Interview: Tenzing Rigdol

The way colour is used in our environment can have a lasting impact on our lives, as Tibetan artist Tenzing Rigdol explains.

“My childhood reminds me of my mother’s favorite colour – purple! She would have me and my younger brother all covered in purple clothes. Even the sweaters, gloves and mufflers that she arduously wove were all in purple. So the colour purple has become the colour of my childhood and I used it as the base for this painting [Mandala Of Kids, 2008, see below]. It is cold clean and innocent. I think that we all have similar traces of it.”
  

Mandala of Kids, 2008, Acrylic on canvas 136 x 134 cm (53_ x 52_ in) © Tenzing Rigdol

Five facts about Tenzing Rigdol
1. He was born in 1982 in Nepal.
2. In 2002 he and his parents were granted political asylum in the USA.
3. He is experienced in the traditional Tibetan arts of sand painting and butter sculpture.
4. He studied art and art history at the Univsersity of Colorado, USA.
5. Talking about his sculpture This Is Not A Chair he explained: “I wondered if I could change the functionality of a clearly defined object by adding other values to it. In this case, I covered the chair with Tibetan Buddhist scriptures and asked myself if this could still be a chair? Perhaps it is a chair which one cannot use to sit on, or maybe someone can sit on it while others cannot, depending on their own mental disposition.”

The Exhibition "Experiment with Forms: Tenzing Rigdol" is at Rossi & Rossi Ltd, London, from Feb 11th to March 27th 2009.