The Tibetan painter Jampa Tseten, popularly known as Amdo Jampa, died on 28 March at the age of 91 in Lhasa. Amdo Jampa was best-known for his vivid photo-realistic style and executed famous portraits of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. He was born in Chentsa [Tibetan: gcan tsha rdzong, Chinese: Jianza] county in Qinghai (incorporating part of the Tibetan area of Amdo, hence his name), and became one of the first Tibetan artists to study at a Chinese art college. He was also a student of the famous Tibetan artist and scholar Gendun Choephel.

Amdo Jampa's work was celebrated by both the Dalai Lama and later by the Chinese authorities, although it has been the subject of some controversy within the Tibetan exile community. Gonkar Gyatso, a Tibetan artist from Lhasa based in the UK who knew Amdo Jampa, said that after Gendun Choephel, Amdo Jampa was the most important Tibetan artist of modern times. He told TIN: "He trained in the 1950s at the same time as several other very talented thangka (1. see End Note) painters and he was the one who tried to do something different. He was quite brave to do so - as well as fortunate in having the support of the Dalai Lama for the work he began to create."

Amdo Jampa began to study the art of traditional Tibetan thangka painting after he became a monk at Drepung monastery in Lhasa as a young teenager. He left the monastery in order to accompany the Dalai Lama to Beijing in 1954, and he remained in the city to study under the Chinese teacher Li Zhongjin, who trained him in traditional Chinese painting as well as in Western painting techniques. According to an article in the Tibetan literary journal Drangchar: "As [Amdo Jampa] mastered the techniques of all three traditions of Tibetan, Chinese and Western art, his paintings were characterised by outstanding individuality, and a three-dimensional effect with the use of shading" (Volume 4, 1993).

On his return to Lhasa, Amdo Jampa was commissioned to paint inside a new palace (Tagtu Mingyur Podrang), which was completed within the Norbulingka, the official summer residence of the Dalai Lama, in 1956. His murals in the summer palace merged a traditional Tibetan style of painting with that of modern portrait painting. While the general style of the paintings was clearly traditional, the figures of the Dalai Lama and others were easily recognisable, which at that time constituted a revolutionary innovation. Later, the 10th Panchen Lama asked Amdo Jampa to paint his portrait, which he carried out in a similarly realist style. Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan writer and co-founder of the Amnye Machen Institute in Dharamsala (India) who knew Amdo Jampa, said: "It was a revelation for many people to see life-like images of such figures for the first time." Traditionally, religious leaders were represented in a highly stylised manner which portrayed them with an other-worldly appearance. Gonkar Gyatso told TIN: "People were astonished and admired the techniques involved, but there was also some controversy, particularly because His Holiness the Dalai Lama looked so human in his work."

In the 1980s, Amdo Jampa travelled to India, where he carried out commissions for religious buildings for the Dalai Lama. When he returned to Tibet in the late 1980s, he lived in the central Tibetan area of Lhasa, and according to the Tibetan magazine Drangchar occupied various official positions such as Chairman of the Tibet Fine Arts Association and Chief Research Officer of the Central Executive Committee of the Tibet Autonomous Museum of Cultural Artefacts. He also opened an art school in Shol village at the foot of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Heather Stoddard, an expert on Tibetan art who knew him, told TIN: "He lived in very simple surroundings in the middle of the old city at that time, just like any other ordinary Tibetan. He didn't seem to have great ambitions - he could probably have risen to become a star under the Communist authorities, but it seems he didn't want to do so." Amdo Jampa's style used elements of modernity such as "photo-realism" within a Buddhist context of reverence for religious teachers. The influences on his work were wide-ranging. Gonkar Gyatso says: "Once I went to his studio in Lhasa and he was studying a book of 15th century Italian religious art. Some of his paintings were clearly influenced by painters such as Carpaccio (2. See End Note), who used vivid, opulent colours, little shading, and had a narrative style."

Jamyang Norbu, a Tibetan writer and co-founder of the cultural Amnye Machen Institute in Dharamsala (India) underlines that Amdo Jampa was particularly influenced by his Tibetan teacher Gendun Choephel. Gendun Choephel had travelled widely in India and was familiar not only with Indian Buddhist and Hindu art but was also aware of various European traditions, as reflected in his dynamic sketches of nudes and dancers. Unlike those of his teacher the resources that Jampa had to draw on artistically were limited due to political circumstances. "Amdo Jampa just didn't have the same depth of cultural and intellectual background as Gendun Choephel, because of the circumstances of the past 50 years in Tibet," said Jamyang Norbu. "But there was a real continuity about his work. He was painting throughout the 1940s and '50s, and he lived through the Uprising in Lhasa in 1959, the Cultural Revolution and even the post-Deng era, all the while managing to somehow keep up his art, though it must be said that like other Tibetan artists he seems to have produced nothing during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. As the Dalai Lama's court painter, he was probably lucky not to have had his fingers smashed during that time."

Amdo Jampa's work has been wide-spread in Tibet and markedly influenced contemporary domestic painting. Gonkar Gyatso said: "Before the Chinese ban on Dalai Lama pictures [in 1996], many monasteries I visited all over Tibet had a large-scale picture of the Dalai Lama on the main shrine - all in the style of Amdo Jampa's famous painting of the Dalai Lama."

The modern artist Elke Hessel who works with Tibetan artists in Lhasa, however, points out that contemporary painters in Tibet today are less influenced by Amdo Jampa's work: "Some of Amdo Jampa's students who are thangka painters have added modern elements such as the use of light and shadow to their style - when they paint the portrait of a contemporary teacher, the face and the hands are painted in a photo-realistic style. But they also try to paint 'modern Buddhist paintings', in which you can see traditional elements mixed with fantasy or surrealism, painted mostly with oil colours on canvas. As far as I know Amdo Jampa has no real influence on the contemporary art scene in Lhasa. Most of the young Tibetan artists have studied in Chinese art academies, which are very open minded and modern, or in the art department of the Tibet University. They are more interested in western artists like Andy Warhol, David Hockney or Baselitz."

At times Amdo Jampa has been a controversial figure in the eyes of some Tibetan exiles. For example, his work "The Three Kings" for the Namgyal Temple in Dharamsala (India) was first rejected by the commissioning exile authorities, although it finally found a prominent place in the neighbouring Tsuglakhang central temple. In her book "In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959" (Reaktion Books, 1999) Clare Harris, an expert on Tibetan art, remarks on that episode: "In Dharamsala, any involvement with Maoist China can be viewed as suspect, and deviation from 'traditional' styles implies a kind of cultural treachery. Jampa's mistake was that he had both studied in China and painted in a style that was not recognised by the exilic audience as part of the remembered traditions of Tibet. However, although he may well have been exposed to Socialist Realism in Beijing, Jampa did not become an adherent of its credo. According to Mao Zedong and his followers, Socialist Realism was a device to be used to create art for the people, by the people, about the people and ultimately, we might argue, to coerce the people. But Jampa Tseten had become a realist painter without becoming a socialist. With the Dalai Lama as a patron, he had no reason to believe that this was beyond the realm of possibility for a Tibetan."

Even when quite elderly, Amdo Jampa would do his "kora" (religious circumambulation) around Lhasa every day. He leaves a wife and a large family - his youngest child was born when he was in his eighties.

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Last updated: 27-May-2002