Gonkar Gyatso & Fu Xiaodong: Overlay. Worlds Within Worlds

We perceive reality through inherited structures, whether we notice them or not. Overlay: Worlds Within Worlds takes this as its premise: contemporary life is not a break from what came before, but an accumulation of ways of seeing that never fully replace one another.

The exhibition brings together two artists working from distinct inherited cosmologies – Tibetan Buddhist and Han Chinese Daoist – not to compare them as cultural artifacts, but to treat each as a living system still capable of organizing present experience. Neither artist preserves or explains tradition; both use it as an active instrument to view contemporary life. This particular way of seeing becomes more urgent especially in times of AI, algorithmic perception, and fragmented attention. The question is not what reality is, but how it gets structured, and what happens when several structures occupy the same moment at once.

What emerges is an overlay: distinct systems sharing the same space without dissolving into each other. A sacred form stays legible even as it absorbs unfamiliar material. A classical cosmology holds its logic even pressed against circuit boards and urban noise. Overlay argues that this is closer to how perception actually works – not one coherent picture of the world, but many worlds, inherited and current, sitting inside the same frame.

Gonkar Gyatso grew up in Lhasa during the Cultural Revolution, when Tibetan religious art was suppressed and traditional life systematically dismantled. He later studied Chinese painting in Beijing, Thangka painting in Dharamsala, and Fine Art in London. His work takes the image of the Buddha as a constant visual framework, reconstructing it through the materials of contemporary life – consumer culture, political history, ecological crisis, global media.

Fu Xiaodong (b. 1978) is a Hangzhou-based ink painter and one of the most rigorous voices in Chinese experimental ink practice. Trained in classical painting and calligraphy, she tests Daoist cosmology – transformation, permeability, continuous change – against contemporary life, where mountains dissolve into circuit boards and brushstrokes trace urban rhythms. Her 2024 solo show in Shinshu, Japan was named Exhibition of the Year.

Ausstellungsdauer
10. September bis 6. November 2026

Ort
Migrant Bird Space
Koppenplatz 5, 10115 Berlin
Dienstag bis Samstag 13 bis 18 Uhr
Eintritt frei