Participating Artists of Revisiting the Roots in a Modern Nuance
Meet the artists below! This section showcases projects and artists' brief bios, listed alphabetically. Please note that all content is copyrighted.
A B H I S H E K S H A H
Photographer
Abhishek Shah renders marvelous prints on Lokta paper that deal, in a minimalist, yet strikingly beautiful way, elements that are an integral part of our culture and heritage sites. When going through a lot of vicissitude in his life, Shah had discovered a new way to perceive and process his life experiences; merely through the lens of his viewfinder, which literally as well as figuratively, changed the way he looked at life and at people.
Latticed windows, Bhairav masks, and textured stone carvings on Shikhara-style temples are a few such elements, which he depicts in a very realistic manner, touching the ancestral beauty of such priceless cultural artifacts. He accentuates the value of such relics using a monochromatic color throughout the series, which emulates the antique quality of such historical marvels. He employs the technique of chiaroscuro, wherein the high contrast between dark and light brings a faint nostalgic feel within the same context, further heightening our inherited cultural worth, especially when seen from the perspective of the present.
Abhishek Shah, a member of the Film Foundry, created a new form of photography art as he conceptualized this technique into the gum printing process in the 1980s. He tweaks every aspect of light and philosophies of life and blends photography as a form of art that is meaningful not just in terms of art techniques and methodologies, but meanings that signify very abstract and contemporary concepts. His approach to art photography leans more toward a moody aesthetic, with which he seems to resonate the most. And his inspiration is deeply rooted in the way he leads his life, his upbringing, and his surrounding influences.
Although never fully satisfied with what he does, he believes that he should trust the process, which is an ongoing quest of trial and error, as well as successful outcomes. Because of the close connection he feels with his heritage and family members, family archives have had a big impact on how he derives motifs and inspirations for his artworks.
Abishek is not from an art background and has never formally learned photography at the school or university level as a hobby. He did photography for his family and took pictures when he traveled. In his life, he reached a point, where a lot of things were rapidly changing around him. During this time, he started to question life, and how one looks at it. That is when he started photography and found a means to answer some questions about the meaning of life through his viewfinder. Over time through his viewfinder, his own perspective about life and the people around him changed.
He is never happy with his own work. He keeps on trying to improve his work, one photo at a time. He believes that when one is satisfied with life, when you fall in love with someone, you stop. His philosophy makes his work unique, as his different approach to work makes his photography moody.
His photography, his work is inspired by his way of life. It reflects the environment he was brought up in, his current surroundings, his life experiences, and his influences. He does not claim his work to be part of art photography. However, art is defined differently in different places. Abhishek’s gum print techniques from the 1980s, his use of chemicals, and the technique of exposing them to UV light resulted in a new art form unique to him. He is an artist with big negatives, he himself has admitted that he often felt that his work was poor and he should leave it, but his love for photography did not let him. Every time while developing a negative, he experiments and tweaks different aspects of light, continuously improving his work.
A S H I N G U R U N G
Graffiti Artist
Ashin Gurung is a 27-year-old Nepali street artist born and brought up in Pokhara. He studied at Saraswati Adarsha Vidhya Ashram and graduated in 2010. He completed his A-Levels from Cosmos International in Pokhara (A-levels) in 2012, but did not get into art at the school level. He lives in a joint family with his parents, brother, sister, and family. None of his family members came from an art background.
His brother works as a barista, his sister is a stay-at-home mom who takes care of the family along with his mother, and his father who is now retired, used to work at a Japanese Factory. His mother was always interested in handicrafts, and when he was in school she would help him with his crafts homework.
His artwork features Nepali Devanagari font style on a plyboard. He uses ancient fonts and scripts, mixing them into ancient calligraphic art and graffiti art. By tracing the designs into a plyboard, he explores a new and experimentative form of art.
Gurung practiced art from a very young age. He was especially passionate about the b-boying form of dance. In 2011, he entered the world of graffiti as part of the hip-hop culture. He practiced all four elements of the hip-hop culture; DJ, Breakdancing, MC, and graffiti. Recently he moved from practicing all four elements to solely focusing on his graffiti work.
In 2014, he got involved with Artlad and its Prasad Project. He was also involved in the “Bako ko Cinema project” (Street’s Cinema Project), and the Rebuilding at the earthquake project with Artlab and Sattya Media Art Collective.
B A T S H A G O P A L V A I D Y A
Painter
Born in the ancient city of Lalitpur, where Vaidya resides today, he has found himself to be surrounded by a rich architectural and religious atmosphere that bustles with life, influencing his creativity to the brim in the majority of his artworks. Lalitpur (composed of two words, Lalit meaning art and pur meaning town) is also known as the town of art and has a legacy that dates back to the 4th Century.
As a young teenager, he was closely groomed within the practice of Ayurveda and as a vaidya himself, an Ayurvedic doctor, he worked with such practitioners who would prescribe medicinal herbs including drawings on Lokta paper sealed inside copper or silver pendants with tantric mantras to treat certain illnesses. In his paintings too, Vaidya draws his inspiration from a collection of drawings and mantras from his father's books written in Nepal Bhasa Lipi (Kutakshar Ranjana script). Behind his art practices are his elder sister Urmila Shrestha who inspired him to join the Sir J.J. School of Arts in India, and his cousin brother who inspired him to do Vedic drawings from Ayurveda books. Before going into drawing, however, his first attempt in arts was dancing, which was also keenly encouraged by his father.
He completed his schooling at Patan High School where he passed his SLC choosing drawing as an optional subject. Interested neither in other academic subjects nor in rigorous study, Vaidya was inclined towards arts and drawings. But he only received any form of formal art education at Sir J.J. School of Arts in 1965 after receiving a scholarship from the Indian government to pursue his 5-year diploma course there. Probably inspired by this influence, his works seem to resemble many Indian tantric artists such as GR Santosh, Akkitham Narayanan, and SH Raza, with similar religious motifs and iconography.
Using drawing as his medium for therapy, each of his unique drawings represents the tantrik vidhi (rituals) symbolism of yantra and mantras on bhojpatra (a type of tree bark). Living in India at that time marked an important point in Vaidya's life when he started using a modern approach to otherwise traditional inspirations.
His paintings reveal tantric symbolism and fascinating details. He intertwines modernist aesthetics, specifically abstraction and surrealism, and importantly, serves to resonate directly with Eastern philosophy and the antediluvian religious practices of Nepal. With recurring motifs, one can see sharp, triangular tantric mountain shapes appear from within the womb of the more solid mountain forms, symbolizing the hidden mystery, spirituality, and power of nature. However, wavy lines and flowy color application characterize these shapes, giving impressions of fluid movements and expressive gestures.
While moving within the dimensions of time and space, he goes beyond the usual rules of visual art and creates a definite rhythm with his rhythmic lines, curves, colors, and sweeping brush strokes. Each figure or part of the human body appears pensive, and they brood in heavenly hues of blues and oranges. To him, these elements, seen in both nature as well as religion, are an Icon, a Motif, and a Mandala – the symbol of the expansion of consciousness within a cosmic charm.
However, his later works focused more on mythical and ancient stories painted in a semi-abstract manner. He worked mostly with color-printed linoleum although the mediums were diversified across emboss on a papercut, woodcut, and oil inspired by Hindu tantrism and shamanism. Focusing his work on religious paraphernalia, temples, and tantric motifs, Vaidya is also best known for his series of portraits of (dancing) Ganesh, one of the primary deities of Hinduism.
Nuanced by simplistic icons and symbols harmonized into a soothing color palette, Vaidya’s artworks integrate ethnographic Hindu references amidst a cosmic beauty so vivid and heavenly that they serve as a recollection of artistic color-coded patterns seen in religious and tantric rituals.
Along with other Nepali artists- Sashi Bikram Shah, Krishna Manandhar, and Indra Pradhan, who were all studying at the same school in the 60s, Vaidya was a part of the popular artist group SKIB. Starting exhibitions in 1971, which was inaugurated by Queen Ratna Rajya Laxmi, the group of 4 artists became stalwarts for 19 long years and were pivotal in their roles in introducing modernism to the Nepali art scene.
B H U W A N T H A P A
Sculptor/ Installation Artist
Bhuwan Thapa is one of the most prominent and active sculptors in Nepal. He is an anomaly in a world where it is a norm to follow trends, set goals, and race ahead to achieve them. He was ten years old when he completed grade three. He got married at 19 and was already 20 when he completed his SLC.
As an artist, Thapa is known for using unconventional and experimental materials to communicate his multiple thoughts and concepts. Thapa produces experimental three-dimensional sculptures featuring a unique and free work style and selection of materials. He follows his intuition according to the present time and situation.
Thapa reminisces, as a child, when he and his brothers would frequently go to the forests to make stick figures of animals using a hasiya (sickle). Even though the design wouldn’t come out to be the most artistic one—it was just a few sticks that made up a body, limbs, and a tail—it was when he first encountered art in his life– his earliest fascination with art.
Being the youngest child in the family gave him enough liberty to explore things and hone his skills. As he had two elder brothers, he never had the pressure of providing for the family; he was always given the freedom of doing things his way. He truly believes that his brothers’ trust and support of his artistic skills have helped him reach where he is now as an artist.
When Thapa was pursuing my bachelor’s degree, he wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to specialize in. He would often ask his teachers to guide him. It was Thakur Prakash Mainali, a senior sculptor, who, after numerous lengthy conversations, finally advised him to become a sculptor. “Although it[sculptor art] needs a lot of time and effort, the result we get from this is quite worthwhile,” Thapa recollects.
His work ‘Thaili’ features a large metal sculpture constructed in the shape of Thaili (a small handcrafted pouch). Paying meticulous attention to the details of this Nepali article, he reproduces a thaili’s drawstrings, stitch patterns, and pleats, emphasizing realism to its utmost importance. Yet, his sculptures look surreal and abstract with how Thapa accentuates the enormity of the pouches using a big metal structure in order to highlight the preponderance of such Nepali items throughout its long history in Nepalese culture.
Abstraction is further emphasized with his use of large human skulls, which he places inside the thaili in a compact manner to suggest the abundance of what he considers to be an embodiment of ancestral roots and heritage; whereas on the other side, the eyes gripping peculiar human skulls may likewise suggest a notation just as how thailis are used for safekeeping valuables like money jewelleries by Nepali women.
Thapa's artworks go beyond the depiction of what can be explicitly deciphered: he uses skulls also as a metaphor for transformation and metamorphosis and how along with the fleeting nature of life and death, societies and communities simultaneously change, and how important it is to preserve and carry along what our roots have provided us.
Bhuwan Thapa holds an MFA from Tribhuvan University, Central Department of Fine Arts, Kirtipur, Kathmandu, Nepal, and is currently working as a faculty at Kathmandu University, Center for Art and Design. He was an Assembly Member (2010-14) at the Nepal Academy of Fine Art (NAFA). He is the President of Nepal Arts Foundation, and ARAMBHA Contemporary Nepali Sculptors’ Group, and a Vice President of Nepal Fine Arts Forum and DOOR Contemporary Art Foundation, Nepal.
B I R E N D R A P R A T A P S I N G H
Painter/ Printmaker
As the founder of The Sirjana Contemporary Art Gallery (1986), Birendra Pratap Singh remains one of the most active and influential artists of his generation. With Singh’s skill in his preferred medium of pen and ink apparent in his large body of works, he illustrates various perspectives of human beings and the environment they live in, ranging from landscapes to cityscapes. He is attempting to represent the reality of human existence. He is able, just as Raphael or Titian was, to convey forms, animate or inanimate, with just a few strokes of the pen, making the sureness of his hand and the alertness of his eyes apparent in his diverse drawings.
Birendra Pratap Singh completed his BFA from Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in 1979 and has exhibited in Nepal, India, Bangladesh, South Korea, Japan, and the UK. His works are also in collections at the Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, and the Tribhuvan International Airport.
Even while Birendra Pratap Singh’s drawings may vary from the surreal to the quirkily figurative, his ability to delineate whatever he wants exactly as he pleases is apparent in each of the drawings on display. With his seemingly comic-like characters, or sometimes representation of creatures in a figuratively mythical look, emoted in somber expressions, Singh is directly drawing the viewers' attention into the psyche of another being, bringing attention to man-made monstrosities inflicted upon other beings of the environment. He fills his figures with bold linear strokes, giving tone and contrast, as well as suggesting some motion and movement within, which is an important aspect of his artworks to give them the striking depth and character presence in his artworks. Now considered as one of the most famous line artists, In the more cryptic drawings, you can see the evidence of pure psychic automatism—a phrase the artist has coined himself, for his method of putting pen to paper and producing whatever forms his brain desires. Markedly bizarre, but as powerful as in their rawness and their ability to convey a man’s innermost imagination, Singh’s creativity through his process of atomization and expressionism of the pieces altogether, most of which, the artist freely states, have some connection to the environment, both natural and artificial; a subject he returns to time and again. This retrospective may be mysterious to the layperson; there is not a lot of explication, and one would walk away without a measure of awe.
The story of Birendra Pratap Singh is ongoing, this exhibition provides us with the chance to see the breadth of his works and to appreciate a certain kind of genius in real-time instead of posthumously, which happens in the case of most old masters like himself. Birendra Pratap and his generation of artists are an important bridge between the pioneers of Western-induced modern art and today’s contemporary art scene. Among his contemporaries, Birendra Pratap is uniquely placed, within the label of old masters all ranging from the early Renaissance in terms of the choices he has made as an artist and his work, that embody modernism distinctly situated in Nepal.
C H I R A G B A N G D E L
Visual Artist/ Painter
Chirag Bangdel is an artist, writer, and poet based in Kathmandu celebrated for a large number of works created in the genre of his figurative compositions. With symbolisms of blissful swans, dancing figures, and blooming lotuses composed with comforting aesthetics. He wants his art to be a soulful depiction of life, and a merry carousel of love, friendship, relationships, and culture.
Although he states that he doesn’t want to paint pain, Bangdel, in his paintings, doesn't hide away from it, nor does he deny it. He goes beyond in finding a resolution; and creating a safe place for him and his audience to take refuge in. His paintings become a healer of agony, a keepsake of the brighter side of life, a celebration within. He toils to paint about hope and converts his paintings into a healer for him and the audience.
Although Bangdel is one of the few artists who doesn’t come from an art background academically, he proudly hails from a family of the greatest artists. Lain Singh Bangdel, the veteran artist and key person in the Nepali art scene, was his granduncle. The veteran artist became his art school from whom he learned art along with his brother, Anurag. Even today, one can find the influence of Lain Singh Bangdel in his work. He always shared a unique, loving bond with his granduncle. Apart from that, his father was an influential figure for him.
Given that he grew up in the midst of the art revolution that was growing in Darjeeling he produced many artists that are renowned today, in the country and outside. The natural ambience inspired him very much and we can see that in his art even today.
He decided to be a full-time artist and in his pursuit, he has left everything behind including his education and other works. As a result, he does not have an academic background, as he never studied art. Neither does he have any regret about it.
He thoroughly revises his apprenticeship of the Western orientation of expressionism in the combination and use of colors and figures. His expressionism depicts the condition of modern mankind but in a very charming and expressive way. He has given his characters the challenges and crises experienced by the painter himself in the formative years of modernism. Yet, his paintings become a healer of agony, a keepsake of the brighter side. Bangdel decontextualizes the shared contents and forms of traditional beliefs and practices and recontextualizes them in the contemporary Nepali context through appropriation; the sense in his paintings always appeal with a highly abstract and modernist place, yet it gives a familiar sense of comfort and joy, one that the viewer cannot help but look into, and remain hooked for hours.
Bangdel’s works can be seen as profoundly filled with hapless and sad figures, wherein his character, often mystical, seems reflective of their inner spiritual realm, with wide, yet closed eyes, which resemble a nirvana-like state of high vibration. These almost look like emulations of Picasso’s figurative paintings such as “The Old Guitarist '' and “ Les Miserables”, with long elongated bodies, blind eyes, flat and splintered faces, and bodies as some commonly prominent features. In his abstract depictions, Bangdel captures the ethos of the people by depicting the calm and livid water lakes. The misty, lyrical, and charming valley bathing in the mellow autumn sun with the haunting beauty of the mythical water creatures are the subjects of his very well-known lyrical paintings.
In 2017, he was commissioned to create a series of paintings that were a major part of “Bodhi Chhaaya” an artistic, cultural extravaganza, staged every day for the next five years in Nepal and abroad, combining theater, dance, music, and other forms of arts. Also a prolific writer in the field of literature, and a radio presenter and producer for more than fifteen years, Bangdel’s inspiration to paint comes from his close affinity with the people around his surroundings, expressing and oftentimes trying to resonate with their feelings, and social circumstances and societal aspirations.
D A W A S H E R P A
Visual Artist
Dawa Sherpa is a contemporary Nepali artist from a place called Bigu in Dolakha. He is the youngest of the five siblings. His father, elder brother, and his brother's wife work in a factory as carpenters. His parents before having them used to lead an ascetic lifestyle, living in the monastery as a monk and nun. Because of this, Buddhism has a significant impact in his life. He, including his sisters, are conventional followers and practitioners of Buddhism.
At the age of 13, Dawa left his home on his own volition to join Dalai Lama’s monastery. However, after being a monk for two years, he left after finding no opportunities to pursue studying Buddhism. He came to Kathmandu and continued his schooling as a fifth grader. He says he doesn’t regret leaving the monastic life and he is grateful for having an opportunity to experience what it felt like living in one.
He completed his high school degree and specialized in management studies from Cambridge College, Nepal. After finishing high school, he explored a lot of other career degree options like engineering, and management; art clicked for him, and got a degree in art from the Lalitkala campus. This degree marked the commencement of his artistic career. Since then, he has never had a hint of urge to return to any other field in life. Sherpa perceives art as the most captivating and meaningful way of living.
Hailing from a place with the conventional Buddhist inhabitants of 1880, which is also widely renowned for its “nun gumba” (monastery for nuns) his works are steeped in the Eastern philosophies of life and Buddhism, which focuses on the essence of living and the existence of being. Dawa Sherpa’s works transcend the conventional mediums of art practices and seek to express themes and concepts through ordinary, locally available materials, through which extraordinary art expression is rendered. Sherpa’s works feature a manipulation of natural elements- mud, stone, and charcoal, through which he plays with textures and dimensions of such raw earth elements to evoke abstract concepts of life and self. Coming from a Buddhist background with such a great influence of Buddhists, his minimalist conceptual artworks are prompted by the simple and minimalist lifestyle of a Buddhist monk, which he himself, at a younger age, was.
This conceptual art originated when Sherpa placed his steps on muddy ground and had a bleak realization that we are all connected by that soil, where he felt the sphere of the earth. In this, he started using mud as an embodiment of human selves in how the cycle of life, death, and rebirth forms a complete circle as a person sustains his life from the food and shelter given by the mud, and eventually dies, decays, and mixes with the mud to complete his life cycle. Sherpa considers his mud art, or better said, mud canvases to be self-portraits. He is the kind of artist who finds the medium and process of expression more important than the final artwork. Taking good as well as bitter experiences of life as inspiration, he depicts the process of manipulating and working with the mud materials itself as the final artwork, wherein the dryness of the mud is orchestrated into dry textures to invoke the dynamic characters of his art-making process as well as that of a human being.
Referring to he give-and-take relation we have with soil and earth, the conceptual self-portraits embody portrait and character into the mud, alluding to the cycle of samsara (in Buddhism, the cyclicality of all life, matter, existence) and with its minimalist, and all-embracing approach, suggest how the entire life is grounded on mud and how we are all the same. His artworks strongly connect with and centralize himself into mud self-portraits, involving and manifesting the artist’s personal energy into them. The relation to self-portrait is formed in how the mud, or the earth element, one of the five elements of life and Buddhism, is in fact the element that is in us all, which creates life as a whole. This naturalist element found in his artwork motifs can be closely related to the Land art movement, prominent around the 1960s and 1970s. In that, influential American artists such as Robert Smithson’s work become relatable.
D I B E S H W O R G U R U N G (D i B)
Mural Artist
In his artworks, Dibeshwor Gurug brings his childhood into his art and introduces a few nuances that exhibit his memories. His characters are a blend of mythical and comical creatures, combining the fantastical world with mythology, bringing a style of traditional art along with highly stylized modern art into depictions that convey unique stories and narratives that are playful, and imaginative, yet profound. He often incorporates drawings of toys, where his characters, adults whatsoever, merrily indulge and mingle along, in an almost carefree and juvenile attitude. There is a socio-political statement he registers, in how people’s actions have reduced to nothing bigger than some infantile or silly shenanigans that do no good to society.
Transitioning his career in cybersecurity, from an IT student Dibeshwor Gurung became a self-taught artist and one of the most well-known street artists in Nepal. He defines himself as an interdisciplinary artist. He hails from a village in Ghandruk, although his schooling was in Kathmandu, where he spent most of his childhood. Gurung’s schooling was in Kathmandu and spent his childhood in a hostel. Art during childhood was a hobby that he pursued in his free periods. But he was always interested in animation among all art forms. Therefore, the sense of close affinity with childhood, and in particular hostel life, where children are self-sufficient and often indulged in their own imaginative worlds, just as the artists’ characters in his drawings are.
He didn’t receive the opportunity to get academic knowledge or a formal art degree. However, he believes education is not requisite for art and he values practicality and first-hand experience in the process of art-making. Coming from such a background, his work can be associated with naive art, a Western art movement that refers to works made with the sole purpose of depicting childlike simplicity and frankness and made by individuals with no formal training in an art school or academy. They follow a similar kind of aestheticism distinguished by their clarity of line, vivacity, and joyful colors, as well as by their rather clean-cut, simple shapes, as represented by French artists such as Henri Rousseau, Street art and his art also seen as influenced by Western art. Art, he believes, is all about his raw emotion mixed with the social and political contexts in the mix. He uses easily available materials (like acrylic paint, pen, and paper) and the demand of the art to give shape to his artistic vision. So far, he has used unique platforms like skateboards, metals, books/notes, wood, walls, and even digital. This use of found objects, and random articles, which much of his works also revolve around, act as a key lament in his work, representing children’s behavior around objects.
Another important element, politics and various contemporary situations in Nepal is also reflected in Gurung’s works. Although his subjects are simplified as cartoon characters with a toy in their hands, their meanings transcend their visually aesthetical nuances to meet the eye with highly emotional content yet detached, impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc. These are strongly evocative in their message as a direct allusion to the unstable political system and leaders of Nepal, wherein his characters can be considered as the political leaders of our country, nonchalant towards the important issues of the nation and rather, indulged in immature and child-like activities, suggesting how looking after the people and the country has almost been a child’s play.
Through time, he feels that his art has been simplified. However, since street art is not yet mainstream the conversation around street art is limited and so is the number of independent street artists, he feels the need to promote it further and foster it in his unique choices of mediums with an influence of Western art.
Gurung has thus made influential and socially engaging art, bringing naivety and inspiration from his childhood and summating deeper aspects of humans and society as an adult. He creates a revolutionary praxis of rethinking art production to add a wider political or rather an emancipatory character to the artworks that are simple and relatable, yet evocative.
H A R E N D R A K U S H W A H A
Visual Artist
Born in Arnaha, a village in the Sarlahi district on the Bihar-Nepal border, Harendra Kushwaha had a keen interest in arts since childhood, although he barely received encouragement at his home for art-related activities due to his parents’ conservative attitude towards arts as a choice of a feasible career. However, adversities in his life didn’t stop him from sketching, drawing, and copying art in notebooks.
Harendra Kushwaha’s artistic ambitions took a decisive turn when he was deeply affected and inspired by the Taare Zameen Par in 2007. Being able to relate to the story of the eight-year-old main character, who overcomes all odds despite suffering from dyslexia) on-screen, Kushwaha was filled with renewed determination to pursue his dream of training as an artist. At the age of 28, Kushwaha won a scholarship from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), he enrolled at the Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata as a student of painting. In 2017, almost a decade after he had taken the plunge, he won the Cima Award, an initiative started in 2015 by the Kolkata-based Centre for Indian and Modern Art (Cima) gallery to recognize young and emerging artists. Along with a cash prize, he also secured the opportunity to display a solo exhibition at the gallery.
Two years after he won the prize, Kushwaha is finally ready with his show, A Piece Of Nothing, which is on till 20 April at the Cima Gallery in Kolkata, though the self-deprecatory title belies the sophistication that informs his work. Kushwaha is represented by Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India. He was also the recipient of the prestigious CIMA award in 2017.
Kushwaha mostly works with paper, painstakingly transforming the two-dimensional flatness of the medium into intricate three-dimensional textured objects. He cuts paper into strips and fashions these into weaves of different tones and shapes. The dense mesh, knitted together like chattais ( hays) and sukkul(mats) often resembles a piece of fabric unspooling. “Kushwaha’s work reminds me of a spider weaving a universe or a writer weaving words,” says Pratiti Basu Sarkar, chief coordinator on the website of Cima.
As equally mundane as these fraying cotton threads, jute clusters, everyday paper and a monochromatic application of paint might look like, as equally everyday affairs of Nepal’s countryside – the terrace farms that form ridges along the Terai hills, the straggly hay laid out to dry under the roof, the matted walls of humble village homes, etc. Harendra Kushwwa’s meticulously crafted artworks represent. However, although the objects he uses are ordinary, the delicate medium of conversation that his paintings portray are built upon vastly intricate handwork, motifs of local authenticity, and painstakingly crafted ingredients of what are all but ordinary found objects.
Harendra Kushwaha’s art is constructed from paper which he cuts painstakingly into wafer-thin strips, colors with graphite or pigment, and sometimes weaves or stitches with cotton thread. This process of immersive making is intrinsic to Kushwaha’s practice, which is rooted in the local – the remote village in Nepal where he grew up before moving to Kolkata to study and make art, and where his family still lives. Often, his paper relief sculptures evoke the textures or contours of the
He constructs his artworks with the original motif of resonating with the vicinities of his everyday life, but there is a more profound basis that dictates his art-making process. It is the process of making something out of nothing, forging the raw material for the work with his own hands, rather than paper and integrating them into the chaotic harmony of his vision. He manipulates diverse ingredients in extremely unique ways to accentuate the pure and basic structural integrity of the objects in forming meaningful embodiments of everyday scenarios– a way of creating, which ultimately stretches the torsion flexibility of these materials leading to the formation of various infinite structural composites– abstract compositions are formed as a result. strikingly in a piece like Topography Of Plowed Rice Field. What appears like a pell-mell cluster of structures it assumes new meaning and definition as we train our eyes to regard them through Kushwaha’s artfully informed lens.
His work is a continuous process. An unending continuity that keeps on adding as time passes by an index of leisure they have organicity of formation without any definite form. Like an everyday diary, they are in a continuous process of growth. They tangentially trace the leisure activity of ladies taking rest after days of work sewing, stitching, and weaving. As his methodology evolved rather than concentrating on the final outcome, the “act” itself became more and more significant. A sense of lubricant pleasure is infused in much of his activities. act is but also I Having seen so much of his childhood years spent in a village in the Terai region of Nepal, he tries to reimagine the memories through his act of weaving and stitching, which is not just his reaching of the contemporary art, but also an acknowledgment of the traditional. While the use of these processes led him to establish a sense of kinship with his native, the very act of weaving also signifies a sense of community that gets emphasized by this very process.
While the three-dimensionality on his flat papers are created by his dynamic use of the objects, the varying contours and textures give a new suggestive shadow– different from an actual shadow. His creation of such minute realities suggests how he is giving new perspectives to the subjects he is representing and subtly intimates how an entire new life under the everyday cosmos is renewed. His work can thus be seen as a masterful relic, a mindful personification, and a representation of the beauty of his surroundings and his personal interpretation of how art can be created within.
HARI OM MEHTA
Visual Artist
Hariom Meheta is a conceptual Nepali artist, who works with socio-political and environmental issues related to water problems, health, and consumerism. He was born in Hanumannagar Saptari in a farmer community and came to Kathmandu in 2009 and joined a fine arts college, inspired by the lifestyle of the valley people. He joined Lalit Kala +2 (PCL) in 2009 and also completed a Master in Fine Arts TU 2018. He currently has his own gallery called Artline Gallery in Baneshwor, where he has been actively teaching arts to kids and conducting art workshops.
Alluding directly to the socio-economic status of the farmers of Nepal, the most prominent, yet undervalued occupation of Nepal, with which the artist himself was acquainted since childhood, Hari Om masterfully creates sculptures that are a physical embodiment of the degraded agricultural status of Madheshi. Born in Terai, he comes from a family that depends on agriculture as the main source of sustenance. Yet, labor is highly undervalued, and treatment is unjust.
The artist meticulously constructs five different instruments used in typical farming: khurpe, pasian, haduwa, haar/kodaira, and bidhha; physically bringing out classical replicas of what goes into the everyday toil of farmers, giving the imagery of the traditional processes and complicatedness and demands of this occupation.
Although crafted in a highly realistic style, each of these sculptures represents different geometric shapes, in an almost cubist style; each signifying different elements in farming- sharply curved rectangular haars for digging and hasiyas for chopping, signifying the variety of use and purpose of the tools that goes into farming. The same number of arithmetics, the five elements of nature is what goes into constructing the entire pottery-based sculpture. Water, air, fire, space, and soil for molding, drying, shaping, and burning the sculptures respectively. The artist masterfully interplays within these elements to viscerally bring us upfront towards the earthy and the organic, the natural elements that require our essence within the natural sphere of the universe and our consequent responsibilities.
Hari Om's works are highly original, contemporary, and meaningful– it is the perfect blend of traditional and contemporary and the intertwining meanings of both; how the contemporary is responsible for the representation if not upliftment of the traditional, and how traditional is a reminder of how we should treat the contemporary. His works aware and awaken us, not just about the pertaining socio-economic hardships of many marginalized Nepalese communities, but also about putting us in the shoes of where he comes from and where he wants his land and community to foster.
He represents a brilliant amalgamation of intense, even primitive realism with the formal vocabulary of cubism. The artwork is a compendium of separate details, each carefully observed and precisely described. This detailed realism, however, is matched by a tendency to simplify forms into abstract, geometric shapes, investigating the visual resources of the science and agricultural practice that sustains human life. His depictions, although very visual in terms of accuracy, strive to develop an understanding and appreciation of food and production, especially the hardships of a wide community of farmers that are involved.
I N D R A P R A D H A N
Painter
The late Indra Pradhan was born in 1944 A.D. in Ilaam, Mechi, Nepal, and passed away in 1995 A.D. He attended Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay in 1964 A.D. and completed his Diploma of Arts in 1970 A.D., after which he also completed a short mural painting course. His first solo exhibition was in his hometown of Ilaam, Nepal in 1969 A.D. He was one of the prominent members of SKIB, along with Shashi Bikram Shah, Krishna Manandhar, and Batsa Gopal Vaidya, which was the first modern art collective in Nepal established in 1971 A.D. They established SKIB because they felt Nepa had a lack of art galleries and art expression that was more secular, than religious. SKIB aimed to change that by inspiring young artists and opening a new vista of communication within artists using other media and methods. These artists became the stalwarts for nineteen long years introducing modernism to Nepal. This is the key time period that defined the modern Nepali art scene. This transitioning period was also the time he worked on the mask series that is now being exhibited at the exhibition.
Early in Indra’s career, he experimented with a variety of different styles, including plain air landscapes, realism, and abstraction; with his main stylistic focus being on abstract expressionism. Amidst vividly applied colors of thick abstract impasto, one can see faint impressionistic lines of figures in Pradhan’s paintings, which are the main subjects of his work. These faint figures, sometimes intricately patterned Bhairav masks, dancing Lakhes in motions or iconographies of animals represented as mythical creatures, Pradhan’s paintings create harsh allegorical juxtapositions, by depicting both figurative and non-figurative styles on one canvas; giving his work a powerful emotive quality. Pradhan’s paintings handled motifs that were based on the artist's experience represented by the simple yet complex forms that filled sometimes the entire field of action with the crowding and competing images that gave the cult of horror but lay pleasantly along the eye paths of the viewer. This juxtaposition in contrasting senses is laid out with how he painted the backgrounds- with richly and abstractly painted expressionism and the central figures, painted usually using smooth and thin allusive lines or otherwise forms and shapes portrayed in fluid movement.
The theme of his work deals with the complexity of ritual and cultural values and explores the ineffable concepts of love, mystery, and divinity. Pradhan seeks to portray a representation of Kathmandu and its rich culture as a city of temples and rich architectural heritage. The artist seems to be aware of his subconscious mind, which reflects his love for the city where he spent so many years. The lyrical city spaces have no echo of the mountains and the blue valley of his native land, nevertheless, they suggest a veiled allusion or poetic drama with an overarching sense of cultural vividness in its fullest form. This is why his paintings become dominated by a color palette of warm oranges and brown hues; colors of the cityscape and cultural happenings within, are depicted as something very interesting, and sensuously appealing.
Indra Pradhan's artworks look stylistically complex in meaning, yet charming. The cult of violence, dissolution of forms on big scales, the uncanny-looking position of images including the human figures and other forms turn out to be lucid, familiar inclusive, and not threatening. The painter did not take any stake in creating figures that would speak either of occultism or of radical challenges. Instead, in the impressionist projections of bigger threats or changes, he created very charming pictures achieved through a very pleasant and inviting combination of colors. His paintings do not show strong movement of brush strokes but the smooth delineation of the images. The overall impact of Indra Pradhan's paintings is one of delight and joy, of friendliness and warmth. Perhaps this comes from his long pedagogic associations with school students and practices, a loving engagement indeed.
J A G A D I S H U P A D H Y A Y A
Photographer
Jagadish Upadhyaya is a professional photographer with a 25-year-long photography journey. With a passion for art, he turned to the profession of photography, creating a very distinct and advanced photography scene in Nepal. He did photography as a hobby before, he studied the subject in the US. He also teaches photography at KU and practices a work ethic driven by sincerity, and clear intention, in an organized form.
Jagadish Upadhyaya creates a realm of photography that brims with nostalgic vision, intimate connections, and retrospective memories that are rendered through his motifs of everyday life. He bases his inspiration highly on his surroundings, his upbringing and the simultaneous environmental influences he accesses to create art. Using highly experimentative, yet innovative methods, wherein he reconstructs and uses handmade primitive pinhole camera technology, he introduces chemicals in his works, exposing them to UV light and producing big negatives. He creates a new form of photography art as he conceptualizes this technique in the gum printing process in the 1980s.
He tweaks every aspect of light and philosophies of life and blends photography as a form of art that is meaningful not just in terms of art techniques and methodologies, but meanings that signify very abstract and contemporary concepts. One of his self-portraits features a very close-up view of himself holding and peeking through a magnifying glass with a very introspective look on his face, suggestive of him examining his inner self, not just through the lens, but also through his artwork and the creation process.
Yet, unlike a regular camera, the use of pinhole technology allows him, because of its single aperture and infinite depth of field to render photographs in primordial and surreal aesthetics, with experimentations to form a limitless and idiosyncratic visual language. The blurred double exposure further amplifies a sense of confusion as he tries to find personal answers through the miasma of perplexity. His other works feature photos of similar aesthetics presenting people from a distant, third-person view, who must probably be indulging in similar personal contemplations. The bright windows in his photographs are a symbol of a place where they could probably find answers, as they recollect haunting memories from the past, feeding their minds with something different and in contrast to his dark and somber photographs, something brighter for the future.
J U P I T E R P R A D H A N
Visual Artist
Jupiter Pradhan, born on 7th September 1977, is an interdisciplinary visual artist, whose artistic expression includes performance, video, painting, and installation. His artworks deal with the social, political, and cultural intermingling in modern times. Jupiter Pradhan holds a BFA in painting from the Tribhuvan University (2005) and an MFA in painting from the University of Development Alternative, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2009). He finds the resources of different art forms from Asia.
In his sculpture installation work, Jupiter Pradhan brings back and shares the memories of his childhood, creating his own realm of reflective and playful world of ceramic dolls, all representing different phases of his life. Be it the time when the kid in him was angry with the family members, packed his belongings in a bindle, and ran away from home; or the time when he first tasted Chyaang; or even the times when he used to go fishing in the rivers- each baby figure mingle in different experiences of his life, which are all but Pradhan’s bittersweet recollection of childhood memories.
Pradhan seeks to beautifully capture the inquisitive minds of children, how they try to make sense of the world around them and reconcile their own physicality with their surroundings; just as one of the babies curiously looks inside a small bowl vessel, while the other tries to figure out how to peel a banana– all hooked into the unique possibility that their tiny minds could construct.
All the babies’ faces are given their own character and expression– the artist very realistically renders, in his attempts to remain truthful and loyal, just as a baby would, wide eyes, chubby cheeks, and button nose typically associated with a baby. This realism attuned to a variety of expressions, each evoking different feelings of bewilderment, awe, and astonishment just as he had felt as a child.
Pradhan’s works can be considered a masterful contemporary trace of childhood memories, which are highly contemplative and personal. With this project, he says he has been intrigued by the idea of searching for his roots and bringing memories or artworks that are close to him. The project and the idea behind it have added value to his art and artists like him.
K I R A N M A H A R J A N
Mural Artist
Kiran Maharjan is in a very transformative period in life, working in unique ways and mediums to revive the post-COVID situation as an artist and as a collective. Growing up in the culturally rich streets of Patan, in the Newa community with four siblings, the artist was always very close to the cultural and social aspects of family life, family gatherings being his main source of exposure. All three of his sisters are nurses in clinical psychology and his brother is involved in the IT sector with other male members of his family involved in hardcore farming and business-related occupations. However, he did experience some liberty to pursue his individualistic wish to pursue arts and neither he nor his siblings, each groomed with unique personalities, were ever forced to do what they never wanted to do.
As an introverted kid, he preferred to indulge in watching TV shows and cartoons rather than outdoor games and activities. With pop culture references being an important part of his life and his art, he finds and imbues such references in each artwork. As a very inquisitive child, he was always also very curious and fascinated about reptiles, oftentimes capturing lizards and spider eggs in ink bottles, and carefully labeling and incubating them. Although his fascination later developed into his wish to pursue herpetology as his first-choice career, it was art that touched and influenced him in unique ways. A keen art enthusiast, Maharjan has loved art for the longest time he can remember. Having been introduced to an encouraging art teacher at Aims schools in Lagankhel, where he was studying in grade 8, his perception of art shifted, veering more towards more philosophical and aesthetical aspects. He started exploring more about art on a practical and professional level as he would take up space and would go to different places, giving art classes to community schools. He joined Artlab and developed his interest in figures, sketches, paintings, and cultural arts.
Facing rejections from many studios, to which he applied to with many of his sketches, he diverted his interest and understanding from gallery spaces to the street, where there was a need to explore and understand alternative art spaces. His involvement in Artlab has given him his own outlet, a place to explore art in a more mainstream manner.
Maharjan pursued his bachelor's degree in art from Kathmandu University and was enrolled in a master's degree in Nepal Bhasa in Patan campus to study the wall writings and scriptures written on the wall. He believes that street art is always taken as a form of vandalism, which, although is partly true, people should also understand that it is a form of rebellion, going against the status quo and giving individuals as well as the general audience an accessible space to consume art and discuss issues together. As someone deeply connected to the richness of the valley’s history and roots, the artist finds it important to inculcate in art’s freedom of expression. The dynamism and vibrancy of graffiti is what enables him to work with this medium in an interesting and skillful way, often representing ideas and themes from a humanitarian perspective. He enjoys being able to use the bountiful spaces beyond a squared canvas, exploring his ability beyond the identity crisis he struggled with when younger. His graffiti makes him more visible, allowing him to leave behind marks, tags, and stickers as his footprints, footprints set as his artistic visions.
His symbolic use of stones is representative of the fights among the communities and society during Jatras and festivals and the risks involved, with many people getting smashed and hurt by it. He advocates for ethics and a humane lifestyle, redefining the socio-cultural contexts of his close vicinity. The '60s and its socio-political representation of the art during that time is an important aspect of the exhibition, to which it very much resonates. His works focus on the new change in society, how artists are getting recognized, and how parallels in the meaning of the art from international art scenes are being drawn. He explores multi-faceted forms of art and the way they can be represented now, often dealing with issues related to the impacts of environmental issues. Connecting to his roots -Mangalbazaar, to which he finds himself very much attached, Maharjan explores the topic of human mindset and perspective. Krodh (anger) is a recurring theme portrayed in his works.
L A I N S I N G H B A N G D E L
Painter/ Writer
Lain Singh Bangdel was born in 1919 near Darjeeling, where he grew up developing a close affinity with arts and crafts from a very young age and drawing images of gods and goddesses all over the walls of his home. He was impressed as a young child, with the paintings he saw in the house of his tree planter father’s British employer.
Bangdel joined Calcutta Arts College in 1939 where he pursued a degree in Arts and Crafts. In 1952, Bangdel enrolled at the French National Art School in Paris where he was influenced by the works of modern masters like Pablo Picasso, Monet, and Braque. The infatuation with these great masters led Bandgel to follow their path by working in impressionistic, expressionistic, and cubist styles, later establishing his career as an expressionist. Besides this, he was so attached to Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s Muna Madan that he used the epic as a theme for many of his impressionistic works.
Bangdel died in October 2002 in Lalitpur at age 83. Lain Singh Bandgel established himself not just as a painter, but also as an acclaimed writer, art historian, and passionate art teacher. His daughter Dina Bangdel carried forward his legacy until her own untimely death in 2017. Bangdel was the founder of modern and contemporary Nepali art. His authoritative and exemplary books explored the realization and preservation of Nepali culture, introducing it to the international art arena.
After having painted object-based works and everyday life in Bengal, including Kolkata’s impoverished suburbs as he lived there pursuing his arts and crafts degree, Bangdel shifted his style to abstraction, forging new Western art styles in the otherwise conventional Nepali art scene that focused on tradition. Influenced especially by the exposure he got to numerous impressionist and post-impressionist paintings during formidable years of professional painting in Paris during the 1960s, Bangdel sought to emphasize the ''secular art by painting country people in their everyday lives with quiet dignity, and his distinctive landscape, immense majestic mountains, and terraced field, simple peasant huts and country temples'' (Neubauer, Forward). Yet he painted these local images in “an international style- a special blend of Western technique learned in London, Paris, and America, and Indian traditional drawings and religious representations' (Neuwauer, forward).
Creating a chiaroscuro of light and dark, life and death, hope and failure, Bangdel painted, in uniquely metaphorical ways. For instance, he has abstract recollections of his childhood memories of growing up in his hometown, Darjeeling. His canvases are filled with colorful geometrical elements that resonate with the densely-packed urban houses and civilizations, wherein the artist roamed around the alleys, gazed at how leaves changed colors with changing seasons, and embraced the cool summer breeze. In such an ethereal imagining of Bangdel’s homeland, aspects of romantic nostalgia are visually apparent. He blurred the distinction between labels like ancient and modern, or foreign and Nepali, with a shift of the point of view to the then contemporary domain. Bangdel’s paintings depict the artist’s pioneering pursuit of abstraction that would help define a modern Nepal.
Much of his imagery is derived from nature and is interpreted and rendered through the artist's perception and imagination. His style is marked by its distinctiveness- it expresses both his familiarity with the trends of modern art and neglects his inspirations that are rooted in his native soil. It shows the structuralism of the influence of Western art and Nepali artist's assimilation of Western influence. He conveyed the nostalgia he then felt through the vibrant use of colors that fill each shape in his paintings with hues that are gradient and expressive, suggestive of the contemplative memories of his culturally rich hometown and many of the artistically lively ambiances of his residences, which were all deeply rooted in his subconscious. His works are never deprived of the character of his native homeland, and yet his style recalls the full vision of modern art.
The artist projected the mood in the expressive use of colors. The dominance of warmer colors like pink, ash, red, cream, etc reflected his dissatisfaction with the growth of unhealthy and derogatory behaviors that are being practiced in the name of modernization in the world. This dominance of warmer colors in Bangdel's paintings eventually became Bangdel’s second established choice of color palette
were termed as the “ROSE PERIOD”. The Rose Period came after the huge creation of blue paintings inspired by Piccasso’s “The Blue Period” which also reflected deep human grief and turmoil. Consequently, it shows Bangdel's interest in using different colors, mediums, and themes, however concording between balanced color and composition, a harmony incited by the beginning of the second innings of his life– art abstraction that was personal and expressive for him.
However, on the other hand, the Picasso-like cubist styles of distorted geometrical shapes render a feeling of dominance, which is striking at first, but is balanced by the artist’s harmoniously painted background that mimics the textures of a pale pastel color. This cubist style seen in his paintings suggests a certain remorse towards his family and life situation as a child growing up in Darjeeling, as he said, “ At that time it felt like I was only wasting my time…”. But as a matter of fact, that idle countryside civilization is what has faded away, suggested by Bangdel’s frequent adaptation of themes of modern societies and the use of smudgy techniques on the backdrop to suggest the disappearing pasturelands found in the then Darjeeling, the nature that Bangdel adored and enjoyed watching at as a child. The bold line, heavy texture, and the hues he used hence, suggest the anger, dislike, and mockery against the so-called modern world where confusion, chaos, complexity, distrust, etc. are ubiquitous. Bangdel has meticulously portrayed these tensions of contemporary times with the method of expressionistic technique.
Realizing his own feelings toward his native land, Nepal during his stay at Calcutta, where there was a growing consciousness of nationalism and self-identity among the young writers and artists after the independence of India from British rule, in India, he attempted to keep the memory of his ancestral home alive through such depictions of his homeland. He thus created a large collection of homage he paid to his land and its people. Bangdel is hence, considered as one of the most celebrated modern Nepali artists for his contribution to depicting contemporary Nepali notions, wherein his works remain as a legendary exposé of his inner romanticism and nostalgia.
REFERENCES
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Self and Tradition: A Case of Influence; MA Thesis by Narayan Bahadur Gurung
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Abrams, M.H.. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Bangalore: Prism Books, 1993
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Lain Singh Bangel’s legacy lives on: The Nepali Times
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Lain Singh Bangdel; Moon Over Kathmandu, Yeh Art Gallery, 2022
M A H I M A S I N G H
Visual Artist
Mahima Singh is a Kathmandu-based interdisciplinary performance and installation artist, who, through her breathtakingly splendid and evocative installations, demands social and human participation. Singh pursued her formal art study in 2000 at Tribhuvan University, Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. Mahima holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the Korean National University of Art, South Korea, and a BFA from Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu Nepal. She is teaching installation and performance art to the students at the Central Department of Tribhuvan University. She is also the program coordinator and program designer for the Mobile Library with the Siddhartha Art Foundation. She is the co-founder of Bikalpa Art Center, a lecturer at Tribhuvan University, MFA, New Media Program, and currently a Program Coordinator at Mobile Library Nepal in collaboration with Asia Art Archive and Siddhartha Art Foundation.
Born in 1984 in Kathmandu in a Newa family. She started with paintings and sketches, like everybody else, the young her would just copy the artworks from school books and “Meena '' cartoons. Very early, she started participating in school,inter-school level competitions, and eventually at national-level competitions.
There were long hours of power outages due to load-shedding at that time. So when there was no light they would go play outside. She remembers that there was no constant supply of running water in the taps, so people would go miles away from their homes to fetch it. She grew up in a joint family with a grandmother, aunts, uncles, parents, and her siblings (two sisters and a brother) all living together. The females around her were all housewives while her father was in NRB, her uncle was a football player, and her brother was a photographer.
Growing up, the siblings went to the same school so she never saw discrimination in terms of opportunities. Yet, unlike her brother, she would be restricted when wanting to travel with her friends. At home and in the neighborhood, she saw cases of domestic violence, and it almost felt normal to her; to see women being beaten by men.
This was not normalized and it felt like it was part of the social norms of the country. But even then as a child, she would question, “Until when ?”, at home, she stepped in and stopped it when she was in 9th grade. This element of feminism and women empowerment is often seen in her evocative artworks, which often become a voice for advocacy and activism against such problematic societal norms, related to women and discrimination.
In one of her installation works, Singh draws inspiration from the Newa culture of bara tyegu (bel bibaha), where adolescent girl children have to go through a coming-of-age ceremony. During this, the girl child spends 12 days in a closed dark room, after her first menstruation, away from male family members, where relatives would visit her and the girl would spend her days in the room, playing and understanding the aspects of growing up.
Singh’s artwork is a representation of the room that has stone pebbles and kon, a natural skin cleanser, barah khya (a cotton doll representing a demon). After 12 days, the doll is washed away and then she looks at the sun for the first time.
As per the changing times, she has recreated a room where males and females would participate in the process, feel the experience of being in the room, and then there is a place where people can make the dolls and wash them away and then gaze upon the artificial sun in the reflection of water, like the custom. Her art, which is experiential and process-based more than form-based, develops throughout time, giving an understanding of how the practice has changed today and what it was before.
Similarly, influenced by the speech of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and his words about life, which state that life is like a sky and it is clear, yet messy and the clouds are our desires and wants. Singh’s question is if life is beautiful, as per Rinpoche's words, how can people take their desires out of their lives? He has suggested a form of meditation and gaining knowledge on how we can attain that peace. Her interactive performance piece features a mandala with five colors, representative of five feelings. It is a participatory art where she invites people to come and write their feelings and collect them on the mandala as well as tape their desires onto her. People have to realize that those desires are an unwanted mess and that people have to clear and filter all that and have a clean image, which is possible with meditation and music.
Drawing parallels with her recently achieved degree in Applied Buddhism and its application in art with her dissertation “Towards Inner Peace through art practice” (2021) Singh reflects on her learnings from Buddhism, including its philosophies and perception of life in her artworks. Through the mandala, an elemental icon in Buddhism to represent life and the Universe, the artist blends the traditional very accurately, touching sentiments of human lives relevant mostly to the ethos of modern life.
M A N I S H L A L S H R E S T H A
Visual Artist
Manish Lal Shrestha is a visual artist who works in the multidisciplinary genres of art including videos, installations, performances, and interactive and community art. In life, he believes that it is our experiences and thought processes that make us and they evolve based on society as well as our surroundings. We draw in experience and taste in our lives from our emotional attachment and our cultural and historical backgrounds. All those experiences are filtered within us.
Born on November 12, 1977, on the day of Bhai Tika, he is the third child of the family with 2 elder sisters (who are in the US now). The very next day, veteran artist Batsa Gopal Vaidya (his god uncle) and his friends came to visit him and her mother in the hospital. There he expressed that he wanted to send the child to Sir JJ School of Arts. In his childhood, he periodically took classes during winter vacations from Sirjana Academy. As a child without a studious mindset, he was never really focused on his academics for the most part, which all changed around grade nine while studying at a well-renowned school like LA, Jawlakhel when he felt the pressure to study well, later even passing his exams with flying colors clearing his SLC with distinction in 1993. Growing up in a supportive background with his mother, who, although grew up in a huge struggle herself to become independent and a provider for her younger siblings. Shrestha’smother is also an activist in girl education and women empowerment. was a double master's degree holder and a culturally and socially very active person. Her son was greatly encouraged to pursue arts. His father, who was also involved in arts had high hopes for Manish’s endeavors along with Manish’s grandmother as well, who was proud of Manish to be studying at Sir JJ School of Arts. Shrestha’s father was a constable during Mahendra’s time. He had exposure to many government agencies and was close to the royal family. He left the job after 17 years and worked as an assistant in Nepal Insurance Company. Art, however, is highly appreciated in Shrestha’s life, with no restrictions whatsoever to make it his main area of focus.
Shrestha grew up in Patan, near the Durbar Square area, which, earlier was still more green and full of forest with a clear flowing river Shrestha highly enjoyed his residential vicinity and grew up playing football and marbles in the Durbar area without the knowledge of it being world heritage site. As someone with an attitude towards life that brims with positivity and a joyous outlook, Shrestha tries to inculcate positivity and the beauty of life in his artworks. Yet he observes life to have many layers with many positives and negatives, many events of sadness and happiness that are inseparable, almost like two sides of the same coin. He often bases his perception of life around this idea with feelings framed and experienced based on people’s lives and happenings around them.
His initiative is Galley MCube set up in Chakupat. The gallery is an alternative art space that promotes young and new artists and their projects. It runs artist residencies and promotes art from all walks of life. He is a maestro of conceptual art and believes a good concept results in good art. With a deep affinity towards Nepali culture, its iconic culture, he often incorporates elements of our tradition and culture like golden bells- he even identifies him as an artist who paints bells– “The Bell Man”.With video works, installations, performances, and interactive pieces, he built his art around a close-knit art community, with his main focus on fabric mediums. Renowned specifically for his 2004 massive 30 installation art of stitched fabric in Bhaktapur Durbar Square, Shrestha has received huge applause and recognition from everywhere else, his artworks being a metaphorical tapestry to connect people, communities, and values. He uses bells as a vibrant metaphor for life, a rich expression of heartbeats, an ethereal sense of how divine sound energies radiate live-giving energies. He highlights the importance of such bells in Durbar Squares, showing their significance in representing spiritual and religious awareness, almost as a way of cleansing the aura and spreading positive energy throughout its vicinity, much as his art helps to do.
He installs video projections in a minimalist approach, depicting huge cups juxtaposed against bright golden bells, which are reminiscent of the cultural roots. It is a social satire on the behaviors of people with how they clean their own space yet pollute others. It brings direct attention to the value of our heritage sites, which are such an invaluable part of our history and culture, which have been rapidly neglected due to expeditious globalization and gentrification.
In the exhibition, he is sharing space with Vaidya sir, for which he is privileged and feels that these artworks collectively connect to his roots, yet juxtapose the artworks and the developments of societal scenarios, showing the contrast between the art worlds of two different time frames, and simultaneously emphasizing on the need to grow our Nepali art scene and the need to transform it to a global scale.
M A N U J B A B U M I S H R A
Painter
Manuj Babu Mishra was born in August 1936 A.D. In 1963, Mishra moved to Dhaka where he subsequently spent five years completing a Bachelor’s degree in fine arts. Although he had a close interest and affinity with painting from a very young age, it was during that time when young Mishra honed his characteristic style and approach to painting that would ultimately bring him great renown. Mishra got his degree in Master of Arts, majoring in Ancient History and Culture, from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. In his professional career, Mishra had been associated with various national and international organizations, worked as a senior graphic designer, and as a Fine Arts lecturer at Tribhuvan University.
In his paintings, Manuj Babu Mishra keeps the figurality of his subjects outside the surreal modus operandi. Trisuls, horns, and rockets were prominent motifs in Mishra’s work which were often surreal and symbolic. Generally, trisuls (tridents) represented divine power, the injunction of horns on some of his characters was seen as symbols of natural ferocity and violence, and rockets, ever so often in the background, were there to mark the advent of modern technology and the profound changes taking place in its wake. Thus, a massive array of artworks painted in this genre could be seen as a symbolic protest against the global dominance of Western civilization; almost like a rebellious movement, he set with the aid of visual arts, expressing a sense of distaste towards conformity and the ethos of the modern era.
Noted for his distinct approach to art, blending the elements of surrealism and symbolism, evident most prominently in his famous Monalisa series, Manuj Babu Mishra enjoyed working in his seclusion, in a place called hermitage in Bouddha, which carried a universe of his own imagination- the vision of apocalypses, which dominates his works. He lived a self-sufficient lifestyle, valuing expression over aesthetics. And so his living spaces were crammed with books and painting equipment, most of which he made himself. He painted forms that are visibly distorted, contorted, and stylized to show his distinct style that clearly foregrounds the picture of the modern era, or of modernism, but is allusionary to contemporary contexts and meanings.
The scary figurative, where human heads are pierced by jets including his own, pythons rising to the sky, and the domination of blue and green, as well as dark, ironically represent a calm acquired after a catharsis; there is a deeper connection between these symbols prompts in the viewer as they beckon one to muse at their profound meanings, celebrating at the same time, their effects on the subconscious.
Mishra had 12 solo shows to his name, with his first exhibition opening in 1967 A.D. in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He had since exhibited internationally in Germany, India, and Denmark, and prolifically in Nepal. In addition to his work as a visual artist, the veteran artist and litterateur published numerous books on art, politics, and history. Mishra's artistic work played a major role in the development of Nepali Modernism. He passed away at the age of 83 due to a heart attack.
His religious satires overtly depict, with motifs of fear and threat, distorted images such as the elongation of human forms to exaggerate politics and society. He is drawn by the style of Picasso’s figurative paintings that depict human misery. “By using blue and green, he creates the intense effect of human misery. Such paintings look almost monochromatic when he uses one color predominantly.”
N A M R A T A S I N G H
Painter
Born in Gorahanna of Mahottari in 1989, Namrata Singh pursued her education in Kathmandu and is well adapted to the Kathmandu-based culture although her artwork vividly depicts sacred symbolism, vibrant colors, and traditional figures allusions to rural Mithila, Where her origin is rooted. Recollecting the fondest of her childhood memories of Mahottari in the eastern Terai region of Nepal, where the artist, Namrata Singh grew up, she paints impressions of traditional Mithila art and culture (Nepalese folk art) using vibrant colors, many sacred Mithila symbols, and anecdotic depictions of Mithila women. Her paintings are brimmed with positivity and optimism, hope and luck, and nature and purity as she fuses the relics of ancient Mithila style with elements of modern art, showcasing life as a whole.
Singh showcases the happiness of life by self-using Mithila Art-inspired motifs like; men, women, lotus, and swans among many others. Meanwhile, she does not hide away from life’s reality where hardship, struggle, and sadness are inevitable. In the midst of vibrant blue, green, red, and pink hues that contrast brightly, Singh cleverly depicts the gloomy side profile of human faces by painting them black to convey sadness. Using acrylic on canvas to create beautiful figures of women, the artist accentuates feminine beauty by using traditional elements, representative of Nepali females- red bindis, red lipstick, and red bangles that show motifs of traditional Mithila and traditional Nepali societies as a symbolic way of spreading compassion and blessing.
Being the first one in her entire family to choose arts as a career, Namrata recollects memories of having to justify her choice to her family and relatives. Her will to take a stance on her choice despite the social constraints is suggestive of strong willpower to promote women’s self-dependence within the context of conservative and patriotic Nepali society, where traditionalist attitude towards women choosing art as a feasible career pertains.
This sense of women's empowerment portrayed in her painting, but in a subtle way, however, doesn’t resemble toxic femininity as she doesn't fight with gender issues, nor does she sabotage others while advocating for her personal worth and women’s societal status.
Instead, all that she does is simply embrace stories and the existence of Nepali women’s demography, while painting their life experiences under the themes of happiness, sadness, and love. So her paintings can be seen as an ongoing quest for exploring humans’ undying wishes and desires. She suggests that it depends on oneself or one’s attitude about what to embrace in life—happiness or sadness, and it is only a matter of choice. And the result is an array of exuberant paintings that bloom with deep emotions, prosperity, and positivity.
She uses Mithila elements as her motif and her mode of expression which is, directly and indirectly, an impression of her early childhood experiences. Her art is a reflection of her observation. She believes it is our experiences that change our thoughts and outlooks on any situation and life. In retrospect, she feels, that where her early observations were raw they are today much more conscious, constructive, and mature. Her regular themes now are motherhood, family, love, and compassion. She uses the elements from Mithila art like birds and animals that are culturally used as symbols of fertility and good luck.
As an artist and a female, she uses her art to express her emotions, portraying daily life and surroundings through a woman as her protagonist. They have been more about female emotions, both positive and negative. It draws that change in thoughts and shows how the emotions of the protagonist take shape, in subtle nuances.
She has chosen ‘traveler’ as her theme for her art. She uses boats as her medium and a tool for women to travel and reach new destinations. Though different women have different experiences, her use of the boat shows that they are traveling together in the same context of life (in the same boat of life) and will reach their respective destinations.
N E H A H I R A C H A N
Painter
Neha Hirachan is a Post Graduate in South Asian Studies. She’s been working with Film Foundry, as a part of the team, for over a year now. Originally an entrepreneur; Hirachan has administered a restaurant business. Besides, she is the CCO (Chief Content Officer) at Shutter Corp Films. Mainly, a part of a socio-political interview podcast called Audio Bites.
Hirachan’s interest in the field of visual art evolved as her work progressed with the collective, Film Foundry. Thereafter, acknowledging her association with the collective that primarily works with Film Photography, she is exploring the visual as well as the pedagogical aspects of the medium.
For this exhibition, overlapping photographed images on layers of paper, Neha Hirachan creates an intricate mesh of black and white compositions that are geometric and abstract. In her delicate formation of collages, she depicts everyday objects in geometrically impressionistic ways, almost as an intriguing juxtaposition of shapes– triangles set against circles and heavy textures against softer strokes, suggesting a delicate balance that the entire world surrounding us is set. The cubist style evoked by the shredded or cut-out paper pieces amplifies the abstraction that the artist is trying to portray, giving it a feel as if different photographed worlds exist within the same plane, and creating illusion in great depth as a new singular reality is perceived objectively. The collage fragments align within their own spaces and repurpose objects around to contextualize such multiple realities. They conceptualize a phenomenon or a piece of object by fleshing out their different facets in order to get a nuanced understanding of it, and in return, understand the world from a unique and different vantage point.
P R A B O D S H R E S T H A
Visual Artist
Prabod Shrestha was born in 1966 in Baglung in a typical Newa family and moved to his Tnamaghar', Kathmandu, at the age of two. Since his father was a civil servant, Prabod moved countless times and lived in different parts of the country. In 1975 his family moved back to Kathmandu, and he has lived here since. This is where he spent his teenage years and where he discovered Freak Street as a place to learn to break boundaries and to be a 'true hippie'. “On Freak Street my mind expanded. Here I learned to be an individual,” says the artist,
The works of Shrestha have that slight touch and feel of the psychedelic album covers of the 60s from bands such as Cream. In fact, in the mid-70s during the aftermath of the hippie era in Kathmandu, Shrestha as a youngster was introduced to the ‘rock n roll’ scene out in the sprawling alleys of Freak Street. He even played in the band ‘Cream Roll’. Because his parents belonged to these different cities, he always saw many cultural conflicts within the family. But the same conflict also provided him with unique opportunities with space to explore more and create his own heritage. He found spaces to grow and find an identity that he was comfortable with.
During his 'hippie days, he frequented Freak Street with friends, played guitar in a band called Cream Roll, and traveled to India, South East Asia, and different parts of Nepal. He worked at Lincoln School as a teacher assistant, and later with different advertising agencies. He was involved in Youth Vox.
In 2005, he also did his first feature film. It was the time when the phones started having cameras so he was fascinated by it and then started taking pictures everywhere and even experimented with the visual elements. Further, he came across screen printing and visual making skills and then that opened an array of possibilities for him and he started experimenting more and growing in his overall artistic journey. As an artist, Shrestha is also known for his video editing and copper jewelry called 'Zigi Expression'.
From 2008 onwards he ran a restaurant at Pokhara's gallery in Kupondole, showcasing the work of Nepali artist Jimmy copper jewelry designs. Since 2015 Prabod has returned to his old graphic art and is involved in documenting the memories and images of hippie personalities from the golden days of Freak Street.
Creatively, he has always found himself to be musically inclined. He considers himself as a reticent person, keen on observing the world go by rather than being a part of the action. In his process to create art, he taps into the same mind of a child who is inquisitive in nature and greatly observes the world go by. As a result, his thoughts would be filled with psychedelic imaginations of abstract thoughts that would induce a sense of trance in him.
As his subject, he plays with abstract forms of art but he makes sure that they represent reality and life as it is. After getting a camera in his hands, he would wander the city for hours, sitting in silence and observing people and life flit by. He says people choose life and make different choices but they have simple innocent dreams.
Kathmandu has been his prominent subject. The more time he spends on the streets, the street life fascinates him more and the more he feels connected to his childhood. He visits tea shops and cafes as well as different markets to see the contrast of life in Kathmandu. Even in the crowd, he is like the silent observer and he searches for the child-like expressions and elements in people rushing through life. He is on a constant quest to find the connection between people who can be seen together.
His fascination with the dynamism of the outside environment and its bountiful societal experiences pushes him to go beyond stagnant ideas, opening up his vision for more experimentative works that help him explore his continual fascination with life.
In his work, he uses colors like pink, and blue often contrasted against a motion-blurred black and white, through which is chaotic and he shows that with his colors using interference patterns and vibrations. All of his photographs have a story behind it where characters and their stories are portrayed together as one. Shrestha's pop-art silkscreen prints are illustrated within a sound installation show. The material displays the lifestyle of modern Kathmandu, often juxtaposing the old and the new. It includes rickshaws and motorbikes, temples and ultra-modern buildings, ancient statues, and modern graffiti. When Prabod lost his gallery during the earthquake in 2015, he started walking. He used to wander the streets of Kathmandu every day. It was a way to work through the trauma, but also to reconnect with his childhood.
All of us who live in Kathmandu and at times struggle with its development connect to Prabod's work. “Despite the overwhelming changes I still recognize the old city that shaped me when I grew up. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by the pollution and urbanization of Kathmandu but sooner or later we reconnect with its core and its vibrancy,” says Prabodh, whose experiences of post-earthquake wanderings enable him to render the world’s flitting realities. He plays with different graphic styles to portray this constant state of flux, but ultimately it is about him connecting and inculcating the characteristics of the city and its people into his works that make them so timeless and vibrant.
P R A K A S H R A N J I T
Illustrator- Visual Artist
Prakash Ranjit is a visual artist and illustrator who explores people’s experiences and likes to signify the insignificant musings that are embedded in people’s day-to-day lives. He uses life in metaphorical terms where the act can be confronted by the common happenings and transforms this into something unique making the act of life a place of beauty. He believes in the power of art to convey an idea, message, and story to the masses in a multitude of layers as one indulges more into the depths of the work.
The artist renders his reflections or imaginings of real-life events in unique, some colorful while others monochromatic black and white illustrations as a visual journal. Creating these playful and pleasing depictions and illustrations is his attempt to understand the state of mind and various factors influencing our mind and ultimately our body and soul. They are a reflection of his search for an awareness of the mind, a medium through which his artwork becomes a journey, a journey that leads me from one idea to another but all connected to various questions that arise within.
The journey to documenting his everyday life started when he decided to draw illustrations to combat his mental health issues. When the artist was diagnosed with various mental health disorders—such as anxiety, and depression—his therapist recommended that he keep a journal. “But instead of writing about my feelings and emotions, I used my drawings,” he says. With a vibrant mix and match of everyday people, objects, and sometimes hyperbolic characters, Ranjit portrays hysterical and comical narratives of life situations in a range of different situations and environments– each with their unique stories to tell, or motifs to speak.
In one of his artworks, he portrays his conversation with a cobbler. It is a simple yet poignant depiction of an everyday conversation between two strangers, and how it can leave an unexpected but lasting impact. The artist often plays with the size and immensity of his characters, either enlarging or diminishing them into other-worldly sizes to bring a sense of fantasy in otherwise ordinary reality and ordinary lives of people.
While establishing an idea, he starts researching on the things related to that idea, how society has dealt with this idea, where has it been utilized, and how it has or could affect the society, the individual, and the artist himself, allowing him to see the situation in a different perspective, and eventually connecting the visual with the idea through his imagination of the elements that signify his search. As he progresses, his imaginations lead him to a series of images and elements that he chose for expressing and sharing his idea– as a result, rendering a world that brims with which in fact turns out to be a world made of these elements and I try to grasp these images and sceneries or events.
R A M M A H A R J A N
Visual Artist
Born in a middle-class family in the year 2040 at Kalimati of Kathmandu, Ram Maharjan has four siblings. His father, who had studied only till 3rd grade and had a great struggle to maintain a decent livelihood and educate his children; passed away prematurely due to kidney failure. However, Ram had ample exposure to the cultural and traditional ambiance of the city. Her mother, although 62 years old, finds herself to be financially strong-minded and capable of management in all terms. His brother works as a graphic designer and is the provider for the family.
Maharjan is a recent graduate of Tribhuvan University, Fine Art. He is more interested in working in a community and actively participating in civic engagement, all of which help him explore his creativity in new forms with multidisciplinary aspects of the socio-political domains. He participated in an artists' residency at Bikalpa Art Center, where he collaborated with another participating artist Ritesh Maharjan on a video installation and three-dimensional installations.
Hailing from a Newa family, he studied in a Newa school and was surrounded by the Newa language and culture as well as norms. Outside school, for him, cultural schooling at home was more prominent during his childhood. He completed his schooling at Rising Star School in Tahachal, whereas he did his 11/12 first at Prasadi Academy in commerce. He later studied at People’s Campus yet he did not see any result or direction for his career. In 2006, he decided to study fine art in Lalit Kala after his cousin-brother recommended him to the college. This marked the start of his journey that turned him into an artist today.
Taking inspiration from the celebration of events, festivals, and festivities, with which he grew up being so closely intertwined, the artist bases his artworks on the ambient feelings of past experiences, in particular the cultural events he cherished as a child, inviting the viewer into the surroundings of a physical event transcribed into paper through abstraction. Maharjan’s canvases are splashed with a range of colors, which he uses to build shapes and lines upon detailed, yet allusive depictions of such events, through which he seeks to create an awareness of the importance of such cultural functions in the context of modern societies.
The sense in his paintings is highly impressionistic, with whatsoever not a single representation of any definite form or shape. He does this to rather than rather than being depictions of one such event, his paintings become an invitation to be in it, experience it, and feel its surroundings rather than just seeing it as a pictorial representation.
His use of strong strokes of earthen colors and lines, copper reds, suggestive of raato mato, and greens, suggestive of nature and vitality, he alludes directly to the elements of nature, and this composition, further contrasted by dark purples and jet blacks to suggest mystery and death, Maharjan metaphors the significance of the functions depicted in his paintings- like Gai Jatra for the deceased, Gathemuga for eradicating evil from society. The interplay of colors, thus, forms these codes to the meanings behind each festival and their impact on how we view communities and families.
His performance art has the same influences infused strongly with social and mythical references. Yet the representations are different. Clad in a cultural dress with a headgear that compliments his performance, Maharjan does the storytelling of gathemuga and all the internationalization of his thoughts on how one takes evil/ negative feelings out of their minds, narrating a very visceral experience of unique festivals as such.
His works are retrospective, based on feeling and experience more than visuals, and it is evocative, in that his manipulation of colors and lines in painting, and expression and presence in performance are highly dynamic and vigorous.
R A M A N A N D A J O S H I (R N J O S H I)
Painter
Popularly known as a landscape artist for his highly detailed and meticulously painted oil paintings, the late RN Joshi was a Nepali art aficionado and a pioneering force in Nepali art, whose vision oversaw the birth of Nepali modernism and whose talents defined an entire epoch. He was born near the Patan Durbar Square in Kwalakhu Tole, Patan. He was the eldest son of a prominent Newar astrologer. He did his SLC and college in Kathmandu and went to India for further studies (1959-1964). He got involved in Lalit Kala College but he felt now that the art education was not up to the standard. He could not implement his learnings in that set-up.
He was the recipient of an Indian Government Cultural Scholarship in 1959 and studied art at the J. J. School of Art. During his studies, he traveled widely through India and began exploring the possibilities of outdoor painting. In 1964 he returned to Nepal and held his first exhibition.
After 1964, he was inspired by Picasso. His artworks would be based heavily on his emotions. He started doing landscapes and even is considered to be the person who introduced landscape art in Nepal. The trend was well-established in the 1970s and 1980s.
He started evening art classes in the year 1969 for students while teaching in the College with mural artists like Kiran Manandhar being one of his early students. This was later turned into the Park Gallery and now the RN Joshi Museum. The main period of Joshi’s life and art are presented in both his own words and hands. In his art style, one can find influences from the Malla-era architecture, his surroundings as well as traditions and culture. In Early Paintings (1963-1970), the reader is treated to his experimentations with modernist art forms, reflecting cubist and other Western art fashions that he later put aside in favor of a more naturalistic style. In order to explore the Nepali people, places, art, culture, and resources and the prospect of abstract paintings fostering in the Nepali art scene, he traveled across the country with a long-term vision to document it all through his landscape art.
His figurative paintings are of common Nepalese people going about their daily business. Each is set against a blank white background which makes them especially compelling. This series has been very popular, especially among expatriates. He also went to Japan for art residency and he mainly did Mandala-themed paintings and Fresco art paintings. Apart from his art, he was also actively involved in cultural heritage preservation as a social activist. He was in fact very prominent in the preservation of temples in the valley and in the Bagmati cleanup campaign. One of the more famous art series was ‘My Land and People’.
RN Joshi died of a heart attack at the age of 88 while his son Navin, just 16, was in India for his studies. It was after his death that Navin started studying the artworks, documents, and archives of his after learning them. Yet he feels that he lost many years in between. Seeing his father’s paintings hung all around the house. And that is when he realized that he needed to preserve all of them. Yet he did not know how to do so.
In 1993 he returned to Kathmandu and he published the book “R.N. Joshi, Widening the Horizon of Nepalese Art” in 2006. He worked to build a museum in his name that would include all the artworks, manuscripts, and things he used. And hence, the RN Joshi Museum came into existence in the old house of the veteran artist. There are two rooms in the studio that are being turned into a museum. The museum will include all his artworks, from tantric art to now, spanning from the time of the 1980s to the present.
Going through his documents today, it was found that Mr. Joshi would paint landscapes from his roof. Another of his artworks included heavy tantric influences. By drawing and sketching, he brewed his own art style.
RN Joshi Museum is collaborating with the exhibition for the opportunity to showcase the diversity of work–from the senior most artists to the new generation–how the Nepali art scene has evolved through time and how Collaborative efforts like this can push the Nepali art scene in the right direction that individual efforts alone might take years. He is hopeful that the exhibition will be helpful in creating an art ecosystem in Nepal and promoting artists and galleries alike.
Taking together the eastern philosophies of Nepal and the roots of Nepal, the colorful array of works depicted at RN (Rama Nanda ) Joshi Museum reflects the in-depth history and development of Nepali art and culture. A new understanding of his founding artist’s heritage is explored, wherein not only is a renewed vitality to his artistic endeavors lenient but his style of expression is vividly transformed. The culmination of this transformation was the series of paintings, in 1980, based on Tantric motifs, which are infused with a deep knowledge of Tantra and its symbolism, and accentuated with the importance of spiritualism in a world that was becoming ever more materialistic.
“These symbolic forms of Art to me are so appealing and inspiring that seek to draw a more and more clear picture of secret values of human life in the real sense. Most of my work presented in the Exhibition is based on the very philosophy of the Nepalese Cult in general inspired by not only the aesthetic values of the symbols, for several years. So, I have tried without breaking the basic philosophy, reshaping and remolding them to express my feelings in Psychic truth with possible purity in color, simple form, medium and different style suitable to the subject theme in the present context.” – RN Joshi
Artist Joshi, highly enthusiastic and spirited, wanted to search in some adventurous way, the essence of Nepal, and he traveled to remote hilly, and untouched areas of the country. He worked under the open sky in the rain and hot sun and had his own sweet and sour experiences but returned with paintings reflecting upon Nepalese life. In his classical watercolor paintings, he depicted the country’s diverse geographical patterns, the picturesque and the harmony of mountains and the lush green vegetation with varieties of flora that with their alluring beauty of nature, attract the lovers of nature, and landscapes like Joshi himself, who through his unmatched artistic skills, was able to build a collection so immense and exquisite.
R U P E S H M A N S I N G H
Photographer
Rupesh is a fine arts graduate from the Kathmandu University, School of Arts, Department of Arts and Design (2019). His work emphasizes family relations, archiving family history, and the idea of its memorialization. Through old black-and-white prints of his family, he finds wider connections to various aspects of our society. Inspired by those images, he teaches himself the methods of film for his photography, making it the prominent medium of art expression while working along with other archival materials.
Through his surrealist emulsion prints, Rupesh Man Singh connects the dots of the past, present, and future, interplaying with the dynamics of family bonding, relationships, and memories and forming a line of conversation to acknowledge the interpersonal depictions of different past and present subconscious personas. He depicts the adventures, triumphs, failures, and stories of a distant past, his family surroundings, rendered through archived photographs and piecing together intriguing still frames that dissect, yet integrate and form memories and recollections altogether. His work is about questioning the role of the family in defining personal identity; how one perceives memories and archives and what can be their significance on both personal and a wider prospect.
Singh deals with a very personal theme in his work, featuring photos of grayscale aesthetics, presenting people, his grandfather among many others, from a distant, third-person view, signifying a sense of estrangement and disconnectedness he feels towards these memories and towards the loss of his grandfather. After losing his Alzheimer 's-affected grandfather, the artist feels remorse when he goes back to these images, thus, using them as a catharsis to render his deep feeling of loss. Because he has only faint memories of his grandfather, which are also evoked by the monochromatic colors that emulate the feel of ancient archived photographs, in part because he didn’t live together, the artist grieves at the inadequate amount of time he spent with his grandfather. Portions of the images are scraped, suggesting how one treats memories, consciously, and unconsciously, how we rely on our memory to remember things, yet are able to get only faint intimations of history. “It was only halfway through the conversation that I realized he did not recognize me,” says Rupesh. “But as we continued with our chatting he said looking out of the window, “ I could see deers here before, I don’t know where they’ve gone now.”, the artist remembers his grandfather’s words.
R O M E L B H A T T A R A I
Street Artist/ Art Manager
Romel Bhattarai, who has a Bachelor’s degree in commerce and specialized in entrepreneurship from Ahmadabad Institute in Bangalore, is one of the pioneers of the gallery space Artlab, which, along with a handful of other Nepali street artists, was created with a vision to build Thamel as an art district, and is currently working on the same. Meanwhile, they are continuing to screen printing and printing on apparel. Vidroh, which translates to rebellion in Nepali, is his gallery space established as an uprising, an act of rebellion to suit Artlab’s idea of sparking a positive change, that he first worked with. It is a space for urban Nepali artists who are about more than just traditional artworks. It is for contemporary artists experimenting with alternative and new media or art forms.
Spending most of his schooling days in Masoore (India) at a boarding school from the age of six till sixteen(1993-2003) Romel Bhattarai was keenly interested in extracurriculars outside the academic setting of the class. After doing his A-levels (2003-2005), his parents suggested he go to the UK for further studies. He went back to India for his Bachelor’s degree in commerce and specialized in entrepreneurship from Ahmadabad Institute in Bangalore.
Bhattarai is the type of artist who finds refuge in the process of art-making; he discovers a sense of peace within, as he simultaneously seeks to depict and abscond the chaos of the world. Always a keen advocate of street art and graffiti, the artist, along with a handful of other Nepali street artists, pioneered new styles of street art with projects like Color KTM and Prasad, which were changing the city one wall at a time.
Romel Bhatterei started printing in apparel first, this was the soft start of Artlab. His work started in 2009/10. His initial idea or vision was to repaint the walls of Kathmandu city. The walls were previously painted red with the slogans of political parties. He wanted to paint it over with graffiti of his own. It is because he believed that art could solve all the problems in society or at the very least introduce positive energy and diminish visual pollution that had taken over the city.
Street art is not new in Nepal, given that the temples and heritage sites are full of it. But people would immediately connect street art that was made out of revolutions by rebels, vandalizing the spaces, in western countries in the 1960s. Maybe for the same reason, making graffiti, for those first two years, was really hard and so was getting the idea through about the graffiti and getting into arguments. But he would explain his thoughts and intentions about how and why they want to beautify the city and give a reason for people to smile. Street art is public property. And there are issues that need to be discussed including local heroes, artists, immigrants, and migrant workers. But because of that, the art needs to be formulated through a clear thought process. He feels it is the responsibility of the artist to be mindful of the history of the place in order to enhance the socio-cultural elements. In life, he feels that we are short of resources yet taking time to create pieces, and create art exhibitions.
With Artlab, his vision is to create Thamel as an art district and is currently working on the same. Meanwhile, they are continuing to screen printing and printing on apparel. Vidroh, which translates to rebellion in Nepali, is his gallery space established as an uprising, an act of rebellion to suit the idea of the art he first worked with. It was a space for urban Nepali artists who are about more than just traditional artworks. It is for contemporary artists experimenting with alternative and new media or art forms.
As an artist, he works with a team and individually and identifies himself as a stencil artist. His subjects and themes are more serious subjects like socio-political and negative sides of society like the issues of fuel shortage. With his art, he wants to be able to spark positive thoughts. His efforts working in the artlab have brought together different artists who are experimenting with different styles including calligraphy, stencils, and graffiti which are an important part of Nepal streets and the Nepali Artscape. “Collaboration is the way to go. Only by working with people in the community that come from different backgrounds can we grow. “, he sees this exhibition collaboration as the most fruitful way to access a wider audience and make street art more mainstream in the arena of Nepali art.
The artist brings together artworks that reflect the contemporary situations of Nepal, experimenting with rusted materials and sheets that give both depth and dimension to his artworks, as well as profound meanings that help the viewer connect with the surroundings that are so mundane for them, yet at times, due to expeditious modernization and gentrification, overlooked.
S A N G E E S H R E S T H A
Painter
Born in 1978 in Lalitpur, Sangee Shrestha lives in Kathmandu. She obtained a diploma in Fine Arts from the Tribhuvan University in Kirtipur in 2004 and a Master’s in History, Culture, and Archeology from the Tribhuvan University in 2009. She also joined Lalitkala Campus where she particularly flourished, finding greater expression for her connection with art although she recalls having a profound connection with art since her childhood. She was awarded the Bhadrakumari Ghale Fine Art Award in 2014, the Special Award in Contemporary Art from the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts in 2015, and the Aranika Yuvakala Award in 2011. She has ever since been actively participating in exhibitions like In Search of Ethics, Kathmandu (2013) Printmaking Past and Present, Rapporter, Kathmandu (2015), and the Equality, Women Artists Painting Exhibition (2015) aimed at advocacy of various contemporary issues.
Shrestha received twofold education- one socially and another academically. Socially, all the norms, values, and beliefs of the family were passed down to her– influences that are highly apparent in her paintings that are so rich in traditional iconographies. Whereas, academically, she received her highest degree in art being the first person in her family to pursue art. She is empowering with how bold she is in her artistic expression. Her canvases brim with colorful hues of bright reds and yellows as she packs them densely with rich symbolism and vibrant icons of Hindu traditionalism as well as futuristic visuals of modernism. She pays attention to meticulous detail while constructing her subjects, incorporating geometric patterns, as seen in most Hindu mandalas and sacred symbolic books with arrays of symmetrical patterns that mimic the daily surroundings, adorning them with a blend of concepts of divinity, identity, and vulnerability of our inner selves.
She has already been in the career of arts for 30 years. Her process to make her artwork starts with conceptualization regardless of the medium be it painting, installation or art writing. What she believes is that art should be self-explanatory and reflect artists’ ideas so that she does not need to explain them herself. Artists should reflect the layers well enough that the people can even understand the artist herself. Having said that, she also believes that art should be free for interpretation. She is the happiest when people describe the art and that matches her concept and intentions.
Shrestha wants to depict the issues of life that are easily ignored or dismissed. She accumulates the concept of equality in society and human psychology. Her paintings break the linear surface of things with the use of geometric shapes, particularly rectangles, squares, and polygons, suggesting depth and a fourth dimension. She attempts to dig out the invisible corners of human expressions, expressing the colorful desires that every human being wants to fulfill, but cannot afford. So many uncontrolled desires make our lives coagulated and complicated.
With a cubist approach to structuring most of her paintings, Shrestha incorporates various abstract shapes and forms, but breaks the natural order of geometric shapes, implying mechanization and fragmentation of the contemporary world. The breaks and rifts also suggest the lack of integration within beings, a certain sense of void, accentuated further by bold lines that make the spaces between two objects ever more larger. The background is suffused with the composition of soft colors resembling mist, fog, ocean, blue sky, or the colors of sunset and sunrise whereas intricate nexus of geometrical shapes are projected in the foreground. The colored rectangles and the lines remind us of Piet Mondrian, and some of the color element styles also resonate with that of Mark Rothko.
Shrestha’s paintings demand time and deep contemplation from the viewers. Rather intriguing motifs are placed on the canvas, which prompts the viewer to decipher the intricate assemblage of geometric patterns and thereby reflect within themselves the essence of complicacy as well as delicacy present in all human beings. Through such small details, she gives a human touch to her works that otherwise feature only geometric mosaics and ombre colors that don’t overtly give a deeper meaning on their own. Very closely related to religious art, her paintings see Influences from neo-tantric Indian artists like GR Santosh, and Biren de, whose works are also characterized by symmetrical patterns of geometry and religious iconographies.
Her canvases thus become a storytelling of people, a reflection of hidden human emotions, and a narration of how we process them, from their derivation from the outside world through the senses to their processing within the inside.
S A R O J K U S H W A H (M A H A T O)
Visual Artist
Saroj Mahato was born in Bara (Terai region of Nepal) and moved to Kathmandu to become an artist in 1999. He started his artistic career as a visual artist/ filmmaker in 2009 and it has been 10 to 15 years since his career as a professional artist. He studied MFA (Video/ Film) from Korea National University of Arts, South Korea (2011). He is also an alumnus of the Asian Film Academy at Busan International Film Festival. He has also worked at Tribhuvan University Central Department of Fine Arts for five years (2012- 2017) as a new media lecturer. Saroj Mahato is the co-founder and director at Bikalpa Art Center (BAC) founded in 2013 and has been working at BAC since then as director/ curator. And, currently, he works at the UNESCO Kathmandu office as Cultura and Creative Industry Coordinator.
Unlike art galleries that depended too much on external funding, which limited them, he, along with his wife, Mahima Singh, also a contemporary Nepali artist, set a trend and pioneered in the art center, Having founded such a big and multidisciplinary organization, Mahato recollects having a ton of organizational responsibilities, and subsequently losing the grip on his personal life. However, he doesn't mind the gap and persistently tries to balance the personal and professional aspects of his life by richly engaging and working with a multitude of local and international artists, curating artworks, and communicating art intentions to a wide range of audiences.
He believes that Nepal always lacked proper management of artists. So he is always making great efforts to establish not just a culture of art creation and appreciation, but a thriving art market in Nepal, which is more commercial, normalized, and institutionalized. Revisiting the roots in a modern nuance is an exhibition, through which he aims to impact the value proposition of art and artists, subsequently redefining the art scene by giving a new lens of traditionalism, nuanced by modern influences and aspiration.
After all the experimentations and milestones that the Nepali art scene has seen and experienced and achieved, Mahato reassesses the original identities, cultural context social values, and identity of the societal and artistic domains and revalues how art can play a role in addressing such questions, giving a new lens and context to how we see the society.
The main narrative he aims to create through the exhibition is the promotion of the Nepali art scene in the contemporary world, giving the context and evidence of the progress since the 196os including the modern and ultra-modern practices. As an artist, he exhibits in the exhibition, a minimalist, very abstract, and contemporary work, which questions the worth or futility, and duality of objects, the identity of being, a journey he has taken with struggles from building from scratch, a life that thrives with art and passion.
Growing up in a traditional Hindu family, though not restrictive, he enjoyed every liberty to explore religious and cultural as well as social practices and was deeply affected by them as a child. Taking inspiration from his childhood recollections of drawing on mud grounds with a stick and painting bhittey chitras in his rural hometown, he brings a very individualistic approach- from perception to behavior- to represent ideas from family background and jubilance to discreetly evolved contemporary day mastery.
His installation, titled “Kharani” (ashes) is a simple, yet evocative metaphor to depict the concept of impermanence, a concept he time and again refers to as having a close association with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. The numbers 3, 6, and 9 act as a prominent aspect in his artwork, which deal with the significance of whole numbers, and entities being whole and complete within a certain dimension. With this theme, he alludes to the significance of human lives. If all that we are made of are biochemical components that one day turn into nothing but ashes and return back to the earth, what is the beginning of a life? And what is it after death?
Drawing in a vast and profound inspiration from easter philosophy and how the artist himself looks at life, he symbolizes ashes as an element that not just represents life and death, but the essence of not having one, the essence of absence and a metaphysical concept of afterlife. Yet the interpretation of life and absence is open for the viewers. Just as seen in many of his previous works that deal with similar concepts of absence, questing the treachery of images and reality; taken inspiration from French artists such as René Magritte and his popular work, “C’est ne pas un pipe” where he uses resemblance to push directly beyond what you think you know. The surrealist concept of the essence of being becomes very prominent in Mahato’s perception of life and its depiction in his artwork.
The presence of a very organic earthy element through Mahato's installation work not only associates our being directly with nature and the biochemical elements that make us physical beings. It goes beyond the physical, questioning our essence (astitva) our need to feel superior gain power and rise above all beings. The terracotta pots filled with soil and ashes act as clear symbolisms of the funeral pyre,, an abstract and quintessence allusion to existentialism and essentiality. Once again, the prominent numbers 3, 6, and 9 (his use of 3 X 3-inch cubes … 6 faces, and 9 pieces… on 3-inch platforms) represent a complete circle of life.
S H A S H I B I K R A M S H A H
Painter
Shashi Bikram Shah is a Nepali artist born in Kathmandu in 1940, and with a career spanning five decades, is regarded as one of the preeminent contemporary artists of Nepal and one of the country's first modernist painters. He was one of the prominent members of SKIB, the first modern art collective in Nepal established in 1971 A.D. along with other prominent modern Nepali artists like Indra Pradhan, Krishna Manandhar, and Batsa Gopal Vaidya. He is the former campus chief of the Fine Art Campus and Sirjana College of Fine Arts, former Vice President of the Artists’ Society of Nepal, and a member of Sirjana Contemporary Art Gallery.
It was particularly during his childhood when Shah delved into Hindu mythology as numerous setbacks and childhood problems related to hearing with his hearing, glaucoma and failing eyesight challenged him further his ability to paint and make art. However, he overcame his health problems and started depicting the ten incarnations of Vishnu entitled “Das Avatar” as an embodiment of the inner strength and resilience he had developed within himself. His supreme horses seem to overpower chaos and destruction and come out victorious.
Shah’s lifelong fascination with art matured in the 1960s while studying at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, where he was introduced to works of impressionists and surrealists. The influence of these artists is still evident in Shah’s paintings which continuously aim to capture the world’s suffering. His works have garnered numerous accolades, have been exhibited in over ten countries, and have been featured in many public and private collections.
Shah's works are often based on myths from Hindu Puranas. Horses act as the prominent iconography seen across almost all his paintings., which he often portrays as a metaphor for Vishnu, a Hindu God, and iconography often depicted riding a horse and the Kalki, an avatar of Vishnu prophesied as a salvation figure to destroy the wicked and usher in a new age when the unjust rule the world and virtue has disappeared. In effect, Shah uses this metaphor to represent the duality of and the dialectics between suffering and salvation.
Shashi Shah studies the unique dramatic modes of culture in a somewhat surrealistic style. There is a vision of the apocalypse in his paintings that becomes the feature that characterizes his paintings. His white stallion imagery reminds us of the prominent white horse in Picasso's oeuvre Guernica, painted under a similar theme of apocalypse. Sashi Shah evokes the mood of pralaya or the apocalyptic sense represented by the wild speed and mood of the stallion.
Within the portrayal of the horse metaphor, its immanence becomes the feature that characterizes his paintings. The somber, excited, terrified, and anguished looks of these stallions show one dimension. Another dimension is the kinetic quality. Shah captures the temporal dimension — the livid times. We can see time by the leaps the stallions take over space. The free movement that challenges being tamed is captured in these figures. The monochromatic use of lines- some straight and some curved, which all create both tones and contrasts are there to further amplify this movement and the presence of vital and unbridled inner energies. Shah creates the nuances of the time through the manipulation of the kinetic avatars of the horses.
He also integrates space as another very important element in his paintings. His visionary motifs prompt him to use space not just in physical, but also psychological terms.The positioning of the central metaphor on the canvas creates both kinds of spaces. In one dimension, the horses overwhelm you, as if they are about to swamp you as you stand in front of the canvas. This positioning accentuates the power of the look and movement of the stallion, dominating one’s eye path as the horses look directly into you, almost forcing you to reflect on your inner self, questioning your own inner power. In that sense because each horse is different and each time you look at them, they touch the unique vulnerable parts in you, as they become a mirror to you.
In another dimension, Shah employs a mythologizing process, wherein time extends to a larger space and covers the world of myths. Sashi Shah says this about his horses: “Horse and horses are here. Horses are not a new and strange thing. The white horse is the symbol of the vehicle today by Kalki. The other horses here are also symbolic — some sorts of evil and horrifying. They are manic. They are devastating. They are likely to destroy our world and our civilization. Some are good, some are evil, and some are as terrifying as nuclear weapons of these days. May they all look beautiful — it is my major goal”.
He is a quintessential Nepalese artist who paints canvases with their bemused yogis and apocryphal horses, showing a mind fully conscious of roots but alive and vibrating within the present surroundings. Shah has made a unique combination of the Western style of painting, conspicuously seen in Picasso's stallions in his mural “Guernica”, foregrounding their sinewy twists and agility, with the Hindu concept of the ten incarnations of Vishnu. Shah's stallions are so flexible that he uses this figurality for diverse motifs — cosmogonic and earthly, seeking to give an evocative voice and power to those who might come across his horse characters.
S R I J A N U L A K
Calligraphy Artist
Calligraphy, which is Ulak’s artworks’ central stylistic element, plays an important role in defining the entire setting on which his characters and subjects are placed. Depicting our cultural icons such as Lakhes, he tries to connect the audience to a certain scene or point in history, to which he refers for its historical impact on the present, prompting us to remember and recollect empirical historical events. The depictions deal with the narration of Srijan Ulak, also known by the tag, ‘sathihandstyle’ is a 28-year-old calligraphy artist, currently pursuing his art degree as a second-year student from Kathmandu University. He has been doing ‘calligraffiti’ since 2016. Ulak utilizes mantras and slokas from Hindu and Tibetan sources and also draws inspiration from different forms of nature. He studied graphic communication at Bangalore but later got involved in street art.
Born and brought up in the Dattatreya area, he studied in Patan where he was always a part of a festive close-knit community, and he loved the time of Jatra and festivals and family functions and family time. He studied inLA until high school in Bhaktapur, but works in Kathmandu, from where he does more commissioned works and on canvas. As an only child, he lived in a hostel and spent most of his time there. His mother is a housewife and his father is a businessman dealing with trade and real estate. Although he was initially made to pursue medicine or the military, seeing his artistic skills prompted his father to encourage Ulak to build a career in arts. He was inspired by tattoo art from Shree Kisi’s Tattoo Art, where he also took tattoo art classes. He was first introduced to Graffiti from music videos.
His tag, sathi_handstyle gives him an opportunity to create his own territory to connect with his audience in better ways and show them where he is coming from. It is for his separate identity in art so that he is known for his work. Tagging in abandoned and unclaimed places are his preferences, which first came from Western culture. He is driven by such style, where artists could do their work, anonymously rebel against something and yet stay hidden and not be prosecuted for it.
Relating heavily to his childhood, which drives him into deep nostalgia, his calligraphic digital artwork, depicting the photography on the side with mixed media, complements well the vicinities of his hometown and the surrounding culture he grew up being close to. His main motivation is in the strokes, how he is able to render images using flowy natural lines and strokes. He uses photography and mixed media with calligraphy in the background, mixing Newari and Tibetan calligraphies along with sacred mantras and song lyrics. His process of creating art follows the natural flow of the mind.
He is very mindful of the impact he is trying to create through his art. His artwork features a Nav Durga Bhawani(nine avatars of the goddess Durga) wherein he shows an appreciation towards the woodwork of the local area and incorporating such ancestral art traditions.
S O F I Y A M A H A R J A N
Visual Artist
Sophiya Maharjan, whose childhood was built around a typical Newa community, was born and brought up in the core city (Sundhara and Balkumari) in a closed-knit community with her school, friends, and family near her. For a good part of her life, she did not get the much-needed exposure at all, not even close to what her contemporaries were having.
As an introverted and socially reticent person, safe and sound in her cocoon and restrained comfort zone, she grew up feeling insecure about society's perceptions and opinions. The world opened up in front of her when she was in grade 12. as her affinity towards art grew stronger, and became the most powerful medium of artistic expression for her. Now she considers herself an explorer. “Everything has a reason and a way to learn, unlearn, and relearn things as a continuous process.”
Brought up by a single mother, she saw her mother challenge stereotypes and encourage her and her brother to have a strong and respected career, under which art was bare. However, both the siblings grew up choosing art-related careers- his brother, a musician, and Sophiya herself a visual artist.
She considers art to be an expressive medium for her, her reason to go on about the day, and a safe place where every emotion and perspective becomes valid, one where one can talk and reshare their emotions and journey. She uses stitching as her form of expression, using thread art and cloth–connecting one dot to another, one at a time– and turning it into a collage. And like the stitches, attaching two pieces of cloth, she also feels attached to her art, her emotions, and her mother. Dots and lines are important elements in her artworks- giving them not only needed contours for depth and perspective but also serving as an important tool of Maharjan in order to render the connection she feels, through her art, with her surrounding, meticulously building one stitch upon the other and creating visionary images that minimalist, yet vibrant. Her tiny squared canvases are delicate and intricate, wherein she plays with various colored threads and adds another layer of intricacy, intertwining everyday realities, human dynamism, and its relation within her graceful visual expression.
She employs a sewing machine–a skill, an heirloom that she got from her mother. Although she grew up seeing her mother use it always, it was during the lockdown, that the mother-daughter bonded over the machine when Sofiya learned the art form from her mother, her first teacher.
Her subjects are about people and their personal belongings as well as personal spaces. Spaces that reflect collective and shared memories. Starting from pencil to sketch. From copying works of master artists to sewing, she has grown as an artist. But to make her career in art, she has had to make some hard choices, indifferent to all the societal pressure that has come her way.
As an artist, she has been in the field for just five to six years, but with academic learning at Kathmandu University, art has made her excited. She is a recent graduate of 2020. Still young, she is on her path of growing as an artist. She is raw and still on her journey to find her space in the Nepali Artscape, but that is what keeps her fresh and relatable, with that traditional touch. She feels and stays close to her roots. One can see the colors of nostalgia in her artworks. The colors of Haku Patasi that instinctively strike her childhood memories are prominent in her mode of depiction of and connection to childhood. Her artworks feature different body parts and highlight elements like Pyakhan angu and Alah that call out to the traditions and norms of the Newa community. It is a beautiful collage of the elements that make you nostalgic, taking you back to days that connect you to your roots.
SUNDAR LAMA
Visual Artist
Born and brought up in and around the Newa community (near Keltole) with three brothers and a sister, Sunder Lama grew up with a strong influence in the Karmacharya family. He passed his SLC in 2056 and was already interested in art history. Though this original culture was different, for him his environment and nurture became stronger to shape his personality. His mother was from the Helambu community whereas his father was from Kathmandu. They both worked in Bir hospital and were not even remotely from the art field. Neither were his three siblings. He wanted to be a journalist, historian, or even a lab assistant, but his family wanted him to have a clerical job. As per that he studied at the Public Youth Campus. He received his art degree from Lalit Kala Campus.
His fascination with art grew with small diagrams and patterns as well as tattoo designs. Art for him is all about happiness and an outlet for his emotions, for his hardship of life to be emoted. He considers art a part of his life, almost synonymous with his existence. He says without art his life would be empty, it would feel like there is a huge void.
His arts are more conceptualized with motifs and representational elements that reflect animal instincts. With a motif of bringing people together while they enjoy his art and life, Lama incorporates the exploration, creation, and execution of stories in his performance art. Sundar Lama’s paintings incorporate various animal imagery, alongside elements of nature to complement that harmony. Yet, almost in a satirical manner, he dramatizes the facial features– exaggerated lips, enlarged head, and mixed-matched attire signifying the presence of animal instinct in all of us. The hyperbolic facial construction and the use of horse symbolism is a bold gesture to represent this– showing how the animal instinct in us prompts us to immediately react and respond; almost feral-like animals. In contrast, there is fish symbolism in the background- creatures considered as less violent and harmless animals, using which the artist is trying to say that we should rather try to be the latter. His canvases bloom with colorful undertones that represent vitality and create a lively aesthetic.
He is more interested in collaborative and narrative works in art so he became more interested in performance art. It is all about the process and then only the selection of artworks that matter. He had always seen a chaotic environment with violence (domestic violence in the family) and its influence has made his life more gloomy. Post-covid, his art sees the use of darker colors with different shades, alluding to the similar element of sombreness and human agony. However, he executes colors in order to bring more colors into his own life.
Inspired by the use of horse elements in Shashi Bikram Shah’s artworks, Lama has also started to incorporate this symbolism in most of his artworks. As a child, he always felt fascinated by Bhairav’s picture in the puja ghar of the Newa community and felt a strong association with the art that captured his attention. When he saw people being divided for an autonomous state during and after the Maoist insurgency, he became more interested in his own origins and the origins of the Tamang community.
He is exhibiting his works with the theme “Roots in a motion”. His paintings are representative of cultural diversity, whereas his performance focuses on the showcase of his experience. He is using elements like gloves and clothes with a video complemented with live music that is being projected of himself while he dances around it. As he was always fascinated by Majipaa Lakhe, he is using the same motif in his work.
He feels he is still in pursuit of searching for his own roots, so he is participating in the exhibition as another platform to explore his interests and art.
S U S H M A S H A K Y A
Visual Artist
“One can have many moral or social guidelines for life but it is from your own actions that you get the results”, says the artist, who, despite so many challenges in life, continues to see the beauty and hope that underline within the beauty of nature and the universe. She believes that people’s perceptions and interpretations or even people’s own sense of direction can be different but learning can continue,” and whether it is a success or a failure, there is learning in every step of life, always. She finds it necessary, not just in art but also in life, that one gets the right subject and the right motivation to feel happy about it and live life. She believes that in order for life to be beautiful you do not need to do the biggest of things, but rather just the smallest things that matter to you.
Sushma Shakya is a contemporary Nepali artist born in the Newa community with Buddhist teaching as its core philosophy. Buddha’s teaching is to love and cherish humans and human lives with actions and contentment throughout life and beyond. She feels very proud of her heritage, and her roots and feels that it is what makes life beautiful. In her art, she includes lines and her motifs include elements from Paubha and Thangkas. And only after her vision is clear, does she search for the right mediums, usually printmaking and mixed media, to express her thoughts. Although her father comes from a business background and With her art, she also feels responsible as an artist to give back to the community.
Shakya recollects her earliest memories in life, even before school life of holding a pen, making art, and not writing alphabets. She remembers watching the vibrant and colorful Kartik Naach and Lakhey Naach Among seven sisters all diverse in different fields, she is the only one in the art field. But contrary to societal pressure, her family never compelled them to marry. Rather, their focus was always on education and on making themselves self-dependent. She was studying commerce at Shankar Dev Campus, uninformed about opportunities for formal art education. It was only when Pramila Bajracharya, a thriving contemporary artist and E-Arts Nepal and Fine Art Center, Nepal, saw her sketches, which Shakya did in her free time, inspired her to pursue arts. Wanting to go beyond the traditional and religious mediums of Thagka and Paubhas, she came to know and learn about printmaking from Uma Shankar Shah and Seema Sharma Shah (Sir & Ma'am) and it was in the early 2000s when she started her journey in art, like many other modern artists, focusing on individual expression. But it was also when she started teaching art. She joined Kathmandu University for a diploma in 2003 and then a Bachelor’s in 2007 in studio art which was shortly followed by her teaching at KU. Then she did her Master’s in Fine Arts in printmaking in 2015 and started freelancing after 2016.
Her style is driven heavily by conceptual art. Focusing on mainly contemporary environmental and health issues, she gets inspiration from and masterfully incorporates the use of the five elements of nature and Buddhism with their intricate balance, which she portrays to show the fragility of human lives and the universe. Specifically, her artworks depict heat and temperature imbalance, air and pollution, space and spatial imbalance, water, and contamination, elements of nature, and sustainability. Her artwork is a way to question the way of society and an open floor for discussion for sustainability. They are the celebration of the third eye, which represents a realm beyond our reality and consciousness. But it is the respect and continuation of acknowledgment of her roots and the knowledge she gains from her ancestors, which encourages her to see the interconnected nature of reality.
Shakya’s artworks are based on architecture with elements and memories of her childhood. The style is heavily influenced by Lichhavi and Malla-era styles which are a big part of our history and culture. Though many have taken new forms in the 21st century, her artwork reflects the same old architecture that people are familiar with. Adding modern nuances, she changes the visual forms and representation that still very well celebrate the old architecture yet find their space in this modern time and space. She employs mixed media, printmaking, and embossing methods to create her twenty-five-piece mosaic art with bold strokes of blue and golden colors for depth and purity.
UMESH SHAH
Painter/ Printmaker
Emulating the sharp angles and bold lines of ancient Egyptian and similar tribal art styles, Shah draws his figures flat, using multiple perspectives and side views to make the forms more recognizable and appreciable in the same way as they are seen incorporated in daily life. Experimental and innovative, his use of textures is loud and prominent, almost as if they’re made using imprint techniques like in ancient Mithila where the women used the imprints of raw everyday objects like twigs, cotton, leaves, cloth, etc. to create certain line and geometrical shapes, suggestive of the long-ingrained impression this type of art and region have had on him. Motifs of Mithila art are also apparent in his paintings through his use of basic still lifes like pots, chairs, and animals composed in two-dimensional perspective, providing a glimpse of the mundane everyday and reflecting on the simplicity of the modest lifestyle of the people of his region.
Having grown up in the Terai region of Nepal, the Mithila culture became a very closely integrated part of his life, and he takes inspiration from the nuptial ceremonies of ancient Mithil where Shah spent his adolescent years keenly observing how Mithila women used sticks wrapped in a cloth to paint and decorate walls with large murals of traditionally made colors, Umesh transverses the expectation of brightly-colored female figures typical of conventional Mithila paintings. Instead, he takes inspiration from these figures, rural women who might have painted them under the scorching sun and expansive plains of Southern Nepal, and depicts how Mithila art can be about an individual as well. He personalizes them by alluding to many different societal as well as personal matters of loss, hope as well as refusal, and empowerment.
Shah reminisces about enjoying art just as a hobby. Being the first one in his entire family to choose arts as a career, Shah recollects memories of feeling lost in the academic arena other than arts, and finally when secured the opportunity to begin his artistic career– for the first time ever – through an art exhibition at a university in Delhi where he was studying Hindi literature around 2003 – he was elated, and the feeling of engaging in artistic practice since then, has always put a smile on his face.
The artist’s upbringing in an underprivileged and socially and economically backward region like Madesh, where it was natural for him to “…. disregard his studies and indulge in outdoor pleasures like swimming and Kabbaddi with friends…”, had however, always made him cautious of the conservative and restrained mindset of those around, and had instilled an inclination towards things unique and special about his region- movies, traditional local art and ceremonial rituals. His will to take a stance on his choice of artistic career and self-dedication despite the social constraints is suggestive of strong willpower to promote empowerment of his region where let alone the opportunities of formal art study and art-making, supportive attitude towards art as a feasible career choice also lack.
Enrolled at the Kathmandu University of Arts as the first batch in 2003, Shah passed out in 2007 and was established as one of the prominent contemporary artists of Nepal. He has been continuing to contribute to Nepali arts by working as a lecturer at the Tribhuvan University of Arts since 2012.
Motifs of Mithila art are rich in his paintings- his use of basic still lifes like pots, chairs, and animals composed in two-dimensional perspective provides a glimpse of the mundane every day and reflects on the simplicity of the modest lifestyle of the people of his region. Furthermore, he doesn't just limit his style to this form of painting. Based on rigorous self-study and his in-depth comprehensive skills, Shah analyses, appreciates, and takes inspiration from Egyptian art, prominently its eye-catching geometric style, with which he very much resonates, due to its equally primitive and eccentric nature; such antediluvian work of art is more than three to four thousand years old. Thus, his work can be seen as a masterful relic, a mindful personification and representation of the beauty of such prehistoric nature of both of these tribal art styles, rendered through his own ex[expression of empowerment in terms of its contemporariness.
P H O T O G R A P H I C W O R K S P R E S E N T E D B Y P H O T O . C I R C L E – N E P A L P I C T U R E L I B R A R Y
The “Revisiting the Roots in a Modern Nuance” curatorial team utilized a fascinating selection of photographs to illustrate the evolution of photography in Nepal. This journey starts from the very introduction of the camera to the country and continues through the transformative period following World War II. This exhibition traces the development of this artistic medium in Nepal and these images represent a window into a different time and perspective. We extend our deepest gratitude to both Photo Circle and the Nepal Picture Library for making these historical works accessible and enriching our exploration of Nepal's photographic heritage.
Photo Circle is a platform for photography in Nepal. Through workshops, publications, exhibitions, and commissioned assignment work, photo.circle strives to bring together photographers and other visual storytellers to nurture unique voices that document and engage with social change in Nepal.
When Krishna Bahadur Chitrakar, a court painter of the Rana dynasty, ended his years of service to Babar Shumsher Rana in the early twentieth century, he was offered the customary gift of a plot of land. Chitrakar refused, choosing a camera instead. With his early camera in hand, he went on to establish Nepal’s first private studio.
In the 1960s, as photographs became mandatory for citizenship certificates, and legal and other identity documents, photography studios became more common in urban areas and highway towns. This allowed photographers and their patrons to experiment more, which was, perhaps also an effect of the advent of democracy, where new ideas flourished. This new generation prioritized candid photographs and rebelled against the perfect symmetry that the first generation of photographers had perfected. The subjects didn’t look at the camera, they smiled, laughed, played with props, and shook hands. These poses were also possible because of advances in technology, as subjects didn’t need to sit still for long periods of time.
Ranas like Dumbar Shumsher (1858- 1922) the first Nepali photographer, encouraged ceremonies, marriages, and other important social events. The second decade of this century saw the arrival of smaller and more portable cameras and private studios started burgeoning. They served the increasing Kathmandu middle class– mostly their own families, friends, and neighbors– who had thrived in bureaucracy, business, and trade. Photography afforded these early consumers a sense of importance and social progression.
In the '70s and '80s, studio experimentation was not solely fueled by creativity, it was also an attempt to create new kinds of products, so patrons would continue to visit the studio. Innovative techniques like double exposure aimed at drawing in more customers. Various props were also introduced, including fedora hats, sunglasses, kimonos, and ginyo-cholos in an attempt to create alternative looks for consumers to be photographed in– the same person could change their clothes and take multiple, different pictures. The canvas background also multiplied and proliferated, providing customers with a number of exotic locales to choose from.
photo.circle has set up Nepal Picture Library, a digital photo archive that hopes to contribute to the study of Nepali photography, generate knowledge, and raise questions about how we can explore issues of memory, identity, and history through images.
