Bowers Museum: Sacred Realms

The Bowers Museum presents Sacred Realms: Buddhist Paintings by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan from the Gayle and Edward P. Roski Collection.   The nine immense paintings shown in this exhibition are all the work of one extraordinary Buddhist monk named Shashi Dhoj Tulachan, a second generation thangka artist living in Tuksche, a remote village located in Mustang, Nepal’s northernmost district adjacent to Tibet.

Shashi Dhoj Tulachan has devoted much of his life to the restoration of a nearby 16th century gompa (Tibetan monastery) known as the Chhairo Gompa.

The paintings in this collection are not thangkas in the traditional sense. Thangkas are usually much smaller and are rolled on canvas so that they can be easily transported and hung anywhere for teaching. The thangkas exhibited here are similar in size to mural paintings found in monasteries. These paintings also deviate from the rules for the creation of a thangka where the exact use of color, shape, proportion, characteristics and qualities of the imagery are all strictly regulated.