The Brooklyn Rail

When the Rubin Museum of Art closes its doors in October, transitioning from a traditional museum to a “global model” that does not include a physical location, New York will say goodbye to a cultural mainstay in Chelsea for the past twenty years. The jewel box museum has presented generations of visitors an introduction to the art of the Himalayas, as well as a sanctuary space in which to view and contemplate it. All of which makes for an even more compelling reason to visit the Rubin’s final exhibition, Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now before it ends October 6. A wide-ranging and ambitious project, the show presents fifty contemporary artworks made by nearly three dozen artists from the Himalayan region and its diaspora.

Rather than isolating the contemporary from the classical, co-curators Michelle Bennett Simorella of the Rubin, Tsewang Lhamo, a founder of the Yakpo Collective, and Roshan Mishra, Director of Taragaon Next in Kathmandu have integrated them, nudging to life a spirited dialogue between the historical and the post-millennial, between artifact and objet d’art. Seeing the recent work in context with the antiquities reminds the viewer that though we in the West tend to put art on a pedestal—both literally and metaphorically—the same is not necessarily true for artists of the Himalayas. This entwined installation aims to return works of art to an integral, everyday part of life.

Many of the participating artists reference works in the permanent collection, reinventing meanings by reworking established cultural markers. Bidhata K C’s installation, Out of Emptiness (2023) is a prime example. The interactive sculpture is composed of large tin cans set on a wheel that encircles a central spindle. K C’s work refers to the late 19th-century Tibetan prayer wheel that sits nearby, a Buddhist ritual item that is common in Tibet, as well as the artist’s native country of Nepal. Prayer wheels are meant to be turned while reciting a mantra, spinning the positive vibrations of the user’s message outward into the world in order to spread the blessing quickly and widely. The earlier model is positioned atop an ornate, decorated cabinet of inlaid wood; K C’s version is of humbler materials that nonetheless are relevant to contemporary life in the Himalayas. On travels through Nepal, K C came across a number of handmade prayer wheels also made from emptied tin cans, which are often left behind by tourists trekking Mt. Everest and other treacherous, regional mountaintop peaks. One can’t help but think about the colonialist inclination to conquer and how these actions invariably alter both native cultures and environments. Reclaiming this trash and using it to create objects of reverence undermines the influence of the subjugator, and shifts power to the meaning of this spiritual totem. At the Rubin, visitors are encouraged to circle the sculpture in clockwise fashion (as is customary) and spin each of the tin cans in turn while sending out a mantra or prayer of one’s own.

Ecological concerns are a throughline for many of the works on view. Kunsang Gyatso, another Nepalese artist who is now based in New York, devotes an exquisite shrine to the tangerine in Goddess of Tangerine (2023), installed beside the Rubin’s famed Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, a permanent installation that occupies an entire gallery. In Gyatso’s shrine, shriveled tangerine rinds sit behind protective glass set within a bright orange altarpiece adorned by a large painting and carved foam relics. In Gyatso’s imagining, the common fruit has disappeared from earth, gone extinct due to irreversible climate changes that have made the planet uninhabitable for it. Despite the pungency of the sumptuous orange color, the viewer is afforded a sobering reminder of the fragility of all life in our catastrophic climate age, and how the existence of even ordinary organisms like grocery store fruit sit in precarious balance.

A number of works use newer technologies to plumb the tropes of Himalayan art. A video by celebrated artist Chitra Ganesh, Silhouette in the Graveyard, from the artist’s 2018 series “The Scorpion Gesture” melds Buddhist iconography with vibrant animation and images pulled from contemporaneous news sources. Ganesh’s video introduces viewers who may be less familiar with Himalayan art to its symbols in a relatable way. Prominently centering Maitreya, or the “Future Buddha,” Silhouette in the Graveyard invokes the possible chaos of a new age heralded by images including massive crowds of desperate political refugees and angry protesters. Elsewhere, Indian-born, New York based Tenzin Mingur Paldron’s short documentary video, The Gentle Buddha Who Cuts Through Ignorance and Duality (Coming Out Trans to my Father) (2023) chronicles the artist’s communication with their elderly father as they relay their gender transition. Paired nearby to this video is a Tibetan Manjushri figure, the bodhisattva of wisdom that displays both male and female characteristics.

Running through all floors of the museum, Bhutanese artist Asha Kama Wangdi’s site-specific installation, The Windhorse (Lungta) (2024), snakes around the central staircase. A centerpiece composed of hundreds of discarded prayer flags, Wangdi constructed the installation in collaboration with members of the Voluntary Artists Studio (VAST), a non-profit arts education and collaborative center he co-founded in his native country. The rippling flags, which the artist sourced in Bhutan, are meant to disseminate prayers and mantras, but are now in such abundance that they frequently end up as litter. Here, Wangdi repurposes them for an installation that reinjects the cloth with its former dignity. The artwork is punctuated throughout by sculptures of Lungta, the horse who signifies good fortune and whose likeness is often imprinted on prayer flags. Standing at the bottom of the staircase, one can gaze up into the colorful folds of the sculpture and become lost in the material; each floor of the museum likewise offers a unique vantage point of the work, so that it constantly changes as one progresses through the upper floors. In this way, with its surprising shifts, forward-looking twists on classical themes, and symbolically-charged materials, The Windhorse (Lungta) is an apt representative of the exhibition as whole, and fitting coda to the physical space of the Rubin Museum of Art.