Grounding: Earth Pigments between Tibet and Singapore
A guest post by our studio assistant Shane (@agamem.no)
Hello all :)
In this week’s letter we invite Shane, our trusty (and sometimes shady) Gen Z studio assistant to share about their encounters with earth pigments and artmaking in Tibet, as well as some of their reflections on labour and land stewardship.
It’s impossible to travel to Tibet and not come across a thangka. One of the most iconic Tibetan art forms, thangkas are paintings on cotton or silk, often depicting sacred Buddhist themes. Peer into any thangka workshop and you would be struck by a dazzling vision: myriad deities, luminous and otherworldly, gaze out from paintings mounted in frames or hung on scrolls. Or perhaps your eyes would light on a mandala, a diagram of the cosmos so intricately detailed that it’s hard to comprehend that they were rendered by human hands. Look a little closer and you’d see the artisans themselves — hunched over their canvases, they labour over precise geometric proportions, bringing these scenes to life with each painstaking stroke.
Thangkas adorn the walls of both religious sites and private homes; they are enshrined in museums and clustered in tourist souvenir stores. Due to their ubiquity, I had admittedly tuned out the sheer number of thangkas surrounding me. Having arrived in Lhasa a few days prior, I was still shaking off the last dregs of altitude sickness, and finally felt robust enough to walk around Barkhor street. There seemed to be nothing especially noteworthy about this particular thangka workshop, until I spotted something familiar: pigments being ground in a mortar and pestle, much like the ones we use in Wild Dot. My curiosity piqued, I squinted into the shop and saw what was — to me, at least — the holy grail: an earth pigment display! Tucked unobtrusively in the back, the minerals sat raised on plinths, their rough and rugged surfaces a distinct counterpoint to the delicate paintings surrounding them. The artists, it seemed, didn’t share much of my enthusiasm. Despite being slightly bemused at this random tourist interrogating them about their pigments in halting, broken Chinese, they sportingly answered my questions.
Much of thangka paintings’ iconic palette come from the earth — present in the rich geology of the Tibetan Plateau, these colours have come to be emblematic of the region’s aesthetic. Traditionally, paints were derived from natural sources: artists utilised mineral pigments and organic dyes or lakes, with hide glue as a binder (Jackson 75). The advent of modernisation has seen such natural pigments gradually falling out of use, with synthetic pigments taking their place as a more easily accessible and cost-effective alternative. Nonetheless, some workshops continue choosing to work with natural pigments, citing the desire to uphold the artform’s heritage. In Chapter 6 of Tibetan Thangka Painting: Methods and Materials, David and Janice Jackson expound on the many types of earth pigments used, and I’ve identified the samples below to the best of my ability:
From left to right: turquoise, yellow mica (or orpiment?), white clay, azurite (blue, but often occurs with green malachite), red sandstone, iron oxide, yellow ochre, pyrite.
Powdered earth pigments. The rightmost jar contains the ingredients for hide glue, the primary binder this shop uses.
There’s just something so alluring about the knowledge that a thangka painting’s vivid colours could stem from something as simple as earth; the idea that this sacred artform, steeped in centuries of history, is also deeply tied to the land. In contrast to Singapore, whose relatively uniform geological landscape lends itself to a rather limited array of colours (brown, grey, yellow, and red, anyone?), Tibet's mineralogical diversity and its applications in painting set off fireworks in my geologist-and-art-historian brain. Indeed, it’s easy to be taken with this romanticised vision — every year, tourists flock to Tibet for its religious profundity and unspoiled natural beauty, seeking some sort of spiritual experience on the Roof of the World. Thangka paintings, amongst other souvenirs boasting sacred significances, are a means for individuals to bring a shining piece of Tibet back home with them. This is a romantic vision, but a dangerous one. In her essay “Collecting Tibet: Dreams and Realities”, Emma Martin notes how popular imaginings of Tibet “represent [it] through wholly religious narratives” (60). Inhabiting an essentially “‘timeless’ and ‘nameless’ space” (62), Tibet becomes a mythicised ideal stripped of its fraught historical and political contexts, especially in relation to colonial exploitation under the CCP state.
Earth pigments and thangkas, seemingly innocuous, could stock cans of worms enough to fill an aisle at a supermarket. As alluded to earlier, the use of natural pigments harkens to tradition and a sense of “authenticity”. However, this is problematised when considering the state’s appropriation of Tibetan culture to bolster its soft power and justify its continued sovereignty over the region (Tibet Watch 8–11). With tourism to Tibet at an all time high and growing year on year, deep-seated cultural traditions are increasingly commodified, with items being churned out for the hungry consumer market. Beyond this, the topic of geology also brings to mind the state’s extraction and exploitation of Tibet’s mineral resources, which has caused great damage not only to the environment, but also the locals’ very lives (Lafiitte 53–91). None of these facts detract from the beauty of Tibetan art, nor do they mean that we are not allowed to appreciate it altogether. But when we let this romanticised narrative become the only one heard, we are allowing it to drown out the voices of the Tibetan people and obscure the injustices which they still struggle against today.
Singapore is hardly comparable to Tibet by any means, lacking as it does the environmental, social, cultural, and political conditions that shape Tibet’s struggles. However, in Wild Dot’s work, the use of earth pigments in Tibetan art offers much food for thought. It raises some fundamental questions surrounding working with the land: what should our relationship with nature be like, and how should our practice and processes reflect this? At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn post, I have developed a greater appreciation of environmental stewardship during my time with Wild Dot. This, along with other buzzwords like “sustainability” and “eco-friendly”, are often bandied about without a concrete sense of what they mean. However, after having worked with nature for some time, I’m beginning to understand that environmental stewardship is, at its core, an ethos of responsibility and care for the environment. Nature is not a tool to be used, or a resource to be harnessed; it provides us with the materials for our artmaking, and we nurture it in return. Admittedly, it took me a while to grasp the scope of this responsibility. It never quite occurred to me just how much time has to be sunk into menial tasks, especially in the garden where there are a thousand small steps in ensuring the plants thrive. There were also a few times when I wondered why we go through the ordeal of producing everything from scratch, when items like wooden paint palettes could easily be bought off Shopee, prefabricated and packaged for our convenience.
But what can I say, I’m a consumerist girl in a late capitalist world: I’ve grown too used to being able to buy anything at the click of a button, and I chase the dopamine of instant gratification like a dog after a bone. However, this mode of slow working I’ve found at Wild Dot has made me realise how alienated we really are from the world around us. We are surrounded by a profusion of things, but don’t see their origins, production processes, or consequences, both human and environmental. With nature relegated to the margins of urban society, the world’s gradual-but-quickening degradation remains conveniently and reassuringly out of sight. This sidelining of the natural world makes it even harder for people to truly understand its value, much less find the motivation to take action against systems so entrenched. For me, natural paint making — and all its attendant labours — is not only a means to create art more sustainably, but also a process by which I can regain a sense of connection to the world around me. Nurturing life from soil, pruning and harvesting, crafting and creating, returning what’s left to the earth and starting it all anew — being with this process at every step made me see where things come from and where things end up, sensitising me to what sustainability and regeneration entail.
It would be remiss to suggest that it’s possible to even live a true sustainable lifestyle. We are only individuals after all, and the webs of consumerism run too deep for us to shake off ourselves. We will always be using plastic, or generating waste, or online shopping. Despite this, though, we can still do what we can with the hand we’ve been dealt, and as more people become aware of the environmental crises the planet faces, maybe one day things will change.
Bibliography
“Culture Clash: Tourism in Tibet.” Tibet Watch, 2014, https://freetibet.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/culture_clash_-_tourism_in_tibet.pdf.
Jackson, David Paul, and Janice A. Jackson. “Pigments.” Tibetan Thangka Painting: Methods and Materials, Serindia, 2007, pp. 75–90.
Lafitte, Gabriel. Spoiling Tibet: China and Resource Nationalism on the Roof of the World. Zed Books, 2021.
Martin, Emma. “Collecting Tibet: Dreams and Realities.” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 30, 2017, pp. 59–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44841227.