Gonkar Gyatso

In a timely exhibition of a new series of works, created from stickers, trinkets, and other ephemera, Tibetan-born artist Gonkar Gyatso explores the impact of global mass-media culture on his homeland’s traditional identity, and offers a comment on both Chinese and American hegemony. The collage Zhong Guo Da Ma (Big Momma China) (all works 2014) feels especially relevant. The collage consists of four stylized Chinese characters that spell out its title. The words, made of aluminum and Plexiglas on Dibond, appear on diamond-shaped paper backgrounds. Each composition is adorned with the kind of gaudy bric-a-brac that might typically feature the sort of “Made in China” stickers bordering the piece.

Certain motifs recur throughout: champagne flutes, rubber ducks, and dice among them—representing, perhaps, the hypocrisy, immaturity, and unpredictability associated with the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership. Similar works spell out other expressions that have been popular in the Chinese mass media, such as Di Gou You (Gutter Oil) and Lao Hu (Tiger)—the latter referring to a member of the nation’s ruling class—and the works’ import derives from Gyatso’s selection and juxtaposition of these phrases.

America doesn’t get off lightly either; the words “Drone,” “FML,” and “Prism” appear side by side, references to the military and to Internet slang that slyly subvert each other, their frames ornamented with a gold-painted bald-eagle crest, Barbie dolls, and red-white-and-blue bunting, respectively. Gyatso’s works, with their color and bling, might seem playful at first glance, but they’re also the result of a serious and long-term meditation on the future of a modern Tibet, which faces repression and conflict on one hand and the shallow misappropriation of its cultural legacy on the other.