Tibet: Images from Home
Photographs by Tsarong Jampa Thinlay and Paintings by S. Newman

August 2014
in the City Center Art Lounge
300 Page Street, San Francisco
(no reception)

Artists’ Statement

Tibet: Images from Home is a collaborative work by Tsarong Jampa Thinlay and S. Newman. The photographs and paintings we are presenting are from images collected from our visits back to Tsarong Jampa Thinlay’s homeland. We attempt to showcase the profound beauty of Tibetan culture. We are inspired by the sumptuous diversity of the landscape and the profound humility and awareness seen in the eyes of Tibetans. To be completely engaged in the moment; embracing the experience with total joy and an open heart. We try to capture the heart of Tibet with images that embody the interdependence of all things, the nature of impermanence and the awareness of the Four Noble Truths.

Tsarong Jampa Thinlay:

I am a Tibetan-American web architect and photographer living in the Bay Area. My full name is Jampa Thinlay Tsarong; the Tsarong family are direct descendants from the earliest and most celebrated Tibetan physician, Yuthok Yonten Gonpo. Born in Lhasa, Tibet, I have also lived in Nepal and Beijing, and am a citizen of the United States. These multicultural experiences enable me to work effectively in cross-cultural settings, with insight and sensitivity to my photography. I passionately embrace this approach in my photographs of Tibet, aspiring to portray my homeland with visual and spiritual depth.

Today our knowledge has expanded greatly with the help of science and technology. But knowledge regarding our own mind, our deep nature, is still limited in the Western world. This is because consciousness is formless and cannot be touched and so cannot be measured with instruments. It can only be known through meditation and other methods.

Unlike an external enemy, the inner enemy cannot regroup and launch a comeback once it has been destroyed from within. One great question underlies our experience, whether we think about it consciously or not: what is the purpose of life? From the moment of birth, every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affects this. From the core of our being, we simply desire contentment. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.

These ideas are the perspective from which my photographs emerge.

S. Newman:

S. Newman has been represented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artist Gallery since 1996. Private collectors throughout France, Germany, England and Tibet have purchased selected paintings. In 2007 Atea (formerly Ementor), one of Europe’s biggest IT companies with approximately 6,000 employees in over seven countries, purchased The Place To Be to represent their company vision of cultural unity. A second painting, Together Towards the Top was added to their collection; it is based on a photograph by Tsarong Jampa Thinlay which he took in Tibet. The Top is the striving to be one’s best self in all aspects; a philosophical aspiration, which brought to mind the pilgrimages climbing to the monasteries high in the mountains.

As a self-taught painter, the objective of my painting is to embrace the viewer by selecting subjects that portray the common denominators between people. My objective is to use art as a means of unification. To reach people is to feel their souls. That is my goal as a painter.