Review: From Buddhas to busses, icons to iPods, Wrightwood 659 shows Himalayan artworks then and now

Sonam Dolma Brauen has surrounded a towering 13th century copper stupa, a type of Buddhist shrine, with 200 white clay mounds arranged in concentric circles. These tsatsas, or small devotional sculptures recently made by participants and each containing a wish for peace, are modeled after the mold carried by the artist’s family during their escape from Tibet when she was 6 years old.

Her “Field of Wishes” perfectly epitomizes the concept of “Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now,” an exhibition that pairs art by 28 living artists of the Himalayas and its diaspora with traditional religious objects from Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and surrounding areas. The historical objects belong to the collection of New York’s Rubin Museum, which curated the show as the final one in its physical space before its doors closed last fall. It’ll be on view in Chicago at Wrightwood 659 through mid-February.

“Reimagine” is full of artists and ideas that will be new to most viewers, with bygone Himalayan art being underrepresented in this city, contemporary Himalayan art not at all. The new work runs the gamut from manga to giant mirrored mandalas, junk assemblage to fine art photography, digital avatars to upcycled fabric sculptures. Alas, the historic statues and pictures end up being mostly overshadowed; it is clear they are here primarily in service of their newer, bigger, and flashier descendants, to provide cultural context but rarely to take center stage. We mostly like big, bold, clever things today, and here they are, outshining their esoteric, modest, sacred inspirations.

Fortunately, there is plenty worth looking at, even at the expense of gems like “The Demoness of Tibet,” a strange early 20th century painting that depicts the legendary taming of a bothersome spirit by pinning her down with Buddhist temples between cosmic mountain ranges. Her supine form is hard to notice in a room dominated by a full-size herd of ghostly riderless horses, tenderly woven from willow branches, old silk saris, and raffia by New York-born Losel Yauch based on her grandfather’s stories of growing up in eastern Tibet. Yauch’s horses are scrappily beautiful elegies for a place long lost to time and exile, but there are horses of other names here, too, including five that gallop confidently out of a 34-foot-long cascade of used prayer flags in the museum’s atrium. “The Windhorse (lungta)” was fashioned by Asha Kama Wangdi with members of VAST, a youth arts organization he co-founded in Bhutan, from the faded flags that accumulate on mountaintops, unintended litter whose spiritual work the artist intends to continue through creative reuse.

Wangdi’s critical, sincere, and spectacular engagement with traditional materials echoes throughout “Reimagine,” notably in an installation by Sneha Shrestha, a Nepalese artist who goes by the name IMAGINE. Against a brilliant yellow graffiti mural of Nepali script, she displays clusters of small metal ritual objects—offering bowls, bells, oil lamps, ewers, buddhas—some borrowed from the Rubin collection, others from family members. Purposely shown without labels, the objects are easy enough to tell apart, the museological sheen of disuse contrasting with the spirited stains of current worship.

There’s not a lot of humor in “Reimagine,” but those who yuk it up do it well. Inspired by a pair of fanciful metalwork temple lions, Shushank Shresta poses lustrous ceramic likenesses of the creatures that guard his own home, pet dogs named Zinc and Caolin, as goofy as their 19th century ancestors are fierce. His “Uber Rat,” a taxicab-rodent with iPods in its ears, cartoonishly updates the lowly critter who serves as the elephant god Ganesha’s vehicle of choice. Shraddha Shrestha also revamps religious imagery, turning Hindu goddesses into adorable Powerpuff Girls versions of themselves. Just imagine the potential animated children’s series, where cute but fiery deities fight for outcasts, ensure fruitful harvests, guide humanity, and bestow profound wisdom! The adult version is already a go: Shanghai-born LuYang cosplays Tibetan Buddhist philosophies in gothic sci-fi getups for her narrative video “DOKU.” Its title derives from a phrase meaning “we are born alone, and we die alone,” a goth mantra if ever there was one.

As seems to be the case everywhere these days, there is plenty of figurative painting in “Reimagine,” much of it very fine. Standouts include Jasmine Rajbhandari’s “Compassion,” a scene of Buddhist and Hindu gods attending to war-injured women and children with water bottles and oxygen tanks, rendered by the Nepalese artist in heroically brash colors. In a pair of palimpsestic paintings on used tarp food sacks by Tenzin Gyurmey Dorjee, a Tibetan refugee born and raised in India, people jostle to get on a bus, a statue is repatriated, a monkey brandishes pistols, mother and son agonize over buying forbidden buffalo meat, animal masks are worn, and Gandhi gazes down on it all. Pema “Tintin” Tshering, of Bhutan, offers a magnificent modernization of the figure of the mahasiddha, who obtains enlightenment unconventionally through passionate practice of a chosen discipline. Arrayed around a gigantic buddha amid sublimely stylized clouds, waves, and decorative patterns, his little mahasiddhas wield such decidedly current tools as a camcorder, stethoscope, soccer ball, guitar, and, of course, those of Tshering himself, a paintbrush and palette. There’s even a laptop represented, like the one I’m typing devotedly on right now.

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

“Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now” runs through Feb. 15, 2025, at Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood Ave.; more information at 773-437-6601 and  wrightwood659.org