also the same in US and France. I always dreamt of living in the Kathmandu
Valley.” Even Chloe’s eighty year old mother wants to come and visit them as they live their dream.
Christian’s goal is simple: he wants to give back some of the love he’s received in Nepal.
He does this in small actions. Some of it comes in the form of counsel to people who need help.
86 | ART MATTERS

A Tamang friend whose monastery collapsed found Christian willing to go and spend three
weeks reconstructing his monastery. Another friend whose old Newari home needed repairs
found a willing helper in the artist.
Christian also has larger plans: he wants to start an art school in Kathmandu. He has talked
with the owner of an old Rana Palace in Teku—the aim is to renovate the palace, then run the
facilities as an art school.
Christian tries to insulate himself from the political divisions of Nepal. The artists in
Nepal, he says, tend to work alone, split by ideology. If they worked together, they would be
strong. “When Nepali people are unhappy,” he says, “We are unhappy.”
Besides an outsider mediating energy, Christian brings with him his years of knowledge
of art. “There can be no good art without good philosophy,” he says. He is keen to expand the
notion of art history amongst the artists of Nepal. The cave paintings of France, the antiquities of
Greece and Rome are important to the production of contemporary art. These classic influences,
he says, are important for creating new artwork. While its not copying, its important to look at
“another mind” in order to be inspired.
“Modern art,” he says, “is all ‘eart.” He puts his hand on his heart. “Its not possible to
learn, unlike traditional art, which is technical and can be learnt.”
 ART MATTERS | 87

But is modern art even art? Christian is not sure. “People tell me you are a big artist in
France,” he says. “But I am not sure. I think: this is your idea, not mine. I think modern art is
about expression. Ideas and expression.”
This idea that the viewer interprets the work through his own lenses is very important with
him. As we go through his work in the upstairs room, Christian stresses: “I want people to be able
to interpret it their own way. I want them…” he hesitates for a word: “I want them to be free.”
This then, is the core of the French philosophy: la libertie. Everybody has the liberty to read
the work their own way. Once a text is put out in the world, the author of that text dies, said French
philosophers. Then it is up to the reader to dechiper and interpret the work through their own minds.
Which leads us to Gandhi and Marx. “Marx was a very nice man,” says Christian. “Very
good philosophy. But then people take his work, and they transformed it.” This revolution,
which has killed 13,000 Nepalis, distresses Christian. He wants to be able to bring Nepali artists
together through peace and art, like during the Vietnam war. He is planning a surprise gift for
Nepal. Are we allowed to know about this gift he has in mind? “It is a surprise,” he says, smiling.
Whatever the gift is, we can be sure it will have a lot of heart.
ECS Magazine, February 2008
88 | ART MATTERS

HO W TO B U I L D A N E PA L I
T E M P L E I N T H I R T Y D AY S

D id the title get your attention? Did you think, as I did, that it would be fun to have a how-to
book on building a Nepali temple—after all, our ancestors seem to have indulged in this pastime
in generous measure, and there is no reason for us to give up on it just because bungee-jumping
and bar-hopping are now the more popular past-times. How come we don’t know how to do it?
Perhaps it’s the missing how-to book?
Enter “Elements of Nepali Temple Architecture” by Puruswottam Dongol. The large-
format book is generously illustrated with photographs of Kathmandu Valley temples. While not
a modern how-to book, the book has elements that an ingenious architect may use to think about
ways to create a new temple.
All of us have gazed at Nepali temples, been mesmerized by the red runners that wave in the
wind, watched pigeons flutter up towards the gabled roofs, and then let our eyes travel upwards towards
 ART MATTERS | 89

the symmetry of struts, carvings, and slanted roofs. Without having the words to describe it, we’ve been
awed by the geometrical precision, the richness of stone and wood carving, the mythological bases, the
intertwined meaning that seems to permeate each inch of space in and around a temple.
And if you’re like me, you’ve also been a little frustrated at the lack of knowledge about
what that awesome figure actually symbolizes, what that mermaid is doing up on that golden
arch over a low wooden door, what kind of ghosts those guardian figures are keeping at bay. If
you’re like me, you may even have become impatient and walked off without taking the time
to learn about the minute intricacies of each art that makes up a Nepali temple, from stone to
wood, carving to sculpture, from Buddhist and Hindu iconography and philosophy to the long
copper banner that floats down from the sloping roofs.
While the book does not explain everything, it gives a simple overview of the most basic
temple structure, from the minute visualization of the tantric base (one temple, for instance, is
visualized as tantric triangles laid on top of each other), to the use of color, to the logic behind
ornamental features. Starting with a history of temple construction, briefly discussing the
non-denomination aspects of Nepali temples which incorporates both Buddhist and Hindu
iconography, the book moves to a discussion of traditional construction techniques. There are
separate chapters on pinnacle, roof, strut, cornice, windows, torana, door, column and plinth.
The simple diagrams help to identify key structures and concepts.
90 | ART MATTERS

The architects of these exquisite structures had to figure out a way to stop the rain from seeping in
and eating into the wooden timbers, and they solved it through an ingenious method—notched tiles that
interlock and stop rain from going in. A brick that sticks out may act to prevent moisture from seeping
into cornice designs. A wooden arm, mimicking an human arm, may hint at the architectural backbone
of wood that holds the bricks up. The delicate balance of the wooden frame, seismologists have long
known, allow the temple to sway during an earthquake, and may allow it to absorb seismic shock with
more resilience. The grinning skulls keep bad spirits away—and maybe even a thief or two.
The low quality photos might bring on an initial yawn, but be assured that once you read the
text, the photographs will come alive. Newari classification of each architectural feature (Newars
being the original architects of pagodas) is broken down and explained in simple language.
The torana, for instance, which is the wooden or metal board above temple doors, is not a mass
of strange mythological figures: it usually features Chhepu, a fierce beast that holds a snake in his
mouth as it attempts to escape; Ganga and Jamuna, the two river goddesses (or two mermaids known
simply as “Nag Kanya”); apsara angels; and at the bottom two makara ( a seahorse looking creature.)
Puruswottam Dongol, the author, is the member secretary of the Kathmandu Valley Town
Development Committee, and has been involved in the promotion of traditional architecture
in the Kathmandu Valley. He is also the deputy director general of the Department of Urban
Development at Babar Mahal.
 ART MATTERS | 91

There seemed to be no hard and fast rule about temple architecture: indeed, the variations
of design seem to be up to the individual team of artists and architects who make it. This fact
came alive to me as I watched two temple constructions take place before my eyes. One was the
Bishalnagar Chowk’s temple, which went from a peepul tree with vendors and a trash-heap to a
beautifully constructed sacred art complex.
I ask the shopkeepers who built this new temple. “The community,” they answer. One
active member of the neighborhood decided to raise funds, and through that they rebuild a
small, exquisite wooden pati (resting place), along with a series of statues that rest directly
underneath a giant peepul tree. The only hint that we are in modern times is the iron bars that
now keep out thieves who do not respect the sanctity of public deities.
While the shrine may have displaced the vegetable sellers, they have not gone very far: a
concrete shelter on the other side of the street provides them with the same modest roof that the
tree once did. As I walk by, I see three men discussing some issue of importance on the pati: this
public space, it appears, is fulfilling its age old function.
The other temple that catches my eye is the one close to Sanepa Chowk. The bamboo
girders hint to a new construction, and so do the new bricks. As I climb up the flimsy bamboo
stairs, I am aware of being in a new construction site. This is a grander project than a statue
underneath a tree. The temple is larger, more traditional. The decorations over the door, and on
the courtyard, hint towards process being followed according to tantric rules and norms.
92 | ART MATTERS

The woman sitting inside and presiding over the temple is large, and dressed in a white
sari. A middle-aged man sitting with her addresses her with great respect as “Ajima.” He tells me
that Ajima was the one who commanded to have this temple built: I am uncertain whether he’s
referring to the woman before him (who I later realize is his mother), or to some metaphysical
Mother Goddess to whom the temple is dedicated.
As the conversation proceeds, Ajima tells me that she has spent six years trying to build
this temple (Yes, thirty days was an optimistic estimate). The land is her own. The money for
construction comes from donations and loans. She is in debt, but she still has to finish the
temple, she says. There is still so much to be done, but they’re not hurrying. Everything has to
be done as it should be done. The mortar is still inches thick, with lentils, molasses and all the
other ingredients people used hundreds of years ago to strengthen their temples.
On the way out, her son says to me that each time they have been in need, the universe
has provided, and people can come forth to help. Ajima, he says, is always there, and has always
helped. For a moment, the two of us stand underneath the door, look at the half-finished beauty
and precision of the temple, and feel the truth of his words.
To support other temple construction projects, call the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust.
ECS Magazine, February 2008
 ART MATTERS | 93

Photo by: Hari Maharjan, ECS Magazine, 2008

94 | ART MATTERS

Photo by: Ajanav Ranjit

 ART MATTERS | 95

A N A N I M AT E D L I F E

W hen Ajanav Mohan Ranjit told me that he’d created the animation filled with Nepali
dancers and farmers that heralds the Kantipur news-hour, I said spontaneously: “I always wanted
to meet the person who made that!” And it was true. There is a magical touch to that particular
digital art that no other Nepali animation has been able to match.
I ask Ajanav what the secret is—is it 2D? Or 3D? He laughs at my confusion. “It’s a
mixture of 2D, 3D and life action footage. We took a Kantipur van and went to Thimi. We started
to take footage of everything. An old man came, carrying a basket. We asked him if we could
shoot him. He said yes. As we started to set up the shot, he wandered away. “Money, money,” he
said, so we had to offer him some.” Also in Thimi, they found out traditional potters no longer
used wooden wheels, but tires to make their pots. So they made a special request for a wooden
wheel--one unused for fifteen years was found. The dancers came from a dance academy. The
96 | ART MATTERS

final image, composited out of three techniques, is the one we see daily on television. The
animation continues to be shown after Ajanav left the station—Kantipur hasn’t replaced it partly
because there is no artist with the same skillset in town.
Ajanav’s life is full of dynamic action, rather like his art. Despite the obstacles, he has
forged his own path in a culture hostile to creative thinking.
Ajanav’s philosophy, like his animation, is striking. He wants, in his own words, “to do
something different.” This may not appear striking until we remember that to veer off from the
doctor-engineer career paths of Nepal is to court contempt, misunderstanding and ostracization.
Which is what Ajanav got. “My friends would laugh when I told them. Fine arts? Why? They
would ask. They even told me that fine arts was just for Third Division students –why was I, a
First Division student, studying it?”
Despite these reactions, Ajanav joined Lalit Kala College of Fine Arts. In the broken down
and dilapidated environment of the college, he felt a second level of frustration. The students
were still doing still life illustration after the first year. On the first day, a professor announced
that their education was limited, and they’d have to go abroad if they wanted to study for a MA
degree. This was not the art school he’d seen in Hollywood films.
 ART MATTERS | 97

In an attempt to keep his options open, Ajanav joined commerce classes. During basketball
sessions, he listened to conversations about future careers. Young students studying commerce
aimed to go on to steady salaried management jobs at Rs. 10,000. “I can do better with fine arts, I
felt,” Ajanav says. And this is when his journey to self-learning began.
Ajanav took a course with Hariram Jojo, an Indian artist who taught him the importance
of field trips. He started to wake up at dawn to sit in temples to sketch. During this time, Ajanav
observed that the art world of Nepal was predetermined in many ways. “It was already decided
who’d win the prizes at the exhibitions. The senior artists were all set,” he says. He chose not to
participate in any exhibitions for this reason.
Ajanav’s first break came with an offer to illustrate the Himalayan Pavilion in the Expo
2000 in Berlin. The pavilion, a mixture of Swayambhunath and Changu Narayan, was exhibited
amongst many other artwork in Berlin. This pavilion won a Gold medal.
His second break came with an offer to do a 2D animation. “It was the first time I’d
thought about animation. I didn’t know anything about it,” he admits. Infocom was developing
Prince of Persia game for the US market, and they hired him. Other offers followed. Wild Storm
DC hired him to do digital paintings. This work experience gave him the opportunity to learn
about interactive multimedia graphics, and introduced him to 3D software.
98 | ART MATTERS

“This is great software, I thought. I can see the top view, side view, bottom view. It really
made my work easy.” In order to boost his knowledge, Ajanav took a one month course in 3D
software, but the class, conducted with one computer and 15 students, taught him nothing. “I
didn’t learn anything there. Then I started to surf the web and read up on web tutorials. I’d stay
up all night. My mother’d come down at 5am and scold me for not going to bed.” This passion,
Ajanav guesses, may have led to his breakthrough.
Restless to boost his skills further, and understanding that more skills would make him
employable in Nepal’s tiny marketplace, Ajanav took a four month course in the now defunct
Institute of Film, Television and Performing Arts. The course taught him the skills to become
a film director. During this time, he heard a big television station was to start in Nepal, and he
wanted to prepare himself to join it. “I’ll be there someday, I thought,” he says.
Sure enough, Kantipur network came to town. Soon, the place buzzed with the best
people from Nepal. Ajanav was one of them. The energy was tremendous. “We really believed
that change would come out of this. We went to work early and stayed till midnight. Sometimes
we worked all weekend—it was so much fun.”
Ajanav, placed in digital broadcasting rather than in production, became inspired watching
a showreel done by Belief, a company that made animations for the Indian industry. “We can
reach this level, we thought,” he says. And this is what led to the famous news animation.
 ART MATTERS | 99

After two years in television, Ajanav felt his learning curve fall. In addition, he met
Suyogya Tuladhar, an animator setting up a 2D animation house. “He had set it up very nicely to
do animation. I was impressed.” Ajanav wanted to work with Suyogya and suggested working in
3D, instead of 2D. He’s learnt about a worldwide CGI community and was hooked to the global
network through the web.
Ajanav heard an animator from Disney was coming to town. Kiran Joshi was known to
have worked on Disney films like the Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and others. “To work in
Hollywood is a dream for an animator. I really wanted to meet him. Finally, he came to Kantipur
for a television interview. He became my idol,” says Ajanav, smiling.
“Lets do something for Nepal,” Ajanav said. Kiran Joshi, who’d taken a look at Ajanav’s
impressive work, promised to return and do something. “He said that he would come back to
do something. But for me, it was like somebody telling me they’d pick me stars from the sky. He
worked in Hollywood. How would he come back to Nepal?”
In 2002 Ajanav quit television and started a commercial advertising company with a small
group. They did more than 50 ads, including all of Dabur’s, within two years. “We were doing very
well. But the domestic market is so small, and I was competing with my best friends. One night we
would drink, the next their project would come to my desk.”
100 | ART MATTERS

Ajanav decided to take a break and visit Bombay. “My aim was to stay there for a week,
get refreshed,” he says. But as usual, Ajanav got lucky. The old friend who he called up worked
for Sony TV. Anjan Gajurel, who worked as art director for mainstream Bollywood movies like
Murder, took Ajanav to his workplace. “He was doing so well, and noone in Nepal knew about
his work,” Ajanav says. “If people knew, they would be inspired to go and do fine arts.”
Through Anjan’s connection, Ajanav visited Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chili Studio, where
the visual effects for the movie Don was being created. The supervisor, Puran Gurung, was a
Nepali from the Northeast. Puran gave Ajanav a tour, leaving him impressed with the level of
development in the Indian film industry.
Ajanav’s next stop was the Prana Animation Studio. Dibesh Maskey, another Nepali who
worked there, gave him a tour of the world-class studio and facilities. The studio, based in the
ILFS building in Bandra, was gigantic. The grandeur of the architecture, and the scale of the
enterprise, struck Ajanav. A large hallway led to a room with a huge dome inside. About 300
animators worked on projects, including Tinkerbell, a Disney film. “It was like going abroad,”
says Ajanav. “The place was so nice I could have worked for free.”
Maskey shared news about the latest software. He asked Ajanav what he used. Ajanav recalls
saying: “I am a jack of all trades, master of none.” The pressure to know a little bit of everything,
 ART MATTERS | 101

crucial to survive in Nepal’s tiny market, was useless in India, where a particular skillset was
emphasized. He got himself an interview and an examination in the studio, and got a glimpse of their
management methods. “That’s when I learnt about how an animation studio is run,” he says.
The Bombay trip inspired Ajanav to do something in Nepal. Now he had a clearer idea.
“If Indian animation companies are doing Hollywood movies, we can do it too,” he thought.
“They’ve built up their manpower. Lets do something similar in Nepal.”
In December 2007, after months of preparation, Kiran Joshi, Suyogya Tuladhar and Ajanav
Ranjit’s destinies came together with the opening of Incessant Rain production company. The
company develops international animations for the global market. Today, Ajanav works in this
spacious studio on projects for both Nepal and abroad. He hopes that young people from Nepal
will not have to migrate because there is no options inside the country. “We’re trying to create a
new platform for youngsters here,” he says. “We’re creating hope even in this difficult time when
everybody wants to go abroad.”
So what made Ajanav, a fine art student who could have ended up making temple paintings
for tourists, to lead such an interesting and successful life at a young age? What led him to pursue
course after course of creative skills? What led him to break a path into a new and unknown
world? “Some friends ended up in huge industries. Some still make traditional paintings of
102 | ART MATTERS

temples,” he says. “It all depended upon how they thought. If I had not thought differently, I
would not be here today.”
Ajanav hopes that people who think of fine arts as an “optional subject” will rethink their
views when they learn about the work done by artists in film, digital art and animation. “I want
people to rethink their view of fine arts,” he says. “I want it to lose its stigma.” Next time we turn
on the television to see the news and see that dancer come on, lets hope for a slight shift in that
perception.
ECS Magazine, March 2008
 ART MATTERS | 103

CONNECTED CENTURIES,
CONNECTED CONTINENTS

G ea Karhof has a twinkle in her blue eyes. “Its such a dark day, isn’t it?” I say, shivering a little
against the cold. “Yes, but it is sunny inside,” she replies, beaming. This emotion seems to encapsulate
her artwork, which is lit with the warm light of a world that is both ancient and modern, fantastic and
realistic, humorous and serious all at the same time.
Gea is here with friend Nan Mulder to show her work at the Siddhartha Art Gallery—the
exhibition is part of a four woman, three country show. The two have been friends since they met
in college nearly forty years ago. Nan moved to Scotland, married and divorced, and then the two
started to travel together nearly twenty years ago. For both of them, place is an important element
in their artwork.
104 | ART MATTERS

Gea lives in Edam, a small town about 20 kilometers out of Amsterdam, known for its
cheese and cartography. Her husband, she explains with the sweetness of somebody who’s lived
a good life, owns a chocolate factory. The couple own an old home that they’ve renovated. There
is a well-known school of cartography in Edam, and the Emperor of Japan owns many of the
maps that were created by this school.
In Gea’s “Connected Centuries”, five neat and narrow houses stand side by side, rather
like they’re lined up in a street in Edam. But there the resemblance ends—they are crowned by
fantastic roofs, pagodas and domes. Inside, Thai dancers sway on boats as Superman descends
with a girl in his arms, acrobatic girls build pyramids on top of each other, and Cambodian
dancers fold their hands to Bette Boo. The house in the middle shows a Japanese woman in
a traditional kimono—the outfit, explains Gea, is 650 years old, and 650 years ago was when
Edam became a city. A red figure rises up balloon-like behind the costumed figures—this is
Geertje Dirkx, one of Rembrandt’s models who also originated from Edam, and around whose
story Gea’s daughter has created a performance. “So Edam is the center of the world, rather like
Jerusalem?” I joke, and Gea acknowledges that the spiritual center of her home is indeed central
to her artwork. The pagodas and stupas that appear in her artwork were drawn in her studio in
Edam before she finally decided to come to Nepal and see them for herself four years ago.
 ART MATTERS | 105

Travel and experiences of different cultures is also central to both artists’ art. Egypt was
their first destination. “I started to make connections between the old and the new. I realized
that time was nothing—there were artwork in Egypt that are four, five thousand years old. Art,
I realized, is incredible,” Gea says. We tend to assume that modernity is linear, but this isn’t so,
says Gea, who says the spectacular nature of ancient artwork stunned her with their precision and
beauty.
In a “View from Heaven,” ancients and moderns share space as they look down from a
circular opening in the ornately tiled sky. The people looking down are winged, and of many
nationalities. Outside, dinorsaurs parade in a circle. “That’s the first life on earth. And if you look
closely enough, you can see a prehistorical Mickey Mouse,” Gea says, smiling at her own visual
joke. What appears to be the ornately cracked tile background is actually text from Dante’s Paradiso.
“They are looking down, we are looking up—its double vision,” Gea says. The ceiling was inspired
by a trip to Guatemala, when she looked up and saw a hole in the roof, and also by the summer
home of a friend in Venice.
Just as Gea’s work is shaped by place, so is Nan Mulder’s. Nan married an Englishman
and moved to Scotland and then to Ireland; divorced him, then returned back to Scotland with
her children. “Holland is a crowded country. I always wanted to move abroad—I’ve lived abroad
106 | ART MATTERS

for thirty years. I don’t belong anywhere, or else you can say I belong everywhere,” she says.
“Dutch expatriates blend in. They don’t group together like other nationalities.”
Just as Gea exudes a sunny, blue and gold aura, so Nan seems to exude a gothic aura. Her
work is primarily black. That velvet black, she says, is what drew her to the technique. She works
with mezzotints, which is a rare technique that few people still know how to make. She received
a scholarship to go to Kracow, Poland, to learn the technique from artists who were still working
with it.
Mezzotint is called “The black art” in French—it’s an elaborate technique in which black is
scraped to reveal the light. “I listen to a lot of music while I work,” she says. “Its very difficult to
see what you’re doing. But I can sit at home and do it.”
Nan works a lot with ideas of rooms—rooms which are inside oneself. “The whole world
is my home. The one place where you are wherever you are is the room inside you. This is
everywhere…or nowhere,” she laughs.
Just as the grounded sense of being part of a small community defines Gea, so the sense
of being an uprooted foreigner defines Nan. The elements of a person who doesn’t have a home
keeps returning. “I was always very, very happy when I started to travel. In Nepal and India, I am
a foreigner. This gives me freedom, and separateness…it also makes me feel lonely,” she says.
 ART MATTERS | 107

These combination of sentiments define her art. “My doors have eyes. The outer world looks to
the inside. The inner world looks outside.”
After meeting a Japanese artist who combined techniques, Nan also started to use photo
etchings and other techniques. This gave her a great deal of freedom, and allowed her to make
more prints in a shorter time. “Infinity in the palm of a hand,” her etching of a hand offering a
marigold in an Indian temple is classic in its simplicity.
A bandh was what led them to their fortuitous meeting with Ragini Upadhay and Seema
Shah. Unable to travel, the two decided to explore Kathmandu’s modern art world instead. The
Nepali artists welcomed the two artists into their studios, and were very hospitable. This led to
the idea of the joint exhibition of the four artists. “We all work with realism, even though its not
pure realism,” Gea explains.
The two artists took time off to give workshops of their techniques to students at Srijana Art
College and Tribhuwan University. They are also sending paper back for the students as a gift.
Gea hands me the tiny copper plate which has her work embossed on it. The stamp, she
explains, was commissioned by the Post Office in Holland, who commissioned her to make
the images of mermaids and curliqued clouds to give as a gift to their directors. The stamp has
interesting shapes on the background. “I discovered a new technique by accident,” she explains. “I
108 | ART MATTERS

printed a little string, and it gave a beautiful design, so I started to use it.” This accidental invention
is now in the hands of art students in Nepal. The spirit of exploration and travel, it appears,
continues to be passed on in the form of new mappings and new techniques by artists who know
no boundaries of place.
 ART MATTERS | 109

EN VOGUE: PRABAL
GURUNG, BILL BLASS

V ogue, one of the world’s premier fashion magazines, features actress Angelina Jolie
on the cover of its January 2007 issue. Jolie wears a raspberry rayon matt jersey evening
dress that drapes across her body in perfect, sensual symmetry—there’s a sari-like hint to
the drape of fabric against her legs. The classic, elegant look comes from the design table
of Bliss Blass, a New York couture house with clients as diverse as Oprah, Laura Bush,
and Sigourney Weaver. What most Nepalese don’t know is that one of the designers of
the label is Prabal Gurung, whose rise to meteoric New York success rivals those of the
best stars.
A St Xavier’s graduate, Prabal was the only one of his class to study this field in
1990. Like all boys, he struggled to belong, but was made to feel different. However,
110 | ART MATTERS

this very sense of being “different” helped to push him to define his sense of identity
later on in life.
Prabal went to Delhi, where he attended the National Institute of Fashion
Technology and worked for the Indian designer Manish Arora. So when he was accepted
to the Parsons School of Design, New York’s most prestigious school of fashion, of which
Donna Karan, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford and other influential designers are alumni, he was
already a veteran industry insider, as well as a student with a deeply serious interest in his
art and business.
Prabal went on to win the Best Designer competition between Parsons and the
Fashion Institute of Technology in 2000. The next year, the faculty asked him not to
compete, but to open the show instead, which he did featuring 15 looks of his work.
The designer Cynthia Rowley, who was a judge at the show, was so impressed she
offered him a job on the spot. After three years with Rowley, Prabal moved to Bill
Blass. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I knew Prabal in New York (he was at Parsons, I was at the New School’s
graduate program in anthropology a block away). The stress of student life in New
York was alleviated by fun evenings with Nepali friends, and Prabal was always a key
 ART MATTERS | 111

participant. He sang, danced and displayed an incredible memory for old radio Nepal
jingles, and a hilarious talent for parodying Nepali pop songs. His side-splitting Tara
Devi imitation: ko hoo ma? Kay hooo ma? (Who am I? What am I?) is pure genius. I
have hours of video footage of Prabal that makes me suspect he would be as good in
the acting world as he is in the fashion one. He can dredge up an Urdu shairi, switch
effortlessly into mainstream American chit-chat, then return to a slap-dash Nepali
insult within the space of a sentence. I was impressed by Prabal’s ability to navigate
through multiple cultures simultaneously. But while Prabal is undeniably at home in
New York, he never forgets his Nepali roots, or his family.
“The most important influence in my life,” says Prabal, “is my family. My mother
a strong, opinionated, hard working and extremely compassionate renaissance woman
whose sense of style, grace and ability to look like million dollars even in a shoestring
budget has left a huge impact on my life. My drive and desire to succeed has come
from her. I am a product of her in every sense. My father’s sartorial elegance, optimism
and relentless pursuit to provide us with better education made me confident to hold
my own today.” He also cites his sister, brother and brother in law as a major source of
inspiration and support.
112 | ART MATTERS

Having a close and supportive family network helped him not just to weather
tough times, but also to share, communicate and articulate his dreams in a way that
served him well in the hyper-competitive environment of New York. Prabal’s mother
had faith in his dreams, and refused to listen to people who said she was a fool to
let him study fashion design. Yet she believed in him, and her faith was eventually
justified.
I was often amazed by Prabal’s ability to party, while simultaneously excelling at
work. There was no doubt he was the best amongst his peers. What is your secret? I
asked him once. And he told me: “The key is to make it appear effortless by working
hard when nobody’s looking.” As we looked through the beautiful drawings of his
portfolio, we had no doubt that Prabal was working extraordinarily hard at the job he
loved best.
One evening I showed up wearing a mirrored Gujarati shawl, which Prabal took
from me and meticulously molded, twisted and shaped into a dozen different outfits—a
skirt, a shirt, a dress, a hairband, a wrap. Watching him at work was akin to watching a
painter rapt with his painting, or a musician with his instrument—there was no doubt
that I was watching a master of his art working on his creations.
 ART MATTERS | 113

Prabal’s daily routine these days is the stuff of fashion magazines. He dresses
the First Lady of the USA, and her daughter. Oprah Winfrey-- “the most influential
woman in the world”--according to some commentators, chose to buy and wear a Bill
Blass dress not just on the cover of her O magazine, but on the very special day on
which she opened her $40 million leadership academy in South Africa.
But despite these successes Prabal is not satisfied. “I have lots to achieve. This
is something I have learned from my mother. With every achievements and success
she always asks me: “That is great, but what’s next?” so that kind of zeal and drive has
kept me going,” he says. “I will feel a real sense of achievement when I am able to give
something back to my country. The day I can make a contribution to Nepal, socially
and/or economically, I’ll consider that a job well done.” Prabal eventually wants to
create his own label—one that would show the world that creative minds can also come
from a small country known mostly for its exotic factor.
Prabal’s farewell party when he went to New York left people gasping as he
showed up—fashionably late—in an outfit that Kathmandu had never seen before,
and probably never will. His ability to leave a shimmering impression of imagination,
114 | ART MATTERS

longing and fantasy will no doubt show its hand again when he returns, time and
again, to visit his home country.
Fashion design falls low on the hierarchy of doctor-engineer obsessed Nepali
culture. But fashion is a billion dollar business globally. In places like New York,
fashion has received its due as a significant shaper of contemporary culture, and a
potent hybrid of art and commerce by being featured at institutions like the Museum
of Modern Art (MOMA). Its time Nepal embraced its own artists in the fashion
world with credit that’s long overdue.
Kantipuronline.com
 ART MATTERS | 115

Illustration by: Prabal Gurung

116 | ART MATTERS

2008
ECS Magazine,
Photo by:
 ART MATTERS | 117

THE UNIVERSAL
L ANGUAGE OF MUSIC

K irateswor is located on an obscure hilltop in the Pashupati temple complex, but many
people can navigate their way there with effortless ease. That is because for the last fifteen
years, classical musicians have gathered to play instruments and share their art every full moon,
drawing crowds of reverent listeners.
The last full moon was no exception. The chaitra moon was almost crimson in its
intensity, and the music of the ishraj, a little known instrument, dissolved the listeners to a
perfect balance of melancholy and joyfulness. Santosh Bhakta Shrestha was accompanied on
his ishraj by Navaraj Gurung on the tabla. The tabla is a special instrument at any occasion,
but especially in Kirateswor where its rounded, full-bodied sound seemed to echo the dancing
footsteps of Shiva, painted in full dancing posture on the stage.
118 | ART MATTERS

We climb up to the little pati and sit next to the baba-ji who’s a permanent resident at
Kirateswor. He dips his finger in his fire and gives me a tika of grey ash. My friends and I
speculate that the Sanskrit slogan painted on the wall says: Anybody who doesn’t know classical
music is like an animal without a tail. We laugh about this for a while, wonder if our Sanskrit
guess is accurate, and then get lost again in the music, which moves into a high-pitched
crescendo that one friend describes as a description of classical angst. Indeed, the musical moods
seem to reflect the human mind—moving from horrible melancholy to a slower sadness, then
exhausted into a calmer state, climbing up to a small spike of joy, then launching full-fledged into
ecstasy before again quieting to introspection.
My sister-in-law, who learns harmonium and classical vocals from a guru, talks about a state
called ananda when listening and singing to music. I am sure this ananda she talks about with such
reverence is different from the casual ananda we talk about in colloquial speech. This full-fledged
feeling of being one with the universe comes more easily when submerged in music, and today I feel
it. Closing my eyes, I can feel the layers of sound dissolving down towards the knowledge of sansar,
the worldly universe, down towards a more fundamental truth. (And no, I wasn’t smoking anything.)
The last set, with Bobby Gurung on the ghatam and Jeevan Rai on the tabla, got too
competitive and too playful for the spiritual setting, but otherwise the music was exceptional.
 ART MATTERS | 119

Sarita Mishra, a musician who is secretary and co-ordinator of the concert at Kirateswor, says that
it took a while to build it up—when they first started the concert fifteen years ago, there were no
women and barely any men. Now, the courtyard is always packed and people linger on after the
concert is over, despite having to walk home in the dark.
This month seems to be a month for music. The the other concert to delight Kathmandu
music lovers (besides Sabin Rai at Tamas) was the Viejos Flamencos with Jorge Pardos, a
legendary 52 year old flamenco musician from Madrid who flew in to play to a packed hall in the
Hyatt Regency Hotel on May 10th. Jorge played the flute and the soprano saxophone, El Chispa
played the cajon (a wooden box with an opening at the back, and played by beating hands on the
front), and Juan Diego the Spanish guitar.
Jorge Pardos was eighteen when Paco de Lucia, the musician who changed the way the
flamenco guitar is played, hired him to tour together. In 1999, Jorge stopped touring with Paco,
and started to do his own work. He did a big tour with Chick Corea, a legendary American
piano player, in 2004.
After an hour of uplifting flamenco, the Nepali band Sukarma came on stage to jam
with the Spanish troupe. The musicians had never met before, and yet they managed to play
comfortably for an hour with harmonic symmetry. My friend whispered: I like them better when
120 | ART MATTERS

there’s a whole ensemble. The musicians took turns to play—with Dhrubesh Chandra Regmi
on the sitar, Pramod Upadhayay on the tabla, and Shyam Nepali on the sarangi, the stage came
alive with both Eastern and Western rhythms. Music is a language that requires no translation,
and quickly the instruments learnt to speak to each other. The drummers delighted in finding
out that they had the same beats—21 year old El Chispa (“the spark”) found a likeminded
companion in Pramod Upadhayay, and the two jammed on their drums, uplifting energy and
spirits. Dr. Regmi played the sitar impossibly fast, while Jorge responded with the flute. As
Shyam Nepali’s sarangi played a melancholy riff that raised the hair on the back of our heads
and left the hall dead silent, the Spanish guitar was the only instrument to respond with its own
empathetic chords.
The hall was a bit too gigantic, too air-conditioned, and too chandeliered for flamenco, but no
doubt the Hyatt has the good sense to make their new jazz club more intimate. The event, organized by
the Delegation for the European Commission and the Hyatt, was a fundraiser for the Kathmandu Jazz
Conservatory, a new music school started in November 2007.
The conservatory was started by Mariano Abello, a Madrid musician who arrived in
Kathmandu on September 11, 2005. “I escaped from the USA, that’s what I did,” Marino says.
Marino was teaching in the universities of South Florida and feeling unfulfilled when his brother
 ART MATTERS | 121

called. “My brother asked me for help for some stuff he was doing here. I contacted Jazzmando.
Me and my wife we fall in love with the Nepali people, so we stayed. We love this place. Here we
are trying to give something we know. Not to give--to share.” Marino’s wife, Janine Lusposa, an
interior designer, designed the new and soon-to-open Jazz Club at the Hyatt.
With fifty plus students ranging in age from six to fifty (three are non-Nepalis), the
Conservatory seemed set to continue the jazz tradition in Nepal. Lets hope the funds raised--Rs.
2000 per ticket from over 200 enthusiastic supporters—will help to sustain this new institution. I
ask if they will be here for a while, and Marino answers with a smile: “Yes. For a while.”
122 | ART MATTERS

END NOTE

P eople often ask me about the art world in Nepal. They are seeking not just formal
institutions and well-known artists but also “the underground”. Many things still remain
unlisted or word of mouth, but those who seek will find: a rich and burgeoning theatre and
performance culture, a fluid music world, an ingrained culture of poetry, and also small but
important steps being taken in the world of painting, sculpture, photography, film, documentary,
digital media, and literature. Highbrow culture gives way graciously to slapstick: television
sitcoms featuring comedians are Nepal’s most favored form of art and entertainment. Nepali
remains the lingua franca but regional languages are becoming more audible with the wide
distribution of FM and satellite radio.
An infusion of donor funds into the art world has brought mixed results—on the one
hand, it has broadened access and sometimes supported stellar products and institutions. On
 ART MATTERS | 123

the other hand, it has encouraged a culture of mediocre content which incorporate the latest
buzzwords but lack a knowledge base, often churned out hastily and without a great deal of
thought by NGOs for a donor’s need for deliverables.
Transnational channels of international artists, the historic migration of Nepalis in and out
of Nepal, and art movements inside Nepal that question the status quo, are a few factors that
bring a cosmopolitan and post-modern view to Nepali arts.
The easiest way to access these worlds is to ask a fellow artist.
Photo By: Jose Reguera

Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer, filmmaker and artist.

She is a graduate of Brown University.
She lives in Kathmandu.

If art reviews are meant to be insightful, this is it. Sushma Joshi’s essays
on the art scene in Nepal cover paintings, sculpture, photography, film,
theater, graphic animation, music, poetry, literature and architecture. And
the artists—some Nepali and some foreign, some covered well by national media
and some from ‘the underground’, some sacred and some profane, some
traditional and some modern, or both. Best of all, the book is inspiring and
fun to read.
Don Messerschmidt, Associate Editor, ECS magazine, Kathmandu