Closing the doors on its 20-year-old location in Chelsea last fall, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art set in motion an ambitious new vision of transforming into a “global museum” by continuing to support research and scholarship on the Himalayan arts. Now loaning pieces from a near-4,000 piece collection, the itinerant museum aims to serve its publics through collaborative exhibitions and programs in partnership with brick-and-mortar institutions. 

“Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now,” hosted by Wrightwood 659, is a sizable foray into this new direction, with works by 28 contemporary artists from Nepal, Bhutan, Taiwan, Japan, China, Switzerland, the U.S., and England, responding to a selection of archival objects. Drawing from Mahāyanā, Vajrayāna, and Theravāda Buddhist schools, curators Michelle Bennett Simorella, Roshan Mishra of Tarragon Next, and Tsewang Lhamo of Yakpo Collective release objects from tedious cycles of museological representation, pairing newly commissioned works and contemporary responses with statues, paintings, and ritual objects once associated with forms of Buddhist “practice.” 

Entering Wrightwood 659’s Tadao Ando-designed brick-and concrete-body, a stark beam of sunlight touches a column of salvaged Buddhist prayer flags, filling four flights of the central atrium. Asha Kama Wangdi and the Voluntary Artist Studio’s The Windhorse (lungta) (2024) connects worldly pitfalls to the power of the immortal through frayed yellow, cerulean, green, crimson, and white block printed pennants found at Bhutanese campsites. Speaking of the climatic effects of increased, unsustainable tourism across the Himalayas, five veiled wooden horses emerge at staggered heights, amplifying an intention or prayer for conscious action and restoration of nature. A 10×10-inch ink-stained, prayer-inscribed woodblock shows Buddha Shakyamuni seated at the center of a mandala. This is the first sign of a comparative study of language, memory, and consciousness, warranted through proximity, that forms a through line in “Reimagine.” 

On the second level, tucked at the end of a C-shaped foyer, John Tsung transposes the body of the Rubin Museum through sound recordings of its interior, days before its final exhibition, “Reimagine,” opened. Channeling vibrations of the architectural body through a foundation stone on a darkened plinth with exposed wires used for recording draped at its side, viewers are invited to touch the stone to experience 神代 (Divine Generation) (2024). Amplifying the circularity of life and death, Tsung infuses the relic with a former life as oil lamps flicker in a moving-image light box nearby. The image, a recreated Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, is scheduled to open at the Brooklyn Museum this June. 

Placing the past and the future in simultaneity, New York-based Kunsang Gyatso’s Goddess of Tangerine (2023) rebuilds a futurist Nepalese-Tibetan shrine, integrating dehydrated tangerines as consecrated relics from a future past. Resting on pin-legged armatures beneath a digital abstract mandala, naive carvings on claylike foam tiles depict a sleeping dog, two suns rising over a mountainscape, and a pigeon. Both Tsung and Gyatso cohere in the abstraction of memory in the experience of diaspora, while crafting individual shrines with native fantasies of Tibetan culture. 

On the third level, Kabi Raj Lama’s lithographic triptych, Construction and Destruction (2023), brackets one end of the gallery, reflecting jewel tones from Charwei Tsai’s Five Sky Dancers (2021). Searching for signs of interconnectedness between impermanence and scientific inquiry, Raj Lama’s mysteriously flawless titian-ochre and amber wash prints point to an intuitive artistic process. Collaborating with Dr. Sujaya Neupane at MIT, the artist’s movements are tracked during the process of creation, throwing skillful karma in an attempt to unearth the therapeutic power of art-making. An exemplary Manjushri bust sits before a negative of its shadow. Three swirling handwritten mantra abstractions drawn in pure azurite, cinnabar, and malachite arouse dakinis (feminine energies) in Five Sky Dancers. A vast, mirrored expanse, Tsai’s The Womb & the Diamond depicts a cut and layered mirrored mandala, with circles laid one atop the other in graded, geometric precision. At the center of each disc, a pebble-sized handblown glass orb contains the exhalation of a mantra on oneness whispered by renowned Buddhist lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. An iconometric blueprint of pure light charts the divine proportions of the universe with a solitary diamond at its center, representing the indestructibility of the intention of the one who has drawn the mandala. 

Following canonical iconometric principles, traditional Tibetan artists are trained in accuracy that is rewarded by religious function. The belief that the divine enters an image through codified geometric proportion implores contemporaries to find new and crafty ways to transform ritual and religious symbology. Integrating external cultural influences like popular media, theater, film, and music, the diaspora has evolved alongside external influences, posing complex, and at times quick-witted, questions. Shushank Shrestha’s Uber Rat (2023) couples a four-foot lusterware ceramic mouse with a toothy comical grin with an 11th-century sandstone Ganesha from central India. Performing his folkloric duty of being the elephant god’s “ride”, the sculpture is placed, surprisingly, directly at the idol’s feet. In a more sober pairing, Uma Bista responds to the 1842 thangka Red Avalokiteshvara. A lithe coral-hued figure symbolizing compassion and fertility hangs alongside six crimson-hued photographs. Gusty fields, bangled wrists, the navel of a woman in repose, a tear nestled atop her delicate dorsal vein—Bista delineates the plight of the menstruating body, considered impure and unholy according to traditional beliefs in South Asia. Disproving superstition, she transgresses indoctrinated thinking, extending grace and tenderness to the fugitive figure. 

Several works on view reveal a level of self-investigation required of diasporic Himalayan artists, forced to articulate a contemporary visual language while countering arguments on the blasphemous nature of breaking with iconographic tradition. Engaging archival objects with utmost reverence, “Reimagine” attempts to painstakingly piece together a new Himalayan canon, as a decreasing number of Himalayan youth remain in traditional craft schools. Receiving the past (the “then”) and the present (the titular “now”) in a continuum, few contemporary Tibetan artists straddle contradiction like Tsherin Sherpa. Overlooking the city’s wintery snowscape at the topmost level, Muted Expressions (2022) depicts Sherpa’s first foray into traditional lost-wax metal casting in the form of a horizontal seven-foot bronze. Once a student of traditional thangka painting under his father, master Urgen Dorje, Sherpa’s oeuvre constantly remixes Tantric motifs. An amalgam of hands and feet explode—mudras, emotive gestures, bodies signaling distress—rousing a sense of the chaos that ensued after Nepal’s 2015 earthquakes. Visibilizing humanity’s capacity for war and peace, suffering and healing, Sherpa places the sacred and the secular in one, sitting in accompaniment with a mid-14th/15th-century sculpture of the Goddess of Protection, Pratisara. 

Casting karmic and dharmic intentions alongside objects excerpted from ritual circulation, the artists in “Reimagine” provide audiences and curators with the possibility of receiving antiquities and ancient arts as conscious, responsive objects. Forming collections that are open to critical and creative reinterpretation, one is compelled to consider the valence of religious and secular art as the Rubin begins to mirror the nomadic nature of its diaspora. Questions of repatriation are also necessitated, as countries like Nepal begin to build much-needed scientific infrastructure to receive works returned from the Met. In another case, the Art Institute of Chicago has refused requests for the return of a 17th-century gilded-copper necklace, blurring lines between mythology and fact. 

Distanced from the motherland and mother tongue, ritual objects in “Reimagine” are reinvigorated by autobiographical accounts retold by contemporary counterparts. Just as a small ray of sunlight transforms our way of seeing, an entire ocean of light illuminates the need for a total shift of consciousness in how we frame a canon—in speech, thought, and action, to generate a compassionate view of the now.

“Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now”
Through 2/15: Sat 10 AM–5 PM, Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood, wrightwood659.org, admission $15