Between the Religious Act and Art Commodity

Abstract

Rebgong, located in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai, China, has become one of the most productive areas of Tibetan Thangka painting since the 1980s. Why has Rebgong, a place outside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), become the stronghold of Thangka commercialization? How have Thangka Buddhist painters reacted to the commercialization of their work? I chose to focus on the changes in the past decades in the transmission and commercialization models of Rebgong Thangka. Based on my analysis of both Chinese and English textual sources as well as three weeks of fieldwork conducted in Rebgong, consisting of observation and interviews with key players such as local Thangka masters, students, government officials and dealers, I argue that the models of technique transmission and commercialization have both drastically changed over the past decades, despite the continuation of some features of traditional master-disciple transmission. To justify these changes and compensate for the traditions they betrayed, the key players employed several moral strategies and negotiated with the Buddhist community to maintain a balance between Thangka as a religious object and as a pure commodity. Meanwhile, the sales of Thangka are essentially dependent on its religious meaning. The project attempts to contribute to our understanding of the transformation of religious art alongside modernization, especially the marketization of the economy, and problematize the dichotomy of its religious function and commodity nature. Equally intriguing in this case is how changes in the realm of religious art fundamentally reshaped a specific place and the associated social relations of particular religious and ethnic natures in modern China.