Hong Kong youth on learning thangka: harder than imagined

By:China Tibet Online
update:August 10,2018

Aug.10,2018--“From wearing out the cloth to applying color and shading, every step is very fine. It takes years of learning, accumulating, and cultivating skills in order to draw a beautiful thangka,” Jiang Yuyi from Hong Kong said in a recent interview, saying that painting thangka is more difficult than she had imagined.

The 2018 “Thangka Workshop”, a mainland internship program for junior thangka artists, was launched on July 7 in Tongren County, Qinghai Province. 13 students from Hong Kong studied thangka painting over 40 days at the Tongren County Regong Painting Institute under Nyangben, a thangka art master and dean of the Regong Painting Institute.

Aug.10,2018--A student from HK is grinding the paint.

Aug.10,2018--A student from HK is painting Tkangka carefully.

Tongren County in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, is known as “Regong”, meaning “the Golden Valley”, and has a reputation as China’s “hometown of Tibetan painting”. Regong Art, of which thangka is the leading art form, was listed as a UNESCO human intangible cultural heritage in 2009.

“The most impressive thing for me was grinding the paint and wearing out the cloth for the canvas. It takes a few days to do these, and everyone’s fingers got blistered. This gave me a deeper understanding of thangka,” Jiang Yuyi said. She is currently drawing her graduation work “Green Tara”. Although the teacher said the overall drawing was good, she is not as happy with it: “Compared with the master, I still have a long way to go in the details.” she said.

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