A New Take on Thangka

The Tricycle office recently paid a visit to the Morgan Lehman Gallery in Manhattan to check out the work of Naomi Basu, a New Delhi–born painter who had two pieces featured in their latest show, “Twenty by Sixteen.” Drawing heavily from her experience in Menri-style thangka painting, Plane and Projection in Yab-Yum and Plane and Depth in Yab-Yum merge traditional Tibetan imagery with contemporary taste, forming a duet of paintings that balance devotion and decoration.

Basu’s work has been exhibited at several New York City galleries including Kate Oh Gallery, LAS Contemporary, and Visionary Projects. Her newest painting, Plastic Shaman/American Psycho, is currently on view at GOCA by Garde’s group exhibition “High Visibility” until August 22.

In 2018, Tricycle interviewed her teacher, Tibetan thangka master Pema Rinzin, who spoke about his early shift from a traditional Asian art background to the contemporary Western art world. Now, eight years later, Basu, who was raised in the UK, sits down with editorial assistant Kami Nguyen to discuss her journey of coming to Tibetan art from a different place.

Tricycle has been following your work for a couple of years now, and it’s grown to become more visually Buddhist-influenced over time. Can you tell me about the evolution of your artwork and your Buddhist background? Absolutely. My grandpa was Buddhist, so my brother and I grew up being familiar with some of the imagery. And he would frequently gift us Buddha statuettes, things like that. So it’s always been something that felt very familiar. I’ve been drawn to that imagery for a while just because of that familiarity and the visual richness of it. 

That influence started showing up in my art around 2022. Since then, my interest in Tibetan Buddhism specifically has deepened, and I read a lot about Tibetan Buddhism. There are specific interests within it that I have. In particular, feminine iconography, the feminine principle. In 2022, I wanted to deepen my knowledge in that area. So my art has a very solid grounding in Tibetan Buddhist iconography because I didn’t want to take from its aesthetics in a superficial way. I was researching what resources there were in New York and elsewhere, and I came across the person who is now my mentor, Pema Rinzin. He had started New York Tibetan Art Studio some years back but then stopped because he didn’t have enough space. I found him and reached out to ask if he would be willing to teach me. He explained that he doesn’t really do it anymore, but he saw some of my art and could tell that I was seriously interested in it. So he said,  “Come have a chat, and then we’ll see from there.”

So I visited his studio back in 2022 and had a very long chat with him. He told me how he teaches, and we went through a lot of his books. He has an amazing rare book collection on Tibetan art and art from that region. He showed me the kinds of pigments he used, and it was something I was super interested in getting to learn more deeply, all of the processes behind it. From then on, he was willing to teach me. I was going to him weekly for several years and learned the very basics of constructing the diagrams that you need to make a thangka painting. He starts out with just a relatively simple Buddha diagram. And he makes you do it many times. He’s made some students do it forty times before they can move on to something else, and then, eventually, you can move on to other things. That’s how it started. That’s one of the big ways I learned about the iconography.

And he also warned me against getting sucked in by what he called tourist art. There are a lot of these thangka paintings that are sold in Nepal and other places where they’re kind of just churned out like a workshop. Like a factory line. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the paintings since they’re devotional, and that’s the way you’re supposed to approach creating them. 

Were you always an artist and then started getting interested in thangka painting, or did you start making art because you were pulled to that genre? I was always making art, painting and drawing. [For several years,] I was drawing and painting from observation and making multiportraits. But [eventually] I started getting more interested in painting that wasn’t grounded so much in reality or observation. My work started getting a little bit more expressive and incorporating more fantastical or mythological elements. And then I organically developed a stronger and stronger interest in Tibetan Buddhist painting, based on my familiarity and just based on looking at more art and paying attention to what I was drawn to. I’d go to the Rubin Museum a lot. Really sad that it’s shut down. 

And as a contemporary artist and a mentee of Pema Rinzin, what sort of training do you carry into these pieces that you’re now using? I saw you left the grid lines and other very technical marks in those Yab-Yum paintings. That’s very observant of you. I wanted to not have those grid lines completely obscured by the layers that went on top because I really wanted to show the process. I think the paintings that you saw in the show are probably the examples where it’s most clear. The two paintings were heavily based on these thangka grids that were given to me by Pema. And he got them from his teacher, so they’re very specific and special to him, and to me and his students. That was layer one of the painting. I constructed the grid with pencil, and drew the deity out in pencil first and went over it with sumi. Those steps were all very much grounded in what Pema taught me. There was no difference there. 

If I just stopped there, it would have been like something I created with him. But in my contemporary practice, I’m not looking to create devotional paintings. I’d say what I’m concerned with is partially making this iconography feel more familiar or accessible to a contemporary audience who may not have any connection to Tibetan Buddhism. In general, what I want to do is create this feeling of connection to some sort of higher meaning. Have you ever read the book The Anxious Generation? 

No, I haven’t. Well, the book is about something completely different, but one of the things that that book got me thinking a lot about is this idea of [the] spiritual degradation that has happened in modern society, like contemporary living and phone-based living. Even though I’m not religious, religion fulfills a very human need, which is this connection to something gracious, something beyond just your daily life, and this feeling of purpose, this feeling of higher meaning. So as someone who isn’t religious, that’s been my own journey, feeling spiritually grounded and feeling connected in that way. That’s one thing I use my art practice for. What I would ideally want is someone who’s not connected to these traditions at all to look at the paintings and feel this kind of awe and connection to something greater than themselves. Generally, that’s what I’m trying to do, but in a way that makes this iconography feel more accessible to a general audience. 

It’s sort of like this quote that I pulled from Pema’s old interview, where he says New York in 1989 “needed a Tibetan artist to bring Tibetan art to the West.” Do you think that’s still true nowadays? Is it for this specific type of Western audience? Yeah, sort of. I’d say for him, since he is Tibetan, it makes sense for him to be bringing Tibet to the West. For me, I think the two paintings that you saw in particular are very heavily grounded in Tibetan iconography, but in general, my paintings are more loosely based in Tibetan iconography, like even this print (Milk Bath). The tiger border is based on a Tibetan meditation rug, so it’s a little bit more minor. 

And then this painting (Sky Dancer) is based on Mandarava, Padmasambhava’s consort, who in some myths has a tigress form. There are little kinds of snippets that show up in my work that aren’t so overt, but Tibetan iconography is the root that I take to try to create this totally separate iconography that is not actually religious but aims to evoke that feeling.

I love the different traditional references that you make. But you also use color in a very interesting and sort of untraditional way. Do you want to talk about that aspect of your work? In those paintings (Milk Bath and Sky Dancer) in particular, I use fluorescent paint in them. I used to really like using fluorescent paint in my painting, and I still do sometimes, but I use it more sparingly now. I think now that I have grown in my practice, I find myself being more drawn to organic-feeling materials. Mineral pigments are what I learned to use with Pema, and those produce super beautiful vibrant colors, but they’re completely natural. So I love the idea of using natural pigments more in my work. 

I do like bright colors, but as you might have seen in the recent paintings, I’ve been drawn to use color a little bit more sparingly and just let the beauty of the natural wood grain show. I do love bright color, but I think now, because I love it so much, I want to be a little bit more precious about it. And then with the fluorescent colors, I like that it’s a small way to contemporize some of the imagery that I have, because fluorescent colors just feel very contemporary.

I also thought that about the metallic gold that you use. The texture that it creates seems very contemporary. It’s interesting because the gold is gold leaf, and that raised gold leaf is more seen in Indian religion. 

And you sometimes use embroidery in your work. Can you tell me about any background you have in textile art? I don’t have any formal training in embroidery or textile art. It’s something I’ve been drawn to for a long time. It’s also something that feels very familiar to me because my family’s Bengali. They’re from West Bengal in India, and kantha embroidery originates from that region. It’s associated with quilts and repurposed fabrics. It’s seen as craft mainly, but it’s inherent to the region my family’s from. So it feels just so natural in a way. And it was something that I was drawn to because I grew up seeing a lot of kantha blankets from my grandma. My grandma used to embroider a lot as well, so that’s just something I was drawn to and decided to pick up some years ago. I bought a very cheap kit and then started doing it. Even the art that I tend to make with it is quite different in nature from the paintings. It also just feels more Indian. It probably taps into that more. I think it feels very comforting. It’s very time-consuming because I do it by hand. Those pieces just take forever to make, which is why I don’t have as many of them, but I would love to make more of those. I would love to combine some of the embroidery elements with my paintings at some point. 

Do you want to talk about the piece that’s in the current group show at GOCA by Garde? That piece is quite different from the pieces you saw in this show (“Twenty by Sixteen”). It’s not as heavily grounded in Tibetan Buddhist iconography. It is a little bit in the sense that that tiger meditation rug makes an appearance in a specific way. But the name of that painting is Plastic Shaman/American Psycho. And that painting, the tone of it, is a little bit more eerie. 

It’s basically satirizing this new age kind of spirituality. It’s a fake chakra diagram. The figure is super buff and supposed to have this kind of perfect, almost plastic, perfect body. And then there are Kama Sutra positions on the border. It basically has these elements of Eastern spirituality that appeal to certain people in the West. But it appeals to them in a superficial way [that’s] based on aesthetics. I see it as this separate kind of consumerism, or it’s morphed with consumerism and materialism where it’s like now there are these $35 yoga classes that are offered, or several-thousand-dollar meditation teacher trainings that you can sign up for, and expensive matching yoga sets, and it’s almost like spirituality is being packaged very neatly into this aesthetically appealing package. That’s generally what it’s about. And linking back to this idea that we all have some sort of yearning for this higher meaning. When you don’t have some sort of structure to that part of your life or a feeling of spiritual grounding, I think people can be more susceptible to getting sucked into those kinds of spiritual trends. It comes from desperation. I’m not mocking the people who fall into it. I know it comes from a place of needing that god-shaped hole filled. But there are people out there very ready and willing to exploit that for money.

Is that a theme that you’ll be exploring now in more of your work? It’s the first piece I’ve explored with this theme just because I’ve been mulling over this idea for some time. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, so that’s why I made this piece. I probably will explore it more in the future, but I think alongside other things, because with my work, I’m looking for ways to connect it more to contemporary experiences but also to investigate where doing that fractures. Where does it not work? Where does it go wrong? I think that piece is exploring that direction.