Gesang Yixi is many things: a Tibetan-born, Chinese-educated artist; a Communist Party member and a Buddhist; an adherent of Tibetan, Han (Chinese), and Western aesthetic styles; and a secular creator of religious art. What he may not be, some students say, is a qualified representative of “Tibetan heritage”—yet his work is being shown under that title in the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies.
“Tibetan Heritage: Paintings by Gesang Yixi” as well as Yixi himself, has been at Wesleyan since September. The small exhibit displays a number of paintings rendered in Thanka style, which is traditionally practiced by Tibetan monks, as well as some that incorporate Chinese or Western elements. The largest painting in the room depicts the Asia Games—a sort of regional Olympics—using Tibetan conventions of flat composition and a limited color scheme. Across from it hangs a painting of spectators at Tibet’s Lithang horse races, who pop out from the canvas with their vivid combination of Tibetan palette and Western shading. The Thanka-influenced paintings include representations of the Buddha, and a motif of Tibetan signs merged with the yin-yang, a specifically Chinese icon.
“Thanka painting is about line,” said Adjunct Professor of Anthropology Patrick Dowdey, who curated the exhibit. “In Western painting it’s about modeling and creating shapes with shading. Gesang Yixi is a master at line work.”
Exquisite as Yixi’s technique may be, some visitors to the exhibit have been alienated not by the aesthetic aspects of the work but by its political implications. The controversy has mostly been, thus far, a tempest in teapot, confined to personal correspondence between Dowdey and a small group of students involved in the Free Tibet movement. Last Friday, however, Josh Bryant ’06 and Kyle Gardner ’06 brought their concerns into a public forum with a Wespeak (“Tibetan Heritage silenced at Freeman Center art exhibit,” Sept. 30).
Bryant and Gardner, both of whom studied in India last year, went to the exhibit excited to see Tibetan art on campus for the second year in a row. Last fall the Freeman Center sponsored the much less contentious Mandala exhibit, bringing in Tibetan monks. They, along with students like Eugene Dizenkoi ’06, who spent last summer in Lhasa, Tibet, were unpleasantly surprised. Because China cannot wipe out Tibet’s deeply rooted religious culture altogether, they argued, it has appropriated that culture instead, turning Tibet into a kind of Disneyland for Chinese tourists.
“You’ve committed the invasion, you’ve destroyed religious infrastructure, you’ve killed or exiled the religious leaders—what’s the next way to wipe out a culture?” Bryant said. “You hang it on a wall.”
The students claimed that rather than representing Tibetan heritage as advertised, the exhibit represented a singularly Chinese perspective: that Tibet, and Tibetan art, is a part of China.
“It’s ‘a Tibetan heritage,’ not ‘Tibetan heritage,’ and there’s a difference between the two,” Bryant said.
“Heritage,” however, meant something different to Yixi and Dowdey.
“From my perspective it meant that [Yixi] is using traditional techniques to present a more modern and a secular art,” Dowdey said. He quoted Yixi: “Of course you can’t say you’re developing the tradition—you can only say you’re developing your own art.”
Dowdey is under fire from these students at least as much as the artwork itself. Yixi’s overtly political paintings—like one that depicts smiling monks waving pictures of Mao against a utopian Communist-Buddhist backdrop—can be viewed in the exhibit catalog, but not on the wall.
“One thing that’s really unfortunate is Dowdey’s depoliticizing [Yixi’s art],” Gardner said. “I think if this was properly contextualized the exhibit would provide a brilliant commentary.”
In defense of his approach, Dowdey explained that he had selected art for the wall based primarily on aesthetic considerations.
“I’m a curator, I put up the good paintings,” he said. “I put up the best work, and [the earlier, more political paintings] are not the best work.”
Dowdey acknowledged, though, that he had political qualms as well about presenting artwork that glorified Mao. Yixi would have been comfortable with that, he said, but he personally would not.
The professor emphasized his dedication to creating an “open arena for discourse,” even at the risk of making unpopular decisions.
“We want a discussion,” he said. “The Free Tibet people have a really strong commitment and that’s great.”
The “Free Tibet people,” in turn, expressed skepticism at Dowdey’s self-defense.
“The exhibit does not explicitly stimulate this discourse,” Bryant said. “If he had framed it in the context of the Cultural Revolution that would have been nice. But we had to address it in terms of our previous knowledge. That’s what makes it subtle and problematic.”
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