Kesang Lamdark

Kesang Lamdark’s life and work has been punctuated by a series of dramatic starts, shifts and turns that, radiating from Switzerland, have played out on a global scale. Such movements make little sense viewed in a logical or progressive sequence, but only begin to gel when set in a more fantastic zone – a doppelgänger of the everyday, an Alpine mirror of Tibet perhaps – where, like the folding tectonic plates that, millennia ago, created this mountain chain, time and space turn back on themselves. On this rarefied level, a state of being may well exist in which art, and the selfhood it expresses, move intuitively, untrammelled by convention or ambition.
Kesang has spent most of his life in Switzerland, his context has remained fluid as a means of survival. He has refused to be categorised in any single group. He has therefore managed to flip, without visible friction, from the gnomic towers of Zurich6 to the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan, back to the mountain retreats of Switzerland or Tibet, and then on, and on, to artists’ studios, galleries, bars, clubs and dives, wherever they may be found. You could say that this propensity for shape shifting expresses his essential “Tibetanness”.

Born in 1963 in Dharamsala, India, Kesang Lamdark grew up in Switzerland. His plastic sculptures and mirrored lightboxes are evidence of his displaced and multicultural upbringing. His search for an appropriate cultural space ultimately turned inwards, as he came to understand and reconnect with his Tibetan heritage while living in the West.