 Hi everybody thanks for the introduction. As Laura said I'll talk about the painting as a body in the Tibetan Buddhist context which is of course the area of my studies and along with kind of Indian Buddhist art. And so what we see on the map here is a map of the Himalayas with its kind of main sites and the cultural connections in the west towards Kashmir, in the south towards Kathmandu and Nepal and the Indian plains and in the northeast towards the central plains of China and in the north towards Central Asia. And I came to this particular topic of the talk by seeing this painting in the Rubin Museum of Art in the museum I worked at until I kind of joined SOAS in 2014. And it's quite a fascinating portrait of a Ningma school hierarchy that we can't really identify so a religious kind of specialist so to speak with his attributes and his ritual tools on the desk. But what was surprising is when we look at the details and actually turn the painting around that he on the back of the painting he's actually represented from the back. And this of course triggered the question in how many paintings or what do paintings have at the back and what does that mean in terms of the interpretation of the painting as a whole. And of course this immediately kind of tells you why I call it the painting as a body because you essentially have here the painting representing the body of the teacher in its entirety on the front side from the front and on the back from the back. And so this would be the overview of that. And so I was starting essentially surveying different paintings and eventually that ended up in an exhibition that was called the flip side focusing on the backs of paintings. And it's actually quite common that the back are decorated and that they have a meaning that complements what is represented on the front. And we can see this on the basis of this mid 19th century Bhutanese painting of a goddess called Vajrayogini that when turned around is particularly revealing because in this particular case the cotton canvas that was used for the painting is transparent and we can actually see quite a lot of the relationship of what we find on the back in relation to the figures in the front. And so what we have here on the back is that for each figure we have three syllables that are essentially symbolizing the purification of the materials the the painting is made in and it's located at the forehead neck and heart of each of the figures. And then you have what would be the speech form or the mantra what would be the speech form of the figure represented at the front. And in the center of the painting we have a stupa kind of funerary monument originally that became the symbol of Buddhism in general especially in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Tibet in East Asia it became kind of the Bhagavata became the preferred monument in this respect. But in Tibetan Buddhism the stupa represents the mind and so this would be the mind form of the deity and we'll see that the stupa form aligns with the deity in the front of the painting. And so if you look where there's this kind of a squarish section above the dome that's where the head of the deity is and the base is exactly where the lotus base is and where the deity stands. So this would be a common way of representing deities on the painting in Tibetan Buddhism where the front body form of the deity is complemented by the back form back representing the speech and the mind form of the deity so more subtle forms of the deity itself. The same concept was then employed for teacher representations in and especially kind of in the 12th early 13th century and throughout the 13th century there are very very interesting paintings that kind of make a statement that compares the teacher the Tibetan Buddhist teacher of the time with the Buddha. And one of the most explicit paintings in that respect is this one and if we compare its composition with a composition that depicts Buddha Shakyamuni at his awakening with scenes of his life represented around him we'll see that the composition of this teacher representation derives from the Shakyamuni painting and there is a direct comparison between the two. In addition he is placed in the succession of the seven Buddhas of the past depicted standing on the very top of the canvas and the future Buddha and before the future Buddha Maitreya who is in the top right corner of the canvas of this representation again that would be something that is taken over from representations of the Buddha. The architecture around the teacher represents the temple of Bodh Gaya where the Buddha attained awakening and interestingly on Tibetan paintings then you find the practitioner represented and here in the in just opposite the bottom left corner of the practitioner in the bottom left corner we have a Buddha Shakyamuni represented which essentially means that he has changed place with the Tibetan teacher who is represented in the center of this painting and it's a clear reference to one particular form of Shakyamuni that apparently was present in the temple of Bodh Gaya the site of awakening and the holiest place of Tibetan world of Buddhism in general that had a peculiar feature namely a relatively disproportionately large head and a very short neck and these features are found copied in objects from essentially the 13th to the 15th century as kind of reference to the Buddha of Bodh Gaya and of course the Buddha on our painting as well has that particular element ascribed to it but this comparison of the teacher with the Buddha goes further yeah and in this particular example we have again a teacher portrait but and we look at this particular example more carefully and in greater detail it's a very prominent Tibetan Buddhist teacher of the 12th century called Pakma Dupa Dorje Gerpo who is represented and of whom eight different schools of Tibetan Buddhism branch off essentially and so if we'll look at the painting kind of more closely there are different elements I want to discuss about it the first one is the notion of a portrait that is kind of communicated in this case so generally portraits in Tibetan painting are rarely portraits of likeness yeah and it's very clear that in this particular representation the eyes for example are highly idealized and and compared to those painted for deities but that they the the artist clearly tried to distinguish the area around the mouth the nose has a peculiar shape and we have the beard and this enables us to kind of identify portraits of the same teacher within the same Tibetan Buddhist school and from approximately the same time as seen on the right side example that is still comparable but obviously painted by a different painter we can even use these physical features to compare it to a sculpture that depicts the same teacher and in this particular teacher representation he is shown frontally as a Buddha and I think that comes to the fore here so in the sculpture we have this comparison to Buddha Shakyamuni at the site of awakening strongly communicated because the teacher himself is represented frontally he touches the earth like the Buddha touched the earth when he attained awakening and even the the representations on the throne elude to this particular narrative event but it's very clear that he is a Tibetan teacher because he wears a vest underneath a sleeveless vest underneath the monastic ropes and they even a heavy cape that protects him from the cold of the Tibetan plateau in comparison to the relative heat of the Indian planes where these kind of dress features wouldn't be necessary what's the painting differs here of course is that it doesn't show the teacher frontally but it shows him in a succession of the Buddha rather than as the Buddha himself and that is also represented through the teacher on top so here you have the comparison with the Buddha image and if we look at the teacher he has a teaching gesture and if we look further up immediately at the top of him is another grey-haired Tibetan monk represented who is or can be identified as Gambopa the immediate teacher of Bagma Dupa and so what the painting emphasizes is less the the achievement of a single individual as it would be with Buddha Shakyamuni but the achievement of an individual in the tradition of Shakyamuni that is of course expressed through the teacher represented directly above him but then also through the Buddha representations left and right of essentially the arch or the rock arch at the top of the central panel that also eludes to the awakening of the Buddha at Bodhkaya and in this painting too we have references to body speech and mind the body of course is again the representation on the front but on the back we have writing that directly refers to the speech form of the teacher so he is essentially treated in the same way as a deity representation and we have the stupa shape here outlined in yellow and then written into it and it's a more ancient form of stupa that is represented here and this is something that Tibetans took over from Indian examples where stupas are occasionally represented on the back of sculptures like in this particular piece from the Asian art museum in San Francisco the a painting is when painted is just a painting yeah it's not a sacred item to become a sacred item it has to be consecrated and the consecration is indicated through the writing on the back on the one hand through the purification mantra that is written vertically the syllables om ahum as I mentioned before and on the other hand through what is called the Yidamaheto verse or what I call the consecration verse which is a standard verse in Buddhism a fairly old one that kind of represents the nucleus of the Buddha's teaching and that particular verse is used in this context as a means to consecrate the item with the teaching of the Buddha yeah and that's essentially in this section that is kind of singled out in red on the slide that consecration verse is found it's a text that is essentially written in Tibetan letters but using Sanskrit language so it's transliterated or actually transcribed into Tibetan again this is something that is found in on Indian objects already sometimes even on the front in this particular stele with the Buddha we have the consecration verse written on the halo behind the head and consecrating the item in this way the painting is of course also an embodiment of Buddhist practice and that is represented through essentially the text on the back which indicates different stages of the progress towards awakening with the right attitude what I call the foundation at the bottom worship or veneration as a major aspect of Buddhist practice the actual consecration or initiation into a particular practice of a deity and with that one receives the lineage transmission of that teaching and its practice is supposed to bring one to Buddha hood which would be represented at the very top of course you can read that also from top down as a kind of the blessing of the Buddha that is alluded to in the top verses on this particular painting we also have what I call the timeless body of the teacher represented because quite similarly to what we know of the life of the Buddha the teacher is here represented repeatedly yeah and he's and we know that in this particular painting because his particular speech form is repeated on the back of many figures all along the sides the bottom parts of the sides and along the bottom row of paintings yeah which to us then indicates that in each of these panels the same teacher is represented that is referred to by the verse that is kind of written on this slide and so if we turn it around again and look at these details the 10 fields flanking the main figure left and right show different beings or different types of personalities different occupations royals secular people Mahasiddha even the Buddha and the monkey that represent previous lives of this the same teacher yeah and so like the Buddha had previous lives that led to his final life and awakening the teacher is here considered as having these previous lives and usually these are kind of remembered and then written down and in the bottom section we actually have the same teacher represented over and over again with the same physical features which indicates that this is the last life these are events from the life that he led in the 12th century and the central sections here emphasize a kind of special feature of his life namely that he meditated in a grass hut which is kind of represented by this dormant building that is represented on two of these kind of central paintings of course now if the teacher's portrait is used as like a deity and consecrated like a deity the painting itself of course is also an object of worship like the the the portrait of the Buddha would be and that is of course expressed then in the painting on the back as well especially through the verses that added at the bottom of the inscription but what is more is that in a way the painting in this case represents a more total a more complete form of the teacher himself yeah representing his body on the front speech and mind on the back and it's clear that the painting itself serves as a kind of replacement for the teacher's presence and so within is a Derek Buddhist traditions the relationship of teacher to his disciple is extremely important and which which of course means that usually the disciple when he is at the same monastery he tries to meet his teacher every day he gets teaching transmissions very often but when the teacher is absent you quite literally can then or he can then use the painting as a replacement for the physical presence of the teacher himself yeah and I think that the fact that you have a front and the back kind of so closely planned together make clear that the painting here can serve as a quite literal replacement for the body of the teacher and the teacher's presence yeah and the teacher here by extension stands for the deity that he instructed his disciple to practice and one of these practices is of course that you imagine your teacher in form of the deity yeah and this is exactly what we have depicted here that by switching the position of the teacher and the Buddha yeah this relationship is indicated and the practitioner in the bottom left corner essentially practices the Buddha but the Buddha in form of his teacher and of course we have other paintings that essentially express the same sentiment independent buddhism especially around that time the paintings that I discussed the early ones the two are both of the taklung kakyu school which is one of the schools deriving from pakmojopa this particular drawing that I have on the screen now is from the trigon kakyu school another pupil of pakmojopa who founded his own school and on this particular case I'm not sure if we have a detail no the footprints of the teachers are represented alongside with the deities yeah and of course the footprints again refer back to the Buddha because the buddhist footprints were worshipped and or instill are worshipped throughout the buddhist world and equally here in Tibetan buddhism then the teacher's footprint and which is probably his yeah his actual footprint applied to the canvas before the drawings were made and the outline was kind of idealized is or the worship of the footprint is one of the kind of ultimate symbols of the devotion of the disciple to the teacher yeah in this particular case we see the folding lines of across the canvas and the damage that it made or that it afflicted to the drawing itself so actually this particular painting was probably not really used to hang it on the wall but it was folded up and probably used in an amulet box or something like that that was taken along and we'll see that the on the right side the central panels those were probably the parts that were on the outside the darker ones the the darker sections while everything else was protected from this being folded up so this would be another example but you you essentially find examples of that type throughout the history of Tibetan buddhism around yeah around 30 to 40 percent of Tibetan paintings have writings on the back that refer to the consecration and the purification of the materials and a much lesser percentage has a stupas painted on the back that refer to the mind form of the deity mantras the speech form of the deity found more often but what is in common in each of these is that they quite literally represent the body yeah and the body of the deity the body of the teacher that is represented in front of it and of course what you do in consecration is you essentially invite the deity into the canvas and you ask it to stay as long as samsara lasts and so as long as the paintings were a sculpture for that matter is well preserved it will be a fully functional representation of that deity or of the body of that deity thanks that's my little summary i'm sure there are many questions and we can go to those now thanks very much christian that really interesting session if people do have questions there's a few options in terms of how to ask them so we've got about i'd say about 15 minutes left if you do have questions for us so you can use the Q&A which is at the bottom of your screen you can also write to us in the chat to ask any questions that you have or if you would like to raise your hand and speak we'll be able to unmute you but just do remember that this session is being recorded and we also have ying day with us as well who is a student at soas so if you do have any questions about the student experience do feel free to ask those as well there is one question many of the paintings in the chat it essentially says many of the paintings shown are quite old to what extent have the colors deteriorated in the paintings that we have seen the colors haven't deteriorated much the paintings that i've shown were probably not used much yeah it's actually they are exceptional in the sense that they are so well preserved for the age after all 700 years is to to survive 700 years kind of essentially undamaged or at these good conditions is a rare instance which simply indicates that they probably spent most of their life rolled up in and that's a characteristic of the Tibetan tanker with scroll painting that you essentially can roll it up you have seen the textiles on top and bottom and so you can roll it up and store it and in this way it would preserve extremely long the other interesting element here is that most of the colors are probably not very light sensitive and so they wouldn't be affected by light that much because most of them are mineral colors at least yeah in the majority of Tibetan paintings yeah and there's another question how these paintings ended up in the museum of Europe and the US that's a very good question i think many ended up in museums in Europe and the US uh from work from the 19th century onwards of course in the 19th century the world is kind of you know ethnographic searches across the world uh from different cultures and so ethnographic museums around the world have Tibetan specimens of that time uh as far as they were kind of available to travelers who traveled through the region and tried to essentially buy them at that time uh and then that tradition essentially continued into the 1930s later on many came through the the art market it's assumed that many of the Tibetan paintings essentially left Tibet in the around and after 59 with Tibetan refugees going to India and that they may have sold them off for yeah for because they needed the means in this case and so that these are the early collections but the paintings are actually showed two of them at least only turned up in the 1990s on the art market and they apparently came from a horde of tackling related paintings that is yeah it's not entirely clear where it was but that most mostly distributed through the art market and so we don't have a real provenance for that then there is another one high painting is a representation and there's literally a body sounds very different to me as for example in Christianity as an imprint of the sacred officially not painted that could be repainted or copied yes uh yeah that's a very good question of course I think one always has to be kind of careful with this kind of intercultural comparisons there is in my we don't have a kind of comparable theological discussion in Tibetan Buddhism as we have it here mostly or in Christianity mostly because it wasn't as much contested the role of the teacher for example or the deity itself was never as much contested in that sense and it is also in the in the Tibetan Buddhist context they are not representing anything ultimate yeah they they are representing a means to get to the awakening in itself yeah and in that sense there's quite a different status that the painting has is there an exploration of the paintings within India and Sri Lanka as well I'm not sure you mean it's so as as a whole I we don't have a specialist on Sri Lanka specifically but we definitely have somebody teaching Indian Buddhism and Hinduism so I talk about Indian Buddhist art as well and yeah but not Sri Lanka specifically what museums do history of art students go to of course the in this case the source is extremely close to the British Museum it's just one block away so that's the easiest to go to and then the VNA of course would be another one but as you will kind of know there are plenty of museums in London that you could that have relevant materials and there is also there there are very good kind of library resources as well that have relevant materials in particular the British library that is nearby as well and so sometimes we include those visits into our courses as well was there a tradition to indicate names of artists and artists were artists preferred to stay anonymous I can't answer the second part if they preferred to stay anonymous but in most cases they remained anonymous because they didn't leave their names on the paintings but their exceptions to the rules they are quite a few of artists known from different time periods and from the 15th century onwards we know Tibetan painters that quite literally changed the history of Tibetan painting through introducing certain types of of painting techniques or motifs that were remembered later on in Tibetan connoisseurship yeah and so so in this case then these artists and their pupils are fairly well known and but the same is true for sculptors so they weren't it's not that frequent that we know the artists and so for example from none of the paintings that I showed we know who actually painted them would they have traveled that far I'm not sure what that refers to the artists artists of course would travel and would kind of you know work on commissions across the Tibetan plateau probably most famous among kind of Himalayan artisanship are the Navari artists the artists of the Kathmandu valley which often were invited from Nepal to Tibet to do certain yeah to accomplish certain works like the creation of stupas or the creation of certain paintings and that is a big topic in this case where we know that there is a lot of exchange then an interesting question what is your favorite part about teaching history of art I think my favorite part of that is going on fieldwork and actually doing the documentation myself finding out things that I haven't were that are not known yet and then writing about those and essentially reconstructing history the history of those and I've done a lot of kind of fieldwork in Himachal Pradesh in India as well as Nepal I'll travel regularly there I'll document regularly there and it's like reconstructing the history for the people who actually live there so this is something that I really like about this work that I'm doing do I have a favorite model module that I teach which one interests you most oh I was very fortunate I could build my modules around my interests so I actually like all of them that I teach and yeah and they are usually there are themes of cultural exchange especially the transmission of Buddhism from India to Tibet which is one of my areas that interests me most another area is quite similar in terms of exchange it's the Gandharan Buddhist art where there is a lot of cultural exchange as well as changing Buddhism itself that interests me and then the last question what sort of jobs does history of art feed into of course there is a lot or there are a lot of jobs around art markets and museums and those would be the majority that are available for yeah for students of history of art so curating or assessing objects for for auctions and so on another one okay are there a lot of students that do a combined degree combined with or there are a lot of students that do a combined degree with language and that's a very good idea in principle because if you study a foreign culture you better learn the language of that culture as well and so I studied both Sanskrit and Tibetan and obviously I've seen that in the case of of the presentation knowing what is written on the back and being able to read it is necessary necessary tool to actually interpret the object correctly and then we have another question yeah how these did the courses adapt to the pandemic yeah that's the the problem with the the pandemic is of course that like this particular session we have to teach from home and students actually many of our students currently didn't even come to London they can't actually enjoy the museums we can't do events related or showing them the objects in the museum directly so that actually yeah that cancels out a certain aspect of teaching that we would otherwise include that is probably the more kind of fun part and the most interesting part of the studies because seeing the life object is obviously different from seeing only pictures of it those who are in London of course can visit the museums independently and so they can essentially bring these two aspects together themselves at least as long as they were open now of course the museums are during this lockdown and during the first lockdown the museums were eventually closed as well and so yeah that's definitely affected but I hope by autumn that's hopefully not necessary anymore and that we can teach a regular in classroom maybe with recordings for those who are still can't attend in person and I think we we also have a question in the chat from Elina she's written I'm intrigued by the various hues and colors of some of the deities were some of them black were some of them lack no they didn't actually use lack in any of the the paintings I showed but what they sometimes do is polish the painting painted surface and that gives it a kind of lack like appearance there is rare evidence of lack actually be used in Tibetan painting so it's not unknown but it's it's rather rare with some of the deities black if it's black yes there are deity representations that are black there's actually a whole kind of category of Tibetan painting called naktang which is black painting these are essentially gold paintings on black ground or gold drawings on black ground usually on subjects that relate to kind of death channel ground wrathfulness and stuff like that and so also the kind of positive utilization of that is is painted on on black but I haven't shown a single example in that respect okay great thank you very much Christian and thank you for all those questions as well from everybody I think we're going to have to end the session here but but thank you very much for joining us and all the best the rest of the year and your application and decision-making process as well