‘Painting is the closest thing to freedom,’ says Tenzing Rigdol

Dazzling and intricately layered, Tenzing Rigdol's works blend traditional Buddhist iconography with contemporary elements to address his own diasporic history. Nepalese by birth, the thirty-nine-year-old artist identifies as Tibetan, as the son of political refugees, and as American through citizenship granted later in life. Today, he lives primarily in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, but also in Prague and New York City.

His biography is crucial to understanding his work. After spending his early life in Kathmandu, he received a scholarship to study at the University of Colorado in Denver in the early 2000s – a deeply formative period that paved the way for future intellectual inquiries. Although he initially focused on chemistry and physics, his interest soon shifted to art, history, and philosophy. ‘Science was so much about taking in information, and art felt more like […] a personal diary for what I was going through,’ he recalls. As a reflection of his work's introspective nature, Rigdol himself appears in many paintings and performances, frequently blindfolded or with his face covered. ‘This is something symbolic to me – a symbol of ignorance,’ he notes.‘I’ll tell you what I’ve experienced, from my viewpoint, as honestly as possible, but I’m saying that I don’t know anything. This is my first statement. That is my approach.’

As we spoke in his home studio, located in the New York City borough of Queens, Rigdol’s quiet ruminations on complex subjects frequently gave way to energetic bursts of laughter. Cast in a warm glow from the setting sun, the room was filled with framed works from past projects as well as a small Buddhist altar. Nearby, a nearly finished painting sat atop a table, with fragmented words scribbled along the periphery of the paper to capture miscellaneous thoughts that occurred to him throughout the six months that he had so far spent on it. The nearly completed work, like many others, offers a contemporary take on Tibetan thangkas, a historical genre of devotional scrolls that ornately portrayed Buddhist deities.

Whereas traditional artisans first sketch out their illustrations before masking the lines with paint, Rigdolbrings networks of interlocking grids to the forefront of his visual surfaces. His lines replicate the graphs that the Tibetan carpet makers of his childhood used to map out colorful designs on self-made rugs, which were often sold from door to door. For the artist, however, they provide a controlling mechanism for the ideas and motifs in his work.

Many of Rigdol’spaintings feature flames – a reference to the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, nuns, and ordinary individuals to protest the Chinese colonization of Tibet. He took notice of the many incidents –numbering over 150 – that have occurred over the past twelve years, and translated these acts into a series of works featuring fiery streaks of red, yellow, and orange. Even more unambiguous is the artist’s performance Our People, Our Land (2011), for which he transported 20,000 kilos of soil from Tibet to Dharamsala, a city in India that has become the de facto capital of the Tibetan exile community. While the planning and shipping process took seventeen months, the performance itself spanned only three days, during which the community rekindled their connections with a native land that many have never set foot on. 

Although these works speak specifically to the Tibetan struggle, Rigdol also considers other protests against oppression around the world.‘I make lots of art about Tibet, but that doesn’t mean that I see the suffering in Palestine, Hong Kong, or Kashmir differently’, he points out.

After working primarily with the flame motif between 2011 and 2015, the artist shifted his attention towards water. In 2019, he spent many weeks in Hong Kong in preparation for a solo exhibition at Rossi & Rossi, where works from this later series were presented. That summer, mass demonstrations unfolded across the city to protest an unpopular extradition bill proposed by the local government. 

Rigdol had been thinking of water as the antithesis of fire and a symbol of healing and purity in Buddhist culture; the mantra among Hong Kong’s protestors to ‘Be Water,’ adopted from the popular icon Bruce Lee, suddenly imbued the series with new meaning. In response, Rigdol created new paintings, such as In Exile, In Hong Kong (2019), in which he appears amid undulating waves. With his feet bound to an illustration pen, he symbolically dodges soldiers’ hats with a yellow umbrella, an object that had become synonymous with protests in the city. As though to evoke the Buddhist notion of the karmic relationship between cause and consequence, he notes, ‘Freedom of expression is not only what I express, but what I allow my surroundings to express to me.’

Presently, the artist is sketching and painting clouds, a prevalent symbol of enlightenment and impermanence within Buddhist iconography. To Rigdol, however, they function as visual stand-ins for fleeting thoughts, epitomizing a personal belief: Philosophical and artistic cogitations are more important than the result to which they lead. ‘If you’re really trying to locate art and the experience of it, you have to move back– to rewind time a little bit, back to when not a single mark has been made,’ he says.‘It’s the journey, from a seed to fruit, that is interesting. In my current work, thought becomes the most important element.’

During the interview, Rigdol also explains the Tibetan word for art, gyu-tsel: a combination of gyuma – illusion or magic – and tsel – craftsmanship. For him, magic resides in the minutes and hours during which his pen or paintbrush interacts with a piece of paper or canvas, or when new concepts slowly take shape. In his words, ‘Whenever I paint, it feels almost like an out-of-body experience. It is, really, the closest thing to freedom.’

Rossi & Rossi will show works by Tenzing Rigdol at Art Basel Hong Kong and online from May 19–23, 2021. 

Vivian Chui is a writer and curator based in New York City.

Top image: Tenzing Rigdol in Queens, New York City, 2021. Photo by Caroline Tompkins for Art Basel.