Beyer Projects congratulates Gonkar Gyatso on his Three Realms exhibition, organized by the Griffith University Art Gallery and exhibition partners The University of Queensland Art Museum and the Institute of Modern Art from August 2011 to April 2012. The exhibition includes sculpture produced by Beyer Projects in collaboration with the artist, and is accompanied by the most extensive published monograph on the artist to date.
"For many years Gonkar Gyatso has encrusted traditional Buddhist iconography with pop cultural referents to explore issues of identity, globalisation, hybridity, and consumerism. Significant new directions in his practice signal an opportune moment to consider one of world art’s rising contemporary art stars…
Much of Gyatso's work charts shifts in identity in relation to continual migration. It has moved through traditional Chinese brush techniques and Buddhist iconography to high-density pop collages of colourful stickers and cut-out text, playing on but subverting typecast notions of pop art and Tibetan culture while reflecting on the popularity of Buddhism in the West. In combining references to traditional Tibetan life with references to a global mass-media culture that threatens to supplant and extinguish it, Gyatso creates a volatile, ambivalent mix…" (Source: Institute of Modern Art)