Tibetan Buddhist Monastery Collections Today

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The study of Tibetan art has made great progress in the last decades. Temples and monasteries as well as museum and private collections have become available in richly illustrated publications, and masterworks of Tibetan painting and metal sculpture housed in western museums and in Tibetan Buddhist institutions have become accessible as well. However, Tibetan Buddhist institutions have much more to offer for research than a selection of the most ancient and valuable pieces they own, as their collections are much broader and allow for research questions that cannot be asked on the basis of objects dispersed in museum and private collections. Examples for such questions are, the relationship of collections to place and school, the composition of sets of objects and their usage, the display and purpose of collections in the past and at present.While western museum and private collections of Tibetan art have been researched on in numerous publications, the latest probably being the study of the Bordier Collection in Gruyere (Béguin, Gilles, ed. 2013. Art sacré du Tibet: Collection Alain Bordier. Paris: Findakly), so far no substantial research has been done on the collections of Tibetan monastic institutions. This project not only makes up for this, but also looks into the questions these collections face in the contemporary world, and thus directly participates in a dialogue that has prominently emerged in the region over the last decade. This research project focuses on the collections of selected monasteries in Ladakh, India (such as Hemis Monastery and affiliated institutions and Matho), and Mustang, Nepal (such as Namgyal, Choede, Kag Choede, Tsarang, Lo Gekhar, Gheling, Jar Choede) and assesses them as both a rich depository to refine our knowledge of Tibetan art and as collections. The artworks themselves not only provide an extremely rich resource of new contextualised objects, many of them with inscriptions, but also for exploring new research questions pertaining to content, material, sets, usage, and display. The latter points intimately relate to the objects being part of historically formed and presently managed collections, which may or may not be representative of the respective branch of Tibetan Buddhism the institution pertains to.