Bhutanese artist Yeshi Pelden’s solo exhibition Perseverance looks beyond preservation to ask how traditional art can evolve without losing the knowledge, discipline and identity from which it emerged.
Tradition is often associated with continuity — techniques repeated faithfully, forms preserved and knowledge passed from one generation to the next. But for Bhutanese artist Yeshi Pelden, continuity need not mean standing still.
In his solo exhibition Perseverance, Yeshi explores what happens when the visual vocabulary of Bhutan’s artistic heritage is carried into a contemporary space. Rather than treating traditional and contemporary art as opposing practices, his works bring the two into conversation, retaining the foundations of the former while embracing the expressive possibilities of the latter.
It is an approach rooted in Yeshi’s own journey as an artist.
His introduction to painting came almost incidentally during a winter vacation, when he spent time helping his uncle, who was a painter. What began as an experience of assisting and observing gradually developed into a deeper interest in the craft.
That interest eventually took him to Bhutan’s National Institute for Zorig Chusum in 2009, where the country’s traditional arts and crafts are taught through years of rigorous training. Today, Yeshi has returned to the institution in a different role — as a painting instructor responsible for passing on the same artistic knowledge he once went there to acquire.
Yet his own practice increasingly asks what an artist can do with that inheritance.
Drawing upon Thangka painting and its rich vocabulary of symbols, forms and spiritual ideas, Yeshi retains recognisable elements of Bhutanese traditional art but alters the way they are encountered. Motifs may be repeated, fragmented or rearranged, creating compositions that emerge from traditional practice without merely reproducing it.
For the artist, reinterpretation is not a rejection of artistic discipline but another way of ensuring its continuity.
“Traditional art has its own discipline and principles, but carrying it forward also gives us room to express it in our own voice,” Yeshi says. “All the works I’ve brought here are my own reinterpretations of traditional art.”
The response to such works, he says, has also demonstrated how reinterpretation can introduce Bhutanese artistic traditions to audiences unfamiliar with them.
“I’ve seen that this kind of expression attracts a lot of interest, especially from foreigners, because it freshly presents our tradition,” he says.
The question at the centre of Perseverance, therefore, is larger than one artist’s experimentation with form. It concerns the way a living tradition survives across generations.
Preservation can protect techniques, symbols and principles from disappearing. But an artistic tradition also depends upon artists continuing to engage with it — not simply as something inherited from the past, but as material capable of speaking to the present.
That distinction becomes particularly important as contemporary artists negotiate increasingly global audiences and visual cultures. For Yeshi, the boundaries frequently drawn between “traditional” and “contemporary” art can sometimes obscure the possibilities that exist between them.
“People often try to separate traditional and contemporary art, but I don’t think we really need to,” he says. “Traditional art has its own discipline and principles, but contemporary art is more about how we express those elements in our own way.”
Bringing the two together, he believes, can make Bhutanese art accessible without stripping it of its origins.
“I think bringing traditional elements into contemporary expression can make the art more relatable and create an opportunity to introduce our art to people outside Bhutan.”
That philosophy gives Perseverance its underlying tension and, ultimately, its character. The works remain connected to an artistic system shaped by patience, precision and generations of accumulated knowledge, while allowing the individual artist greater freedom in how that knowledge is expressed.
Yeshi’s journey from helping his uncle during a winter holiday to teaching traditional painting and developing his own contemporary practice mirrors the argument contained within the exhibition itself. Artistic inheritance moves forward because someone receives it, learns its rules and eventually finds a way to make it speak in a voice of their own.
In Perseverance, tradition is consequently neither a relic to be guarded nor a convention to be discarded. It becomes a starting point.
And perhaps that is where preservation and change cease to be opposites. A tradition can remain faithful to its foundations while acquiring new forms, audiences and meanings. Its survival may depend not only on how carefully it is preserved, but also on whether each generation is given the space to carry it somewhere new.
