Designed by the Honolulu Academy of Arts, in conjunction with the Department of Culture of the Royal Government of Bhutan and the Central Monastic Authority, this exhibition is a first in the Western world and invites the public to discover works of art which have never before been on view outside of Bhutan. This exhibition is the opportunity for the Guimet Museum to participate in the celebration of the centenary of the reign of the Wangchuck dynasty and Bhutan’s adoption of its first constitution in 2008.
By bringing together for the first time more than one hundred Buddhist works of art which are still considered sacred, on loan from thirty temples and monasteries of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan – located between Tibet and the Indian State of Assam – the Guimet Museum offers the general public a unique opportunity to discover the major iconographical themes of Tantric Buddhism, Bhutan’s official religion, via the evocation of the country’s artistic traditions, their historic development and milestone religious figures.
This esoteric form of Buddhism was born in India and spread to the Himalayan region, to Tibet and Bhutan, in the 8th century. Padmasambhava, a famous master from Swât, a region situated in what is now north Pakistan, played a key role in this dissemination.
The authors of the exhibition catalogue wanted to highlight the style and iconographic elements which help distinguish Bhutanese and Tibetan works of art, thereby marking a significant milestone in the development of studies on the subject. The works presented range from the 8th to the 19th centuries, the golden age of Bhutanese art between the 17th and 19th centuries, with a complex and subtle iconography. As part of this discovery, works belonging to the permanent collections of the Guimet Museum will be compared with those presented in the exhibition.
The exhibition offers a rare combination of thangkas, painted or embroidered, some of them very large-scale, as well as metal sculptures and liturgical objects. Dance, which plays an important part in the iconography of tantric Buddhism, will be evoked via clips of films made in Bhutan and broadcast as part of the exhibition. These ritual Buddhist dances, or cham, performed during celebrations, have been preserved in the country with amazing purity, and some of them are linked to predominant figures featured in the works of the exhibition such as Padmasambhava.
