Fabio Rossi says: "This is a great honour and timely recognition for Gonkar, who co-curated with us the landmark exhibition From Classic to Contemporary: Visions from Tibet in 2005 held in our gallery and concurrently at The Sweet Tea House in London. Since then the work of contemporary Tibetan artists has gained international recognition and we are proud to have played such a key role."
Elaine W. Ng, Editor and Publisher of ArtAsiaPacific writes: "Gonkar Gyatso often mixes the iconography of traditional Tibetan art with images from Western popular culture, such as children's stickers, cartoons and newspaper cuttings. … Although Gyatso does not describe himself as a political artist, he admits to infusing his work with subtle political overtones. He finds the process of editing - whether cutting text and images from newspapers or jotting down soundbites from the radio - one of the most powerful acts: deciding what is sacrificed and what remains and is presented to readers, listeners or viewers."
Among the works Gyatso is creating for the Biennale is Reclining Buddha-Beijing Tibet Relationship Index (2009), a six-metre long drawing of Buddha in the final state of enlightenment before his death. The now iconic posture of Buddha lying down, Gyatso says, "has its own elegance but also expresses a sense of vulnerability". Initially some of Buddha's disciples believed he was sleeping, or dead, but the wise knew that this was blissful reincarnation, or nirvana, in essence the "end" or release from reincarnation. Gyatso uses this revered image to explore Chinese-Tibetan relations, superimposing the stock market index onto the figure of Buddha. However, instead of charting the highs and lows of the financial market, Gyatso uses it as a mock graph depicting 58 years of Sino-Tibetan relations since 1951. Rather than illustrate the historical relations between the two ethnic groups - Han Chinese and Tibetan - who share a cultural history through the Buddhist religion, Gyatso's index is tied randomly to a symbolic chronology that holds as much meaning or non-meaning depending on the viewer's perspective of history and current issues. As a Tibetan artist who left home to study at a prestigious Chinese art school, briefly went to Dharamsala in India, and has been based in London for over ten years, Gyatso possesses different viewpoints on this complicated history. He is sympathetic to both the Chinese and Tibetans living in Tibet, but circumspect of the exoticized vision of a spiritual Shangri-la promulgated by both the Western and Chinese press. Many people in both China and the West hold fantasies of an idealized Tibet as an unspoiled land due to its religion and essentially frozen in a permanent time capsule of the 11th century. It is this virtual, rather than an actual, dream of Tibet that Gyatso seeks to uncover.
Gonkar was born in Lhasa in 1961 and left home in 1989 to study art at the Central Academy of Fine Art & Crafts in Beijing. He also studied fine art at Central Saint Martins and the Chelsea School of Design in London and he has been living and working in London since 1996. His work has been exhibited in London, Oxford, Atlanta, Helsinki, Karlsruhe, New Delhi, New York, Washington, Boulder, Los Angeles, Dubai and Zurich. He was a recipient of the Leverhulme Fellowship in 2003 as an artist-in-residence at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, as well as fellow at the library of Tibetan Works & Archive, Dharamsala, India, for traditional Tibetan painting studies. Gonkar's work is held in the Newark Museum, USA, the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, the White Rabbit Collection, Chippendale, the Burger Collection, Switzerland and Hong Kong, the Devi Foundation, India, and the Crocker Art Museum, California, as well as in several major private collections in Europe, Australia, Asia and the USA.