artist profile
Kesang Lamdark
born
1963
lives and works
Zumikon, Switzerland
education
BFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, USA, 1995
MFA, Columbia University, New York, USA, 1997
about the artist
One of the most important artists among the Tibetan diaspora, Kesang Lamdark has had an upbringing that offered him a physical, and thus critical, distance from his ethnic homeland. Born and raised respectively in India and Switzerland, the artist grew up encountering his roots indirectly, and only traveled to his native soil for the first time during adulthood. Tibet is and isn’t home to Lamdark—in his works, “Neo-tantric art” as the artist coins it, he gestures toward his multiple identities through making allusions to his cultural heritage while using modern materials. The jarring tension between the inherited and the experienced manifests itself in the juxtaposition of contrasting iconography, derived from a vicarious past and a concrete present. Lamdark has held solo exhibitions all over the world, in Hong Kong, London, Dubai, Zurich, Basel, New York, and other cities. He has also participated in many group exhibitions held at venues such as the Nam June Paik Arts Center in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea; the Songzhuang Art Center in Beijing, China; the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, USA; the Colorado University Art Museum in Boulder, USA; the Museum Bärengasse in Zürich, Switzerland; and the Wereld Museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.