Since its debut in 2015, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room has been one of the Rubin Museum’s most popular installations, providing an immersive experience inspired by a traditional shrine. Now the Shrine Room travels to Brooklyn, where it will be on view for six years in the Brooklyn Museum’s Arts of Asia galleries as part of a multiyear collaboration.
Beautifully presented in two volumes, Taklung Painting: A Study in Chronology, establishes a reliable foundation for assigning dates to nearly one hundred paintings associated with Taklung Monastery in Central Tibet and its sister monatery, Riwoche, in eastern Tibet. Using vsual images (the succession of teachers represented in the top, side, and, occasionally, the bottom registers of paintings), inscriptions, narrative scenes (in which principal structures in the Taklung monastery compound may be linked to specific dates), and style analysis, the author identifies fundamental parameters that help create firm chronological designations for these c. twelfth to mid-sixteenth century paintings. The essential two-volume set includes more than 800 images, illustrating Taklung paintings in vivid detail, pointing out key visual comparisons and deciphering their many inscriptions.