Tangible blessings Murals of Tibet
fter spending a solid month editing a photograph of a mural in Tibet — one of more than 200 murals he photographed — Thomas Laird began to see the faces of tantric deities from the mural in his dreams. Then, he saw the faces everywhere. “One day, I saw the face of Tara when I looked at my wife Jann Fenner,” he writes in the introduction to his new book. “‘You have now spent more time studying this image,’ I said to myself, ‘than anyone except the artists who painted it 500 years ago.’ ”
Laird’s book a limited-edition sumo-sized tome published by Taschen, is an anthology of high-definition photographs featuring hundreds of Buddhist religious murals from monasteries across Tibet. Laird discusses his book at Form and Concept on Friday, Aug. 31. The copy on display at the gallery is one of only 998 in existence, and the exhibit is part of a national tour. The book is in two volumes that retail for $12,000. In addition to the large-format book, a smaller volume contains a lengthy introduction by Laird, as well as essays by scholars of Tibetan art. The book measures 19.7 by 27.6 inches when closed and comes on its own stand, fabricated by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban from recycled materials.
“This is a record of a long process of dialogue and interrogation with the murals,” Laird said. “It was a long, long journey. The work is in the scale that it is in part because of the importance of the murals in Tibet.” Laird, who is himself a Buddhist, spent more than a decade engaged with the murals at various sites such as Drathang monastery in the Yarlung Tsangpo River Valley; Lukhang temple, the once-secret temple of Lobsang Gyatso, the fifth Dalai Lama; and Gonkar Chode monastery outside of Lhasa.
The work on the project — recreating the murals photographically on a scale that would provide viewers with a real sense of their power and majesty — didn’t begin until 2009, long before Laird had intended presenting the results of his arduous engagement with the murals in book format. Collectively, the potent and arcane imagery represents some of the largest and oldest murals in Tibet, ranging over its thousand-year Buddhist history. Laird presents the Buddhist pantheon of deities, ghostly demons, humans and animals, and historical figures — as well as a multitude of scenes depicting instruction in the faith’s esoteric practices — in an impressive layout.
Laird constructed the images by digitally piecing together numerous source photos often shot in darkened temple rooms, where conditions for photographing were not ideal. Early on, he worked with a team to light and photograph each mural, some of which were more than 10 feet across. Before the work really began, he took a prototype stitched together from slides he took in 1992 to Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and current Dalai Lama, in order to get his impression and guidance on the task of preserving the murals for prosperity by photographing them.
Many of the actual murals in Tibet had been used over the centuries in the training and education not only of Buddhist monks, but of previous dalai lamas. The current Dalai Lama has remained in exile since the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959. Even though he had never seen many of the murals represented in the book, the Dalai Lama nevertheless could explicate their meaning from just a photograph.
“When the Dalai Lama is speaking to an image, even though he has not seen that particular mural in Tibet, he’s inevitably talking about the content, the narratives — not about the art
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