Anay Ngawang Chodak is a Tibetan thangka master and contemporary artist whose work dovetails Buddhist traditional approaches and contemporary, anthropomorphic motifs. One is immediately reminded of the Tibetan or Nepalese painted thangka of Jetsun Milarepa, the Tibetan siddha who famously subsisted, during his practice at Drakar Taso, on nettle tea, which turned his skin a light greenish color—the same hue depicted in portraits of the yogi and spiritual poet. Such colorism was identifiable in Anay Ngawang Chodak’s contribution to Kate Oh’s recent group show, Endless knot, and it is a delight to see the artist be given a solo program at the same gallery, where the full breadth of his intricate and somewhat veristic pattern-weaving is prominently on display.

The works are all very recent and the leitmotif running through them is a tessellation of grid-like matrices, each avenue marked by floral pinks, teal greens, aquamarines, or toasted orange-red channels. A few motifs also reoccur including, where human figures are concerned, bulbous almond eyes warped into a droplet; these are meted out by cartoonish bead-eyed clouds when the artist indulges in their penchant for anthropomorphizing. Burgeoning floral buds are often interconnected into a radiating foreground, with laced faces diagrammatically marked-out into sloping inclines that obliquely round into background matrices and lattices. The linkages in the paintings find fixtures in the anthropomorphic “happiness pods” that blossom with wide eyes. Due to Chodak’s lustrous facture, with the canvas bedaubed in Japanese mineral pigments, French gouache paints, and 24K gold, the picture plane scintillates with significant surface depth and shading. Occasionally, Chodak uses raised elements, dexterously compressing handmade Tibetan cotton and French with cold and hot-pressed paper.

Chodak’s mesmerizing approach—one distinct from abstraction, proper, as the geometrical patterns serve as a conceptual anchor—has its foundations in several traditions; the most marked is the Nalanda tradition of India, though Newa Paubha art and the Kashmiri style of Alchi and the Ajanta Ellora caves art also inform his vernacular, which far extends beyond the strictures of traditionalism. Chodka’s hybrid style brings together Newa Paubha, Kashmiri Alchi, and Tibetan art.

As The Kathmandu post’s Anish Ghimire observed in their December 2023 review of Chodak’s Siddharta Art Gallery show at Baber Mahal Revisited, “Compassion and Wisdom in a Contemporary World”, Chodak is a proper symbolist. Ghimire writes that “[t]he flowers, meticulously portrayed, symbolise the perpetual freshness of love and compassion”, with the thorough-going theme being the process-philosophical ontology of fundamental interconnectedness. These are allegorized by Chodak’s Buddhist thangka paintings, which include scenes from the life of the Buddha, various lamas and bodhisattvas, and deities.

This theme is manifest and resolute in Chodak’s work, as various visual elements are galvanized into interwoven constitutive facets demanding sustained, intelligent perceiving. Chodak’s dexterously dovetailing various styles is of a piece with his biography, which includes an eminent residency at the Dalai Lama’s Palace in Dharamsala, India, preceding his current post in Kathmandu. The percipient’s means of receiving the works is, according to Chodak, a means of meditation; in Noor Anand Chawla’s The new Indian express article, "The Tantric in the Thangka" (2025), which reviews Chodak’s recent Delhi Arushi Arts exhibition, Oneness: exploring universal values (Chodak’s first solo show in India), Chodak is quoted as deeming

his paintings “a way to share the essence of the teachings of Buddha beyond words, of embodying Buddhist philosophy instead of simply depicting it”. While process-philosophical themes and concepts the likes of love, universality, or mind-body dualism might tempt us to reduce the semantically ineffable into a meditative idiom, the works are better attended to with a slowness and patience that reflexively attends to the percipient’s occurrent.

(Text by Ekin Erkan)