Exploring Art in the Kingdom of Bhutan
Exploring the Arts of Bhutan
The Kingdom of Bhutan is rich both in its legacy of art styles and traditions that reach back millennia. Bhutan is also the site of new unique contemporary traditions, contemporary art forms and dialogues.
Dr. Les Joynes (US) is invited as visiting faculty and scholar to the Royal University of Bhutan, College of Language and Cultural Studies in Takse, Bhutan where he is exploring Bhutanese visual cultures, ritual and performative practices as part of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award. In 2019, Les founded the US-Bhutan Art Association as a forum for cultural exchange and appreciation of the traditional and contemporary arts and visual cultures of the Kingdom of Bhutan developing dialogue with Bhutanese traditional and contemporary artists. Dr. Joynes researches Buddhist Art and Ritual at Columbia University in New York and as Senior Scholar at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi.
Exploring Bhutan’s rich cultural history through rituals, traditions and music.
Research Objectives
For his Regional Fieldwork Les will come to the Kingdom of Bhutan in 2022 to develop Research on Bhutanese Traditional and Contemporary Visual Cultures.
Outcomes
Produce a series of Zoom conversations between artists in Bhutan and outside the Kingdom.
Produce a series of documentaries examining the six styles of Bhutanese traditional arts.
Background
Exploration of Bhutan’s taxonomies for art, particularly those found in Ngawang Namgyal’s thirteen traditional arts (1680) and intersections other disciplines. He will be exploring dance and performance in Punakha Tshechu, Tharpaling Thongdrol and Ura Yakchoe performances unique to Bhutan exploring their connections to Vajrayana Buddhism and will be exploring the traditions of:
Sculpture Paper Making (Dezo); Stonework (Dozo): Stone arts for construction; Clay and Ceramics (Jinzo); Bronze casting (Lugzo) : Production of bronze roof-crests, statues, bells, and ritual instruments; Carving (Parzo) Wood, slate, and stone carving: In wood, slate or stone, for making such items as printing blocks for religious texts, masks, furniture, altars, and the slate images adorning many shrines and altars; other woodwork/ woodturning (Shagzo and Shingzo)
Craft (Tshazo) - Cane and bamboo work: The production of such varied items as bows and arrows, baskets, drinks containers, utensils, musical instruments, fences, and mats.
Painting (Lhazo ) thangkas, walls paintings, and statues to the decorations on furniture and window-frames.
Textiles (Thagzo) - Weaving: The production of some of the most intricately woven fabrics produced in Asia and Needlework: (Tshemazo) Working with needle and thread to make clothes, boots, or the most intricate of appliqué thangkas.
Jewelry: Trözo - Silver- and gold-smithing: Working in gold, silver, and copper to make jewelry, ritual objects, and utilitarian household items.
Performance and movement: Exploration of traditional forms of Bhutanese dance and ritualized and durational performances.
Finally, he will explore Bhutan’s contemporary arts and its new generation of artists that are exploring new visual spaces.
Dr. Les Joynes
Biography
Les Joynes (born 1963) is a sculptor and multi-media visual artist based in New York, USA. Dr. Les Joynes began researching Bhutanese art and Buddhist ritual traditions at the age of 23.
Born in Santa Barbara, California, Joynes trained as a sculptor and multi-media artist in London at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, and in Tokyo at Musashino Art University.
Joynes is recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award (2022), Japan Ministry of Education and Culture (MeXT) Scholarship (1997-2001), University of the Arts London Fellow at the University of the Arts London Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (2015), the NKD Fellowship (2008), the Taiwan Huayu Scholarship (2016), Bauhaus Artist Fellow (2008-2009), Edwin Abbey Fellowship, National Design Museum (2009), and the King Sturge Sculpture Prize, London (1995).
Early life and education
Joynes was born in Santa Barbara, California. Meeting Andy Warhol in New York in the 1980s he was inspired by Warhol and his factory as a space ability to “flip” the way we perceive art in its relationship with consumerism. He was also inspired by artists Josef Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and philosophers Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham and Julia Kristeva in their exploration of the relationships of power, observer and abject spaces.
Joynes finished his BA with honors in History at Boston University in and M.Sc. from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences. Completing his BA (Hons) Fine Art (1996) at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London he studied under minimalist sculptors Stephen Furlonger and David Annesley and was selected to study under French sculptor Jean Cardot at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1995).
During his MA Fine Art (1997) at Goldsmiths, he studied under conceptual artist and painter Michael Craig-Martin and Japanese public arts sculptor Hideyuki Mogami while Monbusho Scholar (1997-2001) completing his masters in fine art in Japanese at Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Moving to New York in the early 2000s he also studied technique under the American pop artist James Rosenquist.
Researching new forms of experimental and collaborative art practices, Joynes earned his PhD (2012) from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, UK; and Post-Doctorate (2017) in Fine Art from the School of Art and Communications at University of São Paulo, Brazil. He created cross-disciplinary collaborative research with Brazilian artists indexing indigenous and syncretic rituals and art-making.
Work
First exhibiting at eighteen at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art at the age of eighteen, Joynes has exhibited at the Barbican, London, the Ecole des Beaux-arts, Paris, Milch Gallery, London, Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, Inside Out Art Museum Beijing, Mongolia Zanabazar National Museum of Fine Art Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, Museum of Brazilian Arts Brazil, Åmotgård Museum, Norway, Norimatsu Museum, Japan CBGB, New York, Art Fair Tokyo and Fenberger House, Nagano, Japan.
Since 1979 Joynes has explored found objects as ready-mades and photographed Southern Californian track-home garages as ready-made installations. Later in the early 1990s inspired by Gordon Matta Clark and Jason Rhoades he began excavating structures amid demolition rescuing objects, books, masonry to excavate from the abandoned factories and warehouses in London’s Isle of Dogs, sites that were used as film locations for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). In London and Japan he worked with formless materials including pigmented polyurethane creating objects that attempted to defy sculptural norms and sensibilities and created forests of giant globular slip-cast polyurethane flowers for exhibitions in Korea and the UK.
Invited by art critic, essayist Jonathan Crary in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia, Joynes continued to build his practice to explore power relations between the museum, the observer and the art object.
In 2012 he began to turn the museum inside out, re-lensing and shifting the ordered and predicable experiences of museum spectatorship inside-out. At the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paolo, Brazil he installed FormLAB as a museum-within-a-museum where within a central studio module he would continuously tamper with and remake the works displayed in FormLAB’s museum exhibition to destabilize the experience of the spectator and question when, if ever, a work of art is really finished.
Also involved in artistic research he explores the tandem processes of experimental art-making and critical interpretation. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar and artist he is examining how Indian contemporary art indexes Indian classical and folk art forms that have reflected facets of South Asian and Himalayan identity.
