Apart from offering screenings, panel discussionss and masterclasses, DIFF will be exhibiting drawings by Vancouver-based Japanese artist Tomoyo Ihaya at TIPA in order to add to the diversity of the DIFF cultural experience.
These images weredrawn and painted by Tomoyo from January 2012 onwards, mostly in Dharamshala during one of her several artistic research trips to India,which were sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts.
In early 2012, the growing number of self-immolations of Tibetans in China-dominated Tibet upset her profoundly. She then arranged to live in Dharamshala for several months among the exile Tibetan community in India. There she vowed to make a drawing each time she heard a report about another act of self-immolation. For her, these were a way of bearing witness, paying tribute to, and mourning the dead through her art.
It can be said that Tomoyo chronicles these events as they unfold in the media, locally and internationally, almost as a journalist would. However,these intimate paintings on handmade Japanese paperare seeped with the intense emotional response she experiences amidst the Tibetan community she has befriended and lived with, as they tumultuously face the elusive reality of gaining freedom for their lost land.
Indian writer and scholar, Ananya Vajpeyi, described the drawings in this way:
“Each of her little canvases on Japanese paper tells a story, with the self-immolating individual as the protagonist of that story. Certain symbols and metaphors recur in all her works, including a white tent on a mountain, green saplings, blue lotuses, red flower petals or drops of blood, water bodies of all kinds, principally lakes and rivers, candles, trees, animals, birds and of course human figures, mostly in white” (Seminar magazine, April 2013).
Born in Japan, Tomoyo Ihaya is a renowned artist. She has held solo shows in Vancouver, Toronto, Kelowna, Dharamshala and group shows in India, America, Japan, Canada, Korea, Taiwan etc. An established printmaker, Tomoyo Ihaya has had a long standing relationship with Bharat Bhawan.Her curiosity about other cultures and her strong belief that art and one’s life should be intertwined has lead her to travel and produce art work through international artist-in-residency programs in many parts of the world.