Yishen (Sonam Dolma Brauen)
Details:
Sonam Dolma Brauen
Yishen
Acrylic on canvas
47.2x31.5 in
2015
Sonam Dolma has been working for several years on ""Yishen"". This is a Chinese word, which the Tibetan-born artist has chosen for her latest cycle of paintings. It means ""leaving one's body"". For this very personal work, the artist, who came to Switzerland when she was 19, has engaged intensively with the self-immolations in her native country. More than 150 mostly young Tibetan monks and nuns have set fire to themselves, to protest as living torches against the increasing repression of their people by the Chinese.
In her paintings, Sonam Dolma takes up this signal of desperation, which is given scarcely any attention in the West, and carefully tracks down what remains of these people who have gone up in flames. Nothing blatant is to be made out, and one seeks in vain for elements of Tibetan art, even though the artist has dealt with subjects of her country of origin in her earlier works. She uses acrylic colors, because with these she needs less time for working. Through this immediacy, the alchemical process of abstraction is intensified and forlornness and faith equally become visible.
About the artist:
Born in 1953, Sonam Dolma Brauen spent the first six years of her life in Tibet. Due to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, she fled across the Himalayan mountains with her family to India in 1959. From the age of seven, Sonam joined her mother in working in road construction to support their family. She began attending school for the first time at age 13, learning English and basic studies at an English Medium School in India. At the age of 19, Sonam and her mother emigrated to Switzerland, where she married Swiss anthropologist and curator Martin Brauen. They have two children: Yangzom, actress, film director and author and Tashi, artist.
Sonam began her art training in 1990, studying at Art School Bern with Arthur Freuler, Leopold Schropp, Mariann Bissegger, and most significantly, Serge Fausto Sommer. The majority of her paintings are abstract. They are illusory appearances following the Buddhist belief that all appearance is ultimately illusory.
After moving to New York City in 2008, where she lived for four years, she began working more with installations using materials and objects like used monk robes from Tibet and India, plaster, empty ammunition shells. Provocative works utilize teeth and used ammunition in pieces that comment on contemporary society.
Her installations express ongoing themes that preoccupy her: Machismo and its relation to power, money and war; and the political situation in her home country Tibet.
Her work has been shown worldwide alongside artists such as Bill Viola and Zhang Huan, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith and Robert Longo among others. One of her most important installations, My Father's Death, is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
Website:
www.sonambrauen.net