Gonkar Gyatso’s current work comes out of a fascination with material and pop culture and a desire to bring equal attention to the mundane as well as the extraordinary, the imminent and the superfluous. These contradictions are often found in the same piece. His work can be very silly, uncanny and even ironic at the same time comes out of concerns that are shaping our times. As his own experience has been one that reflect a kind of hybridity and transformation his work also holds this quality. We are all repositories of our time and place and the work cannot help but reveal the politics and culture that have shaped him. Gonkar collects materials from around the world to construct his images and each work contains a kind of geographic specificity relating to the time and place his is making the work, where he has been and the things that have touched him.

Gonkar’s interest in signage and iconography have led him to design his own stickers and signs which he incorporates into his work; sometimes they are collages and at other times they stand on their own; each representing a social or political trend that he would like to bring to attention. Gonkar’s repetitive use of the Buddha and appropriation of our media saturated environments illustrates his interest in ubiquity, accessibility; often appropriating and even re-appropriating his own work. What once was “White Noise” becomes a cacophony of carefully composed images, beautifully constructed into an iconographic form or word. While graffiti is now considered its own art form, Gonkar is also interested in pushing the boundaries between, what some might say, is hi and low art and certainly takes a lot of his inspiration from the street.