h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

30 January 2005
The Times - Lousisiana, USA
By Jennifer Flowers

It was one of the typical intimate gatherings that Meadows Museum of Art director Diane Dufilho enjoys every so often at her home.

Save for one new voice.

On this particular Tuesday evening in January, she and her guests nibbled on wine, cheese and crackers, brimming with questions as houseguest Tenzin Wangden Andrugtsang explained how to make a meal out of barley flour and yak butter tea.

Wangden is a second-generation Tibetan living in an exile community in Dharamsala, India, which became the home of thousands of Tibetans in 1959 when they followed their Buddhist spiritual leader into exile after violent uprisings following the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Having arrived in Shreveport in early January, he's already gotten the grand tour, visiting Sci-Port and tasting Southern specialties at local eateries, like Strawn's Eat Shop and The Real Pickle.

A slew of cultural exchanges between Tibet and Shreveport are streaming into Centenary College's Meadows Museum of Art this spring as it hosts a series of special guests, events and exhibits intended to educate and immerse the campus and the community in Tibetan religion and culture.

Wangden, an amateur filmmaker and photographer, brings a human element to the college's academic expansion into Eastern religion and culture. He will appear at related lectures and events over the next three months, while using Centenary's facilities to edit his digital documentary film on Tibetans in exile.

Funding for Wangden's trip, approximately $22,000 from organizations including the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Shreveport Regional Arts Council, the Rubin Foundation and Rose-Neath Funeral Homes, was granted to the Meadows and is going toward Tibet-themed educational and public programming. His visit wasn't a sure thing until Dec. 21, 2004, days before he arrived in Shreveport in early January, which left the museum waiting for word of his visa approval.

And it seems faculty and staff have managed to use the Tibetan focus in as many collaborative ways as possible, augmenting student and community life, as well as putting a unique exhibit on the walls of the Meadows Museum, while helping Wangden complete his projects.

Seeking a Tibet-themed exhibit to complement a three-week student trip to Dharamsala, orchestrated by Centenary's religion department and part of the college's required service-learning classes, Dufilho came across Californian photographer Joe Mickey, who was seeking publicity for his Tibetan Photo Project. Mickey started the project about four years ago by sending disposable cameras to a handful of Tibetans like Wangden, who live in India, giving them an opportunity to document exile life.

According to Dufilho, the exhibit is unusual for the Meadows because of its cultural rather than aesthetic focus. "I wanted it to be a really complete package so that the community benefited, the college benefited, the students benefited, the Tibetans benefited, that there were no minuses anywhere," she said.

Wangden started corresponding with Mickey while working in the Dalai Lama's office several years ago, and eventually started receiving disposable cameras from his electronic pen pal.

"He told me, shoot whatever you want to shoot, but try as much as possible to have the subject be Tibetan," Wangden said in his delicate, Hindi- and Tibetan-accented English. "So I shot a variety
of shots of people in the street, people talking, and I sent them back to him and he was quite surprised at the quality of some of the photos."

When Wangden and a Buddhist monk named Jam Yang Norbu returned to Mickey an array of candid slice-of-life shots of Tibetan exile communities, he realized the uniqueness of helping Tibetans develop their own visual language for portraying their own people. "Photography is one of the great equalizers," Mickey said. "If you can take a short of something, you can become a voice on it without having a billion dollars."

When Mickey subsequently sent Wangden a digital video camera, the project took on a whole new dimension. The resulting body of work is on display on a Web site called Tibetan Photo Project (www.tibetanphotoproject.com) and is coming to the Meadows as "Tibet: A Photographic Essay through the Eyes of Monks in Exile," which opens Feb. 27 and runs through May 29. Wangden's film, composed of interviews and slice-of-life scenes in the exile community titled Voices in Exile, will premiere as a work-in-progress at the Meadows on the opening day of the exhibit.

Aside from giving occasional technical advice, Mickey refrained from making any suggestions in terms of subject matter or style. "What makes this project really unusual is the fact that there are so many portfolios and so many great films on Tibetans, but they've all been produced by Westerners," he said. "The whole concept of this is to produce this material and have it come from Tibetans because it's such a powerful voice."

Wangden, now editing his film at Centenary's art department, lives in a time when many Tibetan exile communities are moving into their third generation. "Usually the second generation and the third generation, we have not experienced the suffering as the (first generation) has experienced it," he said. "Naturally, unless you have the first-time feeling of what pain is, you actually don't know what pain is. This is the fear among the older generation that one day we all will assimilate and disintegrate into the world population."

Tibet, which had asserted its independence from China for decades after the end of the Ch'ing dynasty in China, was invaded by the Chinese People's Liberation Army in 1950. As a result, Tibet became a "national autonomous region," a Communist China-controlled region under the traditional rule of the Dalai Lama. After a series of violent uprisings, the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, fled to India in 1959 with tens of thousands of followers where he established a government-in-exile. China's 1966 Cultural Revolution was responsible for destroying thousands of monasteries in Tibet and banning religious practices until 1976.

Since then, protest and conflict have persisted. While the Chinese believe they liberated Tibetans from feudal theocracy, others say Tibetans have suffered numerous human rights violations and cultural genocide.

Wangden is hoping his film will shed light on the current state of Tibetan exile for Western audiences, among whom the Tibet cause has gained popularity over recent decades with the help of celebrity advocates, including actor Richard Gere and musician Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, as well as by films like Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun.

"You'll see in my film that so many of the young Tibetans have the same idea that it's high time that we said no more to donations," he said. "But what we really need from the West is not military or humanitarian aid but political support. That is the message I try to convey from my film."

Mickey, who quit his newspaper photography job to dedicate more time to the Tibetan Photo Project, will meet Wangden for the first time in Shreveport at the opening of the exhibit after years of collaborating from opposite corners of the globe.

The art, religion and communications departments are getting involved, scheduling Wangden for class discussions and pairing communications major Emilie Reeks with Wangden to help him use the editing software at Centenary.

"Not only is it an incredible opportunity to be working on something I want to do later on in life, but I'm also interested in the subject of his films so it's kind of a double bonus for me," Reeks, 20, said.

And religious studies department chair Dr. Peter Huff and religious studies professor Dr. David Otto are excited to see their students have on-campus access to Tibetan culture before their three-week trip to Dharamsala this spring. The trip puts 20 Centenary students in contact with Tibetan monks and nuns in India via e-mail before they meet and spend time with them in India.

"It's education by immersion," said Otto, who is leading the trip to Dharamsala in collaboration with Neil Guidry, founder of the Louisiana Himalaya Association. "To be the student, to hear the
teaching of the high lamas, to engage in religious discourse from someone who comes from the position of being a practitioner and a believer, you can't replace that. It's so different from what can occur in a sterile academic environment."

Meadows-sponsored Tibetan events include the creation by Drepung Loseling Monastery monks of a mandala, a sacred ritual design in sand with roots in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition used as a meditative tool. The concept of religious performance art isn't totally new to the Meadows: Buddhist monk Lobsang Samten constructed a mandala as a performance installation in February 1996 at the museum, an event that coincided with its 20th anniversary.

Mickey, who contacted close to 300 museums nationwide to exhibit his project, is tickled that Wangden ended up going where he did. "You have a Tibetan in the Deep South developing through photography a voice for the Tibetans," he said. "Of all places you would think of, maybe some Ivy League place would pick up on this in the Northeast or some liberal place like Berkeley. I think it speaks volumes about the universal desire to help sort of make it all better."

And Wangden says that Southern hospitality is as hearty and welcoming as its cuisine. He's looking forward to the culture shock during his time in Shreveport, especially after having developed a passion for eating hot dogs.

But all the while, he's keeping in mind why he made the long trip here.

"There are millions and millions of Westerners who don't even know who Tibetans are," he said. "We just want to make them aware that there exists a country, which is known as Tibet, and that there are people who were driven out of their land and who are living in different parts of the world. And they're really alive. They have a separate identity. They're Tibetan."