PUNTSOK TSERING (D)

Puntsok Tsering was born on July 10, 1976 in Düchung in central Tibet.                                            
After graduating school he studied traditional Tibetan painting in Lhasa under a private master teacher. At the same time he received instruction from his grandfather, who was famous for his Tibetan calligraphy and poetry.
At age seventeen Puntsok Tsering had already begun teaching Tibetan at a private school in Lhasa. He studied classical poetry and Tibetan literature at the University of Lhasa for one year. He has lived in Germany since 1998. At present he lives in Düsseldorf, paints, composes poems and works teaching Tibetan. He is a member of the Kailash Artists' Group.

 Puntsok Tsering's works reflect not only his process of coming to terms with his own personal history, but also with western and eastern societal realities. Although Puntsok Tsering grew up in communist-dominated Tibet he had the good fortune of experiencing a "classical" Tibetan training in his family.
This traditionally includes mastering different writing styles, poetic composition and the memorization of classical texts. But he also felt attracted to western culture starting at a very early age.

Since settling in Germany he has been moving continually between these two cultural spheres. He has become a kind of wanderer between both worlds. Thus he follows with great interest the cultural developments of exile Tibetans, where new poetry, literature and music are to be found; but the new currents emerging in Tibet itself in spite of the Chinese occupation are what interest him most of all.
In addition he is also studying classical and modern  poetry and contemporary culture here in Germany.

 All of these cultural influences - but also the personal theme of his own identity, of being both familiar and foreign at the same time - are reflected in his collages. For these he uses handmade German, Japanese or Himalayan paper, fragments of brochures, newspapers - which he layers, lines up, covers with each other and then writes over with Tibetan poems, words or signs. Here he does not draw primarily on Tibetan-Buddhist symbolism, but rather on the"normal" signs and signals of every-day life which he then contrasts with statements from Buddhist epistemology, for example.

 Each of his pictures contains its own story/history/the story of its development, which must be explained to the viewer. Therefore each work is accompanied by a translation of the Tibetan texts in German.