[The project in Lo
Manthang has stirred debate. Some scholars of Tibetan art assert that the
painters in Lo Manthang are altering important historical murals and jeopardizing
scholarship by painting new images atop sections of walls where the original
images have been destroyed. Those involved in the project argue that residents
want complete artwork in their houses of worship.]
By Edward Wong
 |
Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times
A local woman worked on a historic mural at Thubchen
Monastery
in Lo Manthang, Nepal.
|
LO MANTHANG, Nepal — Dozens of painters sat atop scaffolding that soared toward the
roof of an ancient monastery. With a swipe of their brushes, colors appeared
that gave life to the Buddha. Gold for the skin. Black for the eyes. Orange for
the robes.
They worked by dim
portable electric lights. Dusty statues of Tibetan Buddhist deities gazed on.
From openings in the roof, a few shafts of sunlight fell through the 35 wooden
pillars in the main chamber of the enormous Thubchen Monastery, the same
edifice that had awed Michel Peissel, the explorer of Tibet,
when he visited a half-century ago.
“In Nepal, no one knows
how to do this, so we have to learn,” said Tashi Gurung, 34, a painter
participating in what is one of the most ambitious Tibetan art projects in the
Himalayas.
Financed by the American Himalayan Foundation, the project
is aimed at restoring to a vibrant state the artwork of two of the three main
monasteries and temples in Lo Manthang, the walled capital of the once-forbidden kingdom of Mustang. Bordering
Tibet in the remote trans-Himalayan desert, Mustang is an important enclave of
Tibetan Buddhist culture.
Tibetan leaders,
including the Dalai Lama, say their culture is under assault in the vast
Tibetan regions ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, which occupied central
Tibet in 1951. That, along with the encroachment of modernity, means that the
act of preserving or reviving Tibetan art is arguably more important than at
any time since China’s devastating Cultural Revolution.
The project in Lo
Manthang has stirred debate. Some scholars of Tibetan art assert that the
painters in Lo Manthang are altering important historical murals and jeopardizing
scholarship by painting new images atop sections of walls where the original
images have been destroyed. Those involved in the project argue that residents
want complete artwork in their houses of worship.
The project’s director
is Luigi Fieni,
39, an Italian who first came to work here after graduating from an art
conservation program in Rome. Mr. Fieni and other Westerners have trained local
residents to work on the art, creating a 35-member team that includes 20 women
and one monk (though there was initial reluctance from local men to tolerate
the women’s participation).
There are three major
religious buildings in Lo Manthang. Two of them are monasteries, and one is a
temple traditionally used for ceremonies by the royal family. Their thick, red
walls rise among alleyways that wind past whitewashed mud-brick homes. An
80-year-old king and his family reside in a palace in the town center. The town
was founded in the 14th century, and the oldest religious buildings date to the
15th century.
Much of the Tibetan art
here reflects a Newari influence, which comes from the Katmandu Valley.
Centuries ago, Newari artisans were welcomed by some Tibetan rulers, especially
those who followed the Sakya branch of Tibetan Buddhism, which is common
throughout Mustang.
The art project began in
1999 with the cleaning of murals in Thubchen Monastery, after an initial round
of architectural reconstruction. Then the painters moved on to Jampa Temple, where
the dark main chamber has a towering statue of Maitreya, the future Buddha.
The walls on the first
floor are adorned with remarkably detailed mandalas, a form of geometric art
considered a representation of the cosmos. Here, Mr. Fieni decided to deviate
from the initial approach taken at Thubchen. He wanted his team, rather than do
purely restoration, to paint sections of the walls where an original mural had
disappeared or been destroyed.
The painters would then
try to recreate those pictures based on tradition and on what had been painted
elsewhere in the chamber. Mr. Fieni also consulted with monks to ask what
pictures they wanted on the walls. In 2010, the team returned to Thubchen to
adopt the new approach and paint large sections.
“Call this painting, not
restoration or conservation,” Mr. Fieni said. He added that this method helped
restore the living nature of the artwork, as opposed to what he called the
Western “colonialism” approach of preserving the old above all else.
“When we arrived, we
started working following the Westerners’ theories of conservation,” Mr. Fieni
said. “Then, while working and living within the community, I changed my point
of view, and I decided to follow the needs of the culture I was working for. So
I decided to start reconstructing the missing areas.”
Once taught how to
paint, local residents decide how they want to decorate the monasteries, Mr.
Fieni said.
“All the other
conservation projects I’ve seen are Westerners doing the artwork, locals
fetching clay,” he said. “This is the first one where we train the locals.”
There were challenges.
Painters in higher castes initially did not want artists in lower castes
sitting on the scaffolding above them. And there were religious beliefs to
accommodate. At the buildings, an abbot used a mirror to absorb the spirits of
the gods in the statues and murals before the painting began; after the project
is completed, the abbot is expected to release the spirits from the mirror so
they can return.
Mr. Fieni’s approach to
restoring the temples and monasteries has been contested. Christian Luczanits,
a senior curator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, which displays
Himalayan art, said he blanched at what he saw when he traveled to Mustang in
2010 and 2012. Mr. Luczanits said that sufficient scholarship had not been done
into the original paintings. Now, because of the new painting, any scholar
wanting to study the originals must look at photographs rather than rely on what
is present in the temple, he said.
“The temple now after
restoration cannot be understood anymore without the previous documentation,”
Mr. Luczanits said in an interview.
Last year, he made his
opinion known at a contentious meeting at the palace in Lo Manthang. Among
those present were Mr. Fieni, an abbot, the prince of Mustang and
representatives of the American Himalayan Foundation, which gives financial
support to many development projects in Mustang. (The foundation’s president,
Erica Stone, said the total being spent on the building renovations in Lo
Manthang alone was $2.58 million. An additional $768,000 had been spent for
restoring the town wall and constructing drainage.)
There was vigorous
debate, and the royal family and the abbot both backed Mr. Fieni. The
ceremonial prince, Jigme Singi Palbar Bista, said in an interview that the
buildings “are renovated very well.”
Thoroughly painting
Thubchen Monastery would take another three to four years, but the project’s
budget will run out this year. Mr. Fieni estimated there was a total of about
3,660 square feet of wall space to paint.
He said he was thinking
about moving on to restoration projects in India or Myanmar with some of the
painters he had trained here. In 2006 and 2007, he took five of them to work
with him at a Tibetan monastery in Sichuan Province, in western China, a
project that was never completed because the Chinese authorities shut down
access to the area after a Tibetan uprising in 2008.
