Gonkar Gyatso

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Executed in 2011, Endless Knot is a supreme example of Gonkar Gyatso’s uniquely pioneering Tibetan modernism, evincing his ascendance to the thoroughly transnational stage of contemporary art. Represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and of the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, Gyatso also participated to critical acclaim in the 53^rd International Venice Biennale in 2009. Negotiating the cultural influences from his time spent in Chinese state-sponsored art school, traditional Tibetan artistic training, and finally on a full scholarship at Central St. Martin’s School of Art, London, Gyatso’s hybrid aesthetic bespeaks a wide cross-fertilisation of references and techniques. Scholar Clare Harris has written that Gyatso’s continual reworking of the image of the Buddha – or “the body of a highly mobile, migrating image” – corresponds to his own experience of geo-cultural multiplicity (Clare Harris, ‘The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts Towards a Transnational Art History’, Art History, September 2006, p. 702).

In Buddhism, the Endless Knot is a closed, graphic ornament composed of intertwined lines. It is one of the eight auspicious symbols, each representing a different quality of enlightenment and thus bringing good luck. In Tibetan and Indian Buddhism, the Endless Knot signifies the intertwining of religious teachings and secular concerns, as well as the union of knowledge and compassion. Within the Chinese Buddhist “Huayan school”, the Endless Knot took on a wider and more metaphysical meaning, illustrating the doctrine of “interpenetration.” This belief established causal connections between all events, intimately relating disparate occurrences through a far-reaching chain. Appropriated by Gyatso in the present work, the phrase Endless Knot functions ambiguously, seeming to visually signify the harmonious interpenetration of Western and Buddhist cultures, whilst nevertheless offering a critical reading of the idol-worship extended to signs, symbols, and advertising in the popular media, which decorate the sculpture.

In traditional Tibetan Thangka painting, the wild proliferation of detail and colour, devised according to complex geometrical schemes, was designed to facilitate meditation by drawing the beholder into a state of visual reverie. In Endless Knot, the dazzling play of collaged images entrances the eye, but is divorced from its religious function. Emulating post-modern critiques of contemporary imagery as redolent with meaningless, rootless signifiers, Gyatso advances an incisive critique of such visual culture. Upon the Buddha figure, chakras – wheel-like centres of energy – are demarcated by sun shapes crowned with conventional warning symbols, suggesting a toxic encounter. Visually stunning, Endless Knot recalls Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh’s suggestion that the West, in order to meaningfully connect with Buddhist teachings, should reimagine the Buddha in a new and native form.