撰文：才仁・夏爾帕（Tsherin Sherpa） 協同：普嘉・杜瓦爾（Pooja Duwal）
萊因・辛格・班德爾 爵士（Sir Lain Singh Bangdel）的作品於香港巴塞爾藝術展（Art Basel Hong Kong）呈現之際，能有此榮幸回顧其卓越的生命與深遠的遺緒，實屬一份殊榮。眼見他的創作——繼在尼泊爾、美國及歐洲舉行重要展覽之後——步入這國際舞台，便體認到：一種在尼泊爾沃土中孕育、經由其民族精神塑造而成的現代主義，如今正以令人信服的姿態與國際觀眾展開對話。班德爾在此國際展會中的作品呈現，肯定了任何對亞洲現代藝術的嚴謹溯源都必須將喜馬拉雅地區及其開創者納入其中。
本畫冊中對於班德爾的生平已有詳盡記錄：他在大吉嶺的童年時光、於加爾各答所受的繪畫訓練、決定他風格的巴黎歲月，以及 1960 年代初返鄉的決定。他被公認為尼泊爾現代藝術的先行者、多產的小說家，以及奠定基礎的藝術史學者，他的著作守護了尼泊爾珍貴的雕塑遺產。這些細節我將不再重複。
在此，我將以一位當代藝術家的身份進行陳述。作為一位親身沐浴於他的藝術典範與榜樣光芒之下的創作者，我得以用一種最為直接且真切的方式，去感受和體悟：他的開創性作品，究竟為我們這一代尼泊爾藝術家，鋪設和實現了何種深遠的可能性？
初次面對班德爾的畫作時，我心頭湧現的是謙遜與力量交織的感受。他是一位藝術家，他將歐洲現代主義的精髓——立體派的結構、抽象派的自由、表現主義的熱情融入體內，然後靜靜地將這股力量，轉向了喜馬拉雅、轉向了尼泊爾的故事、轉向了他自己人民內心的情感氣候。他的用色絕非僅僅形式上的選擇；它們承載著風雲變幻、山巒海拔同時象徵內在世界的高度，和歷史記憶。他的抽象作品並非孤立的實驗；它們飽含著對尼泊爾山川與人民的深切關懷與流離情懷。
對於像我這樣，在一個已然與全球化接軌的尼泊爾成長的藝術家而言，班德爾的作品給予了我至關重要的啟示：一個人可以全然地屬於當代，卻無需割捨自己的文化血脈。他向我們展示，「現代」不必等同於「西方」，而借鑒西方的技藝也無損於對自身歷史的忠誠。他在畫布的方寸之間，將遙遠的世界編織在一起，為我們這些同樣遊走於不同文化、語言和地理之間的人，鋪就了一條前行的道路。
我始終為他抽象畫作中那份沉靜的自持而感動。它們不喧嘩、不張揚，而是循序漸進地將觀者的靈魂引入。起初，你只見大片藍、灰或土紅色帶橫掃而過。然後，一條山脊線、一組可能暗示屋頂的塊狀結構，或是一個旗幟、一輪明月的意象緩緩浮現。這種感受對我而言，正是他現代性的一部分。在這個不斷加速的時代，班德爾的畫作要求觀者駐足沉思，而這份投入的時間，終將得到回饋。它們訓練我們的眼睛超越表象的描繪，進而深入心靈層面的感受。
同樣震撼人心的是他那些植根於社會現實的具象作品：加爾各答的饑荒景象、《穆納與馬丹》（Muna Madan）系列，以及描繪挑夫與勞工的肖像。在這些作品中，你能見證到一種深厚的人文精神，即使畫面上的人物最終隱去，它也從未離開過他的創作。早期場景中那份對於人文的同理心，也一直延續到他後期的抽象畫作中，只不過苦難與堅韌不再藉由面孔與軀體呈現，而是透過韻律、斷裂與光影來傳達。正是這種貫穿始終的倫理脈絡——他對真誠的堅持——成就了他的現代主義與其持久的力量。
2024 年，我很榮幸在加德滿都的 Takpa 空間策劃了「萊因・辛格・班德爾 爵士：我的藝術奉獻」的非營利展覽。決定舉辦這個展覽是源自一份責任與感恩的心。作為一名同樣穿梭於尼泊爾與廣闊世界之間的藝術家，我深信我自己的道路，在某種意義上是班德爾所開創的。策劃他的展覽，是一種對這份傳承的認可，並將其在一個為當代對話而設計的空間中，重現給更年輕的一代。
從展覽之初，我們便預感到這將是一場不凡的展覽，但無人能預料到的是它後續強烈的迴響。對於 Takpa 而言，它成為我們有史以來最成功的展覽之一——不僅在參觀人數上，更在參與的強度上。年輕的藝術家和學生們一再造訪，手中拿著速寫本，在《加德滿都谷地》和那些喜馬拉雅抽象畫前靜默地佇立著。許多觀者告訴我們，他們從書本上認識這個名字，卻從未有機會一次集中欣賞如此多的原作。有些人在他的畫作中感受到了一種「包容」——允許著他們去嘗試、去大膽、去想像一種不必追隨他人腳步的尼泊爾現代藝術。
外國訪客也經常感到驚喜。許多人坦言，他們不知道尼泊爾擁有如此悠久而精妙的現代繪畫史。他們對這個國家的印象，主要還停留在傳統宗教藝術、佛塔和古蹟上。但站在班德爾的抽象畫前，他們彷彿邂逅了另一個尼泊爾——一個與巴黎和紐約進行對話，卻又無可辯駁地屬於自身的尼泊爾。幾位訪客將這些作品描述為「靜默的史詩」：它們尺幅內斂，卻在情感和氛圍的延伸上顯得浩瀚無垠。對他們而言，這場展覽改寫了關於現代主義可以發生於何處，以及誰有權主張其歸屬的既定認知。
然而，最令我動容的，是目睹不同世代如何透過他的畫布彼此相遇。年長的參觀者中，有些人曾在 1960、70 年代於加德滿都看過他早期的展覽，並分享那些初次接觸現代藝術的記憶。年輕的觀眾傾聽著——往往懷著敬畏之心——逐漸意識到，他們今日所視為理所當然的視覺自由，其實是前人艱難爭取而來的。在畫廊空間中，班德爾不僅是一位歷史人物；他成為了一個連結過去與未來的，活生生的節點。
這次在 Takpa 的經歷，讓我更深地思考了「承載」藝術家遺緒的意義。在尼泊爾，我們常以崇敬來談論遺緒，但我開始意識到它更是一種持續的行動：策劃、教育、寫作、開闢藝術場域，或創造條件等，讓這些畫作能被以嶄新的眼光看待。班德爾和沙克雅家族數十年來一直履行著這份責任，他們組織展覽、建立檔案、製作影片，推動其作品進入全球重要機構。作為一名藝術家和策展人，我將我們在 Takpa 的努力視為這個大型的關懷與推動生態中的一部分。
在制度層面，班德爾奠定了我們許多人如今賴以立足的基礎：尼泊爾藝術理事會（Nepal Art Council）、畢蘭德拉藝術畫廊（Birendra Art Gallery），以及他在尼泊爾皇家學院（Royal Nepal Academy）的領導。在思想層面，關於他早期雕塑和被盜圖像的著作，建構了一套理解文化遺產、失落與返還問題的思考脈絡，至今仍持續形塑相關討論。在藝術層面，他向我們證明了抽象可以紮根於喜馬拉雅：它錨定於具體的山川、詩歌、奮鬥與希望，而非懸浮在一個沒有地理標誌的普世空間裡。
對於我這一代及更年輕的藝術家來說，這一點至為關鍵。我們身處的全球藝術界往往看重創作的新穎與速度。在如此背景下，班德爾的作品示範了另一種嚴謹：它耐心地紮根，並以倫理作為基礎。他的畫作不在於製造奇觀，而在於專注——專注於光影、專注於大地、專注於歷史，專注於人類心靈中那份安靜的內在氣候。這便是我渴望繼承和延續的現代主義。
在香港巴塞爾藝術展上邂逅班德爾的畫作，是目睹這份遺緒又向前邁出了新的一步。在這裡，他的作品與亞洲乃至全球多元的現代主義並肩而立——韓國的單色畫、日本的具體派、印度的進步派、中國的抽象藝術等等。在這宏大的合唱中，他的聲音依然清晰、獨特。他的畫布提醒著我們，現代藝術的洪流並非僅自少數西方中心單向奔湧；它誕生於無數地方性的拉鋸與轉化之中，包括在一座喜馬拉雅山區的小首都裡，一位藝術家拒絕在故土與世界之間做出取捨。
對於香港乃至世界各地的觀者而言，我衷心期望此次在香港巴塞爾藝術展上的呈現，所提供的絕不僅是對尼泊爾現代藝術的驚鴻一瞥。我更希望它能邀請人們重新審視藝術創新的真正源頭，並在未來我們談論起「全球」藝術史時，能夠摒棄「以誰為故事核心」的既定成見。
對於我們身處尼泊爾及廣泛喜馬拉雅地區的人們來說，在香港巴塞爾藝術展見證班德爾的作品，既是一場盛大的慶典，同時也是一份莊嚴的召喚，號召著我們延續這位偉人所開創的足跡：在擁抱世界的同時不失本我，並以最真誠的勇氣，不斷轉化我們所繼承的藝術形式。
我向畢巴卡爾・沙克亞博士（Bibhakar S. Shakya, Ph.D.）、班德爾和沙克雅家族、丹之寶畫廊，以及所有透過奉獻精神將班德爾的遺緒帶上這個國際舞台的人，致以最深切的感激。願他的藝術繼續啟發未來的世代——在尼泊爾、橫跨南亞，乃至全世界。
關於作者
才仁・夏爾帕（Tsherin Sherpa，1968 年出生於加德滿都）是一位享譽國際的當代藝術家，其作品將傳統藏傳唐卡繪畫與當代視覺語彙進行轉譯與融合。才仁・夏爾帕師從其父——烏爾根・多吉大師（Master Urgen Dorje），他的創作深深汲取喜馬拉雅的造像元素，同時探討身份、離散經驗與圖像轉化等主題。他層次豐富的構圖，既反映了個人的歷程，也體現了文化的路徑，成功地連結了神聖傳統與當代表達。
才仁・夏爾帕的作品於國際上廣泛展出，並於 2022 年代表尼泊爾參加威尼斯雙年展。他的作品被多家重要機構收藏，其中包括維多利亞與艾伯特博物館、魯賓藝術博物館以及舊金山亞洲藝術博物館。他目前居住並工作於加德滿都與加州之間，並持續擴大喜馬拉雅藝術在全球當代論述中的影響力。
Bangdel’s Life and Legacy: A Contemporary Artist Reflects
By Tsherin Sherpa with Pooja Duwal
It is an honor to reflect on the life and legacy of Sir Lain Singh Bangdel on the occasion of his presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong. To see his work enter this global arena—after important exhibitions in Nepal, the United States, and Europe—is to recognize that a modernism shaped in and through Nepal now speaks convincingly to international audiences. His presence here affirms that any serious history of Asian modern art must include the Himalayan region and its pioneers.
Much has already been written in this catalog about Bangdel’s biography: his childhood in Darjeeling, his training in Kolkata, his formative Paris years, and his decisive return to Nepal in the early 1960s. He is rightly remembered as the pioneer of modern Nepali art, a prolific novelist, and a foundational art historian whose books helped protect Nepal’s sculptural heritage. I will not repeat these details here. Instead, I want to speak as a contemporary artist who has lived with his example—as someone who has felt, in a very direct way, what his work made possible for my generation.
When I first encountered Bangdel’s paintings, I felt both humbled and energized. Here was an artist who had digested European modernism—Cubism, abstraction, expressionism—and then quietly turned it toward the Himalayas, toward Nepali stories, toward the emotional climates of his own people. His colors were not just formal decisions; they carried weather, altitude, and memory. His abstractions were not detached experiments; they were charged with longing, displacement, and a deep sense of care for Nepal’s landscapes and its people.
For artists like me, coming of age in a Nepal already touched by globalization, Bangdel’s work offered a crucial reassurance: that one could be fully contemporary without abandoning one’s inheritance. He showed that “modern” did not have to mean “Western,” and that referencing Western techniques did not require surrendering one’s own history. He stitched together distant worlds on the surface of the canvas and, in doing so, opened a path for those of us who also move between cultures, languages, and geographies.
I have always been struck by the quiet discipline of his abstractions. They are not loud; they do not shout for attention. Instead, they pull you in gradually. At first you notice sweeping bands of blue, gray, or earthen red. Then, slowly, a ridge line emerges, or a cluster of forms that might be rooftops, or a suggestion of a flag or moon. That slowness is, for me, part of their modernity. In a world that moves quickly, his paintings demand—and reward—time. They train the eye to move beyond the literal and into the felt.
Equally powerful are his figurative works rooted in social reality: the famine paintings from Kolkata, the Muna-Madan series, the portraits of porters and laborers. In these, you see a deep humanism that never leaves his practice, even when the figure disappears. The empathy in those early scenes carries forward into his later abstractions, where suffering and resilience are conveyed through rhythm, fracture, and light rather than through faces and bodies. That ethical through-line—his insistence on sincerity—is what makes his modernism so enduring.
In 2024, I had the privilege of curating Lain S. Bangdel: My Dedication to Art, a non-profit exhibition at Takpa in Kathmandu. The decision to host that exhibition came from a place of gratitude and responsibility. As an artist who has also lived between Nepal and the wider world, I have long felt that my own path is, in some sense, possible because of Bangdel’s. Curating his work was a way of acknowledging that lineage and offering it back to a younger generation in a space designed for contemporary dialogue.
From the very beginning, we sensed that the exhibition would be special, but none of us anticipated just how strongly it would resonate. For Takpa, it became one of the most successful shows we have ever mounted—measured not only in attendance, but in the intensity of engagement. Young artists and art students came again and again, sketchbooks in hand, standing in silence before canvases like Kathmandu Valley and the Himalayan abstractions. Many told us they had known his name from textbooks, but had never seen so many original works together. Some spoke of feeling “permission” in his paintings—permission to experiment, to be bold, to imagine a modern Nepali art that did not have to look like anyone else’s.
Foreign visitors, too, were often surprised. Many admitted that they did not know Nepal had such a long and sophisticated history of modern painting. They associated the country primarily with traditional religious art, stupas, and monuments. Standing in front of Bangdel’s abstractions, they encountered another Nepal—one in conversation with Paris and New York, yet unmistakably its own. Several visitors described the works as “quietly epic”: intimate in scale, but vast in emotional and atmospheric reach. For them, the exhibition rewrote assumptions about where modernism could be located, and who could claim it.
What moved me most, however, was watching generations meet one another through his canvases. Older visitors, some of whom had seen his early exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s, shared memories of those first encounters with modern art in Kathmandu. Younger visitors listened—often in awe—as they realized that the visual freedoms they take for granted were hard won. In the gallery space, Bangdel was not only a historical figure; he was a living point of connection between past and future.
This experience at Takpa made me think differently about what it means to “carry” an artist’s legacy. In Nepal, we often talk about legacy in terms of reverence, but I came to understand it also as a form of work: curating, teaching, writing, arguing for space, creating conditions in which these paintings can be seen with fresh eyes. The Bangdel and Shakya family have carried this responsibility for decades—organizing exhibitions, building archives, producing films, and bringing his work into institutions across continents. As an artist and curator, I see our efforts at Takpa as part of that larger ecosystem of care.
Institutionally, Bangdel helped lay the foundations that many of us now walk on: the Nepal Art Council, the Birendra Art Gallery, and his leadership at the Royal Nepal Academy. Intellectually, his books on early sculpture and stolen images created a framework for thinking about heritage, loss, and restitution that continues to shape conversations today. Artistically, he showed that abstraction could be Himalayan—that it could be anchored in specific mountains, poems, struggles, and hopes, rather than floating in a placeless, universal space.
For artists of my generation and younger, this is crucial. We are operating in a global art world that often prizes novelty and speed. In that context, Bangdel’s work models another kind of rigor: rooted, patient, and ethically grounded. His paintings are not about spectacle. They are about attention—to light, to land, to history, to the quiet inner weather of the human heart. That is the kind of modernism I want to inherit and extend.
To encounter Bangdel’s paintings at Art Basel Hong Kong is to see this inheritance taken yet another step forward. Here, his work stands among multiple modernisms from across Asia and the world—Korean Dansaekhwa, Japanese Gutai, Indian Progressives, Chinese abstraction, and more. In that chorus, his voice remains distinct. His canvases remind us that modern art did not flow in one direction from a few Western centers; it emerged through countless local negotiations, including in a small Himalayan capital where one artist refused to choose between his roots and the wider world.
For viewers in Hong Kong and beyond, I hope this presentation offers more than a glimpse of Nepali modern art. I hope it invites a rethinking of where artistic innovation happens, and whose stories we center when we speak of “global” art history. For those of us in Nepal and the broader Himalayan region, seeing Bangdel at Art Basel is both a celebration and a call—to continue the work he began, to engage the world without losing ourselves, and to keep transforming our inherited forms with honesty and courage.
I offer my deepest appreciation to Dr. Bibhakar S. Shakya, the Bangdel and Shakya family, TANSBAO Gallery, and all those whose dedication has brought Bangdel’s legacy to this global stage. May his art continue to inspire generations to come—in Nepal, across South Asia, and around the world.
About the Author
Tsherin Sherpa (b. 1968, Kathmandu) is a globally acclaimed contemporary artist whose work fuses traditional Tibetan thangka painting with modern visual languages. Trained by his father, Master Urgen Dorje, Sherpa’s practice draws deeply from Himalayan iconography while engaging themes of identity, diaspora, and transformation. His richly layered compositions reflect both personal and cultural journeys, bridging sacred tradition and contemporary expression.
Sherpa has exhibited internationally and represented Nepal at the Venice Biennale in 2022. His work is held in major institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He lives and works between Kathmandu and Northern California, continuing to expand the presence of Himalayan art in global contemporary discourse.