Sohan Qadri

Gallery Mission Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With galleries in New York, Beverly Hills, and Hong Kong, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

Painting Without Borders

By Marius Kwint

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ords can often get in the way of art, even though much modern art is consciously formed through a dialogue with art history and philosophy. Silence is certainly the appropriate response to Sohan Qadri’s paintings, because they are created simply to be seen, without thought, interpretation, or narration. Like the Tantric meditation techniques that Qadri also teaches from his home in Copenhagen, the luminous paper-scapes of this Punjabi-born artist are pure sensation, intended to flood the mind rather than to prompt it, and to turn the viewer’s attention inwards, toward ananda, or an ecstasy that is “beyond stories.” “History pertains to conflicts,” he told me. “I don’t believe in history: I believe in something that’s abiding all the time. I’m interested in that; I live that; I practice that.”

While Qadri stresses that his vision is not tied to any particular time or place, his deep, harmonious hues—Sindoori reds, peacock blues, hot ochres, and lush greens—patently evoke India’s textile traditions as well as its vistas, and are obtained using organic dyes that he brews himself. To the observer schooled in Western abstraction, however, at first glance his striations and holes summon an eclectic array of resemblances: Their qualities are somewhat protozoic, like the diatoms of

plankton or the tiny oölites that constitute limestone; somewhat epic and archaeological, like the Nazca Lines; and somewhat whimsical, like the paintings of the Swiss-born abstractionist Paul Klee or the Catalan Joan Miró. Qadri’s technique of puncturing his paper bears obvious comparison with the slashed canvases of the Argentinean painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana, although for Fontana this was primarily a means of quasi-sculptural illusion, whereas Qadri’s roseate wounds unite the verso with the recto, dissolving the distinction between surface and interior.

“When I create, I’m not there,” Qadri said.

“Painting comes from beyond. When I start, I am completely blank. When I’m friends with blankness, good things come.” Qadri uses 400-gram-per-squaremeter bespoke paper from the Hahnemühle firm in Germany, and scores, punctures, and abrades it, applying printer’s inks to some of the feathered edges, before priming it with glycerin for absorption. Finally, he dyes the paper with soft brushes or in a bath, and waits for the shapes and microstructures to reveal themselves. Unlike paint or ink, dye fuses with the fibers themselves, giving the “paintings” their vital integrity and autonomy. The entire process takes him no more than three to four hours. Part of the reason he 7

abandoned the oil painting with which he founded his career was that it took too long. “As soon as it becomes a struggle, it’s not working,” he told me. “I avoid effort as much as possible in getting to the essence.” It was a wise move, because ironically the paper-works have a much more disciplined appearance than the oils, although that particular medium gave him important insights, too, among them that “every stroke on the canvas is a complete stroke by itself.”

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cholars have identified specific Tantric-Vajrayan Buddhist symbolism in Qadri’s ovoid seeds, glowing vulvas, sinuous spines, sutured wounds, scored furrows, and occasional grids. “Tantra” means “continuum” and the lines can be, among other things, paths or channels for the flow of vital energies, or prana.

The dots, or seeds, represent the bindu, which in Buddhist cosmology are the originary voids, both containing and extending into infinity. Qadri is a sparing wordsmith, and in one of his published volumes of poetry, The Dot and the Dots (1978), he puts the relationship between the two kinds of mark thus:

The Line

Is the footprints

of the Dot

on the face

of Space.

“Art and metaphysics are inseparable and reciprocal in Buddhist thought,” explains the distinguished American art critic Donald Kuspit, who has called Qadri “the preeminent aesthetic mystic of modernism.” For another expert, the Himalayan art scholar Betty Seid, the paintings are “cosmic diagrams,” or yantra, designed to aid meditation, the likes of which Qadri also remembers drawing on the wall for a temple dancer and musician who lived on the family farm, and became one of his childhood gurus.

Qadri himself, however, is keen to emphasize that such devices are merely means to higher and universal ends.

The symbols are neither self-contained, nor are they

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signs in the linguistic sense, nor are they themselves to be meditated upon. “A symbol is a step only, not a place to stay,” he tells me. ‘It will transcend itself if you stay visual.” His discipline is nothing if not easy.

The very purpose of Qadri’s spiritual practice is to go beyond the bindings of allegiance, and for his starting-points, he has chosen the convergences between the main religions that he absorbed in his journey. “Vajrayana is a ritualized form of Buddhism,” Qadri explains in a published interview with journalist Vibhuti Patel. “It’s where Hinduism and Buddhism meet. Zen is its offshoot.” Elsewhere, he said, “for me, all systems point to the same bindu. One does not have to find a balance between systems: There is an inherent cohesiveness in all systems, and one only has to become aware of it. Then contradictions fade away.” Qadri does not think that his art is about society and politics, but in a rare moment of comment, he writes: “Systems and symbols are catchy, but to be caught in them is a sign of retardation, giving rise to narrow-mindedness. ... In my opinion, these forces have affected almost all religions today, and hence the rise of fanaticism and hatred towards systems and symbols other than those taught by one’s own religion.”

He remembers harmonious relations between Muslims and Hindus in his childhood village, with blessings conferred from all parties when his mother’s cattle were sick. His impact on practical politics has been considerable, since, in 1973, he co-founded the famous Christiania free community in an abandoned barracks on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Largely selfgoverning on anarchist-cooperative principles, and know for its open trading of soft drugs, Christiania has lately become a target for the police and center-right government, which is pressing to build private housing on the pretext of “mixed ownership.” In May 2007, Christiania made international headlines because of riots against the demolition of a building there. Qadri does not deny the realities of such strife and conflict, but his quest is to “see the concord behind suffering.”

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undaram Tagore, who represents Qadri in New York, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills, California, and has written the main biographical account, says that he does not merely cross borders and divisions, but completely “dissolves” them. Qadri was born Sohan Singh in 1932 to a wealthy part-Sikh family from the Kapurthala district of the Punjab, where, as a child on the family farm, he learned from two resident gurus: one a Sufi, Ahmed Ali Shah Qadri, whose last name he later adopted, and the other the Bengali yogi named Bikham Giri, for whom he drew the yantras. “He was a master of prana [vital energies],” Qadri said of the latter, “he’d breathe in and his eyeballs would pop out.

He’d go into a trance. I learned by observing him, by being with him for hours.” The Sufi master also used a mirror as a means of self-transcendence, rather than narcissism, and gave Qadri the mirror, which he still carries along with the surname. Qadri recounted to Patel: “ ‘Sohan Singh’ did not look right. That’s when ‘Qadri’ came into my head. The master himself was not using that name: It was not important to him, his mirror was! ... I never called him ‘Qadri’ but, when I signed it on my first painting, it looked right. The choice of that Hindu-Muslim, Sanskrit-Persian combination thrilled me later.”

Tagore tells how, showing early artistic promise, the teenage Qadri resisted family wishes that he take over the farm and ran away via Karnaul to Tibet, much as the German mountaineer and writer Heinrich Harrer had recently done to escape from a British prisoner-of-war camp. He sought refuge in Buddhist monasteries before he was almost literally dragged home by his wrestler cousin at the behest of his mother. He nevertheless insisted on matriculating at the local college, the first from his village to do so. After graduation, he sought artistic fulfillment in Bombay, working first as a still photographer in early Bollywood and then discovering the famous JJ School of Art. There, with India newly independent and international modernism flourishing, he met the Progressive Artists Group of Bombay,

including the painter and writer Francis Newton Souza, who later moved to New York. Prompted by the artists Krishna Ara, K.K. Hebbar, and Shanti Dave, Qadri proceeded to the Simla College of Art in the Himalayan foothills, the erstwhile summer capital of British India.

Like Copenhagen, Simla was cosmopolitan but provincial enough to nourish gentilities such as, Tagore notes, “Christ Church, the Cecil Hotel, and the quaint toy train that chugged up and down the foothills.”

The curriculum was based on the Royal College of Art in London, while feeding in exacting lessons from the Mughol style of painting. Dating from the 16th century, this style, often associated with miniatures, stood as historic evidence of the power of cultural amalgamation, boasting both Persian roots and the influence of Renaissance painting that was introduced by visiting Jesuits to Akbar’s court. Satish Gujral was also teaching at Simla after having spent time in Mexico with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. There, Qadri began to sell his paintings to Europeans and Americans at the Maria Brothers bookshop. While still a student, he visited the galleries of Delhi, met more artists, and felt part of a new generation of modernists who began to reject their predecessors’ sole reliance on Indianseeming figuration.

Finding his first patrons in the figures of Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, an associate of the London Bloomsbury Group, and Pierre Jeanneret, cousin of Le Corbusier, Qadri was invited to exhibit in the Punjabi capital of Chandigarh. He slaked his thirst for international modernism as depicted on the pages of Studio International and The Modern Review, and moved from figuration to abstraction, rejecting many of his contemporaries’ urban realism in the search for something more redolent of his own philosophical and spiritual background. He devised his enduring system of dividing dark, warm or cool, and light colors. Further exhibitions followed in New Delhi, but the market in India at that time was largely restricted to a few Western diplomats and expatriates, and Anand encouraged him to travel abroad.

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hrough a mixture of guile and luck, and still penniless, he got a passport and made his way to Nairobi, where he befriended the Kenyan gallerist Elimo Njau, and persuaded the Indian ambassador to sponsor his show at the city’s Paa-yaa-paa Gallery. A similar seizing of opportunities saw him soon journeying to Zurich and Brussels, where he exhibited at the Galerie Roman Louis in 1966, and played chess with Réné Magritte. In Paris, the same year, he exhibited at the prestigious Galerie Arnaud alongside Pierre Soulages and other stellar artists, before eventually settling in the more tranquil Copenhagen with the help of the Danish ministry of culture, and the nonchalant hospitality of an eccentric aristocrat and civil servant whose huge villa he shared for many years alongside a number of fish, free-flying birds, dogs, and turtles.

Qadri does not seem to value one experience over another, and it took both his childhood gurus to help him appreciate the reciprocity of sound and silence.

His Bengali yogi’s “deep voice still resonates in my head: It made me vibrate,” he recalls. “Hindus chant and dance; my guru was always dancing!” However, “[at] the mosque there was silence; no sound, no noise. It was visual. I loved it.” Qadri speaks of the vibrations that have since been visualized in his work: The apertures, like lights, are also the tinkling of temple bells, and the lines are harmonious waves, or “resonances” in quiet, like the effect of an orchestra that damps its instruments to close a great symphony. “There is a yantric heart oozing out of silence,” he tells me. Like the Russianborn abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky, Qadri attributes sounds to colors. Qadri also remains open to external impressions, and the parallel lines serve to evoke for him ploughed fields in the dawn mist of his rural childhood. Copenhagen, known for its clean, orthogonal modernism, is also a city of water, where a pale northern sun rakes flat, grassy expanses, and rippling harbors.

The art of reconciling these other senses through vision is also consistent with Tantra (the topography of his papers invite touch, while suggesting

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the bright palette of Indian cuisine). As is fairly widely known, Tantra involves a range of sensory practices, including the ritual consumption of taboo foods, and most notoriously in the eyes of prurient and repressive Abrahamic cultures, sex. “Tantra, I feel, is the only system in the world that liberates sex from its bondage,” wrote Qadri in an email interview with writer-poet Swati Chopra. “To comprehend the sensual and the sacred as one unit, or in unity, is the extraordinary approach of Tantric sadhana [practice].... To procreate is also to recreate. Tantra ... is all-inclusive, taking in the negative with the positive. What otherwise becomes a religious trap is used as a stepping-stone for advancement....

Tantra believes in viewing life as a whole, so there is no denial of any sort.” The distinguished Columbia University professor and former Buddhist monk Robert Thurman argues that such a reconciliation of flesh and spirit can fulfill American individualism without the predatory consumption of the world’s resources.

He says that Qadri “breaks through to pure beauty by seeing though illusions and soaring free.”

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ince Qadri is able to integrate art and life through Tantra, and therefore largely to realize the dream of modernism, he is probably not bothered about how his work is appropriated or represented by others. A trawl of the web shows one of his paintings illustrating Deepak Chopra’s riposte to the militant atheism of my Oxford colleague Richard Dawkins in the New Age magazine Resurgence, and another fronting an issue of McKinsey Quarterly on securing India’s economic boom. The intercourse between Occident and Orient is of course nothing new, and their duality is, of course, often overstated or projected.

Although modernism is stereotypically associated with the triumph of clinical “Western” rationality, it has important roots in 20th-century esoteric movements and European encounters with the South and East.

For example, Klee revolutionized his own abstraction after visiting North Africa, and the Dutch painter Piet

Mondrian’s rectilinear designs famously expressed his belief in Theosophy, which was partly inspired by Vedic mythology. There is much in common between Qadri’s principles and the Western classical tradition of the sublime, which, according to the influential New York-based critic Clement Greenberg, reaches its apogee in abstract expressionism, particularly the color-field painting of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko.

In such work, Greenberg argued, painting “discovers its own essence” and so fulfills the historical process that Qadri transcends.

Not all these relationships have been happy ones, however; several critics inspired by PalestinianAmerican scholar Edward Said’s polemic Orientalism (1975) have decried the idealization of Eastern wisdom, especially in Asia’s present circumstances of economic modernization red in tooth and claw. And while New Age movements were associated with a progressive counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s, the appropriation of the Tantric in the West had a darker side in the preceding decades, owing to the search for an “Aryan” mythology on the Far Right.

It is this mixed history that the German Nobel Prizewinning writer Heinrich Böll had in mind when he wrote that Qadri “liberates the word meditation from its fashionable taste and brings it back to its proper origin, uninfluenced by Western propaganda, misunderstandings, and corruptions.” With similar intent, the artist Francis Newton Souza wrote, “Qadri is a learned man. He is a saintly man from whom an aura emanates. Try to expose him as a phony saint and he emerges as a great artist.” However, Qadri, along with other internationally successful artists of the Indian diaspora reminds that modernism can migrate in more than one direction, so that the concern with “proper origins” becomes unimportant. Some would say that we are still left with the task of turning this vision of international modernism into a social reality, because all the while that Qadri is dissolving borders, states are sophisticating them.

Principal sources: 1. Marius Kwint, conversation with Sohan Qadri, March 2008.

2. Seeker: The Art of Sohan Qadri, New York and Ahmedabad: Sundaram Tagore and Mapin Publishing, 2004.

3. Sohan Qadri: Presence of Being, New York: Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2007.

4. “The Art of a Seeker.” Interview with Vibhuti Patel, www.beliefnet.com.

5. “At the Bindu.” Email interview with Swati Chopra, www.lifepositive.com.

Marius Kwint is a senior lecturer in visual culture at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Previously, he was a lecturer in the history of art and a fellow of St. Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford. In 2005, he devised and co-curated a major exhibition at the Museum of Design, Zurich, on the dendritic (tree-like) form in scientific visual culture, entitled Einfach Komplex (Simply Complex). He has just (May 2010) finished hosting the tour of the American-born artist Beth Fisher’s acclaimed exhibition Grisaille Legacy from the Royal Scottish Academy to Portsmouth.

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List of Works (organized by page number) 2

Untitled (detail), 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Installation, Drishti: A New Vision, the Art of Sohan Qadri, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, 2010

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Adya II (detail), 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Moksha II, 2009, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Havan VI, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Nadi III, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 39 x 55 inches

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Amala VI (detail)

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Amala VI, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 39 x 27 inches

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Adya II, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Arti IV, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Sruti IV, 2009, ink and dye on paper, 27 x 39 inches

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Sruti III, 2009, ink and dye on paper, 27 x 39 inches

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Untitled (detail)

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Untitled, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Installation, Drishti: A New Vision, the Art of Sohan Qadri, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, 2010

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Untitled, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Untitled, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Abhasa II, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 39 x 55 inches

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Homa IV (detail)

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Homa IV, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Arnava V, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Akasha III, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Bija IV, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Vedanta III, 2007, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Untitled, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches

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Curriculum Vitae

2003

EDUCATION 1951

1955-60

1988

Initiated by Guru Bhikham Giri: yoga and meditation, dance and music Master’s Degree in Fine Art, Government College of Art, Simla, India Writers Workshop, Calcutta, India

TEACHING

Conducts meditations and seminars on aesthetics and metaphysics

AWARDS 1982 1968

I.A.P.A.A. award, Toronto, Canada Award in painting, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, India

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2004

Rasa: Contemporary Asian Art Group Show, Sundram Tagore, Beverly Hills Drishti: A New Vision, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York The Reason for Hope Group Show, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York The Reason for Hope Group Show, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Beverly Hills, California The Reason for Hope Group Show, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong Seer: The Art of Sohan Qadri, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Seer: The Art of Sohan Qadri, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong Presence of Being, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Carol Turner Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris, France Florence Biennale, Italy Colors, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Inner Journey, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery, Moscow, Russia Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Gallery II, New York, New York Next Level, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York East/West, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Gallery Indigo Blue, Singapore Kumar Gallery, New Delhi, India The Dot & the Dots, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York The William Benton Museum of Art,

2002-3 2002 2001

1999 1995 1994

1990 1980

1978 1977 1976 1975

1974 1973

1972

1971

1970

1969

1968 1967

1966

1965

1964 1963

Storrs, Connecticut Dissolving Contours, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Tibet House, New York, New York Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Rye Arts Center, Rye, New York Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Jain Marunouchi Gallery, New York, New York Art and Deal, New Delhi, India Gallery 7, Mumbai, India Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, India Gallery 7, Toronto, Canada Gallery Shades, Singapore Gallery 7, Mumbai, India Alliance Française, Nairobi, Kenya Court Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark Gallery United, Los Angeles, California Lyngby kunstforening, Copenhagen, Denmark Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, India Galerie International, Stockholm, Sweden Chemould Gallery, Bombay, India Galerie Gilles Corbiel, Montreal, Canada Basel Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland Court Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark Surya Galerie, Freinsheim, Germany Taide Museo, Tampere, Finland IKI, Dusseldorf, Germany Gentofte Kunstbibliotek, Copehagen, Denmark Galerie Glaub, Köln, Germany Edition Klingmann, Hannover, Germany Galerie Rubin & Magnussen, Copenhagen, Denmark Essex 3 Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California Picture Loan Gallery, Toronto, Canada Galerie 93, Ottawa, Canada Galerie Gilles Corbiel, Montreal, Canada Galerie Rubin & Magnussen, Copenhagen, Denmark Galerie d’Arte Moderne, Hälsingborg, Sweden Galerie Musarion, Basel, Switzerland Gladsaxe Kunstkreds, Copenhagen, Denmark P.U. Fine Art Museum, Chandigarh, India Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, India Anthony Mellor Gallery, Huddersfield, United Kingdom Ars Studio, Aarhus, Denmark Salon International, Paris, France Commonwealth Institute, London, United Kingdom Compedium Gallery, London, United Kingdom Ars Studio, Aarhus, Denmark Galerie Stenzel, Munich, Germany La Formiere Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland Galerie Arlequin, Zürich, Switzerland Galerie Junge Generation, Vienna, Austria W.D.K. Galerie, Zielona Gora, Poland Paa Ya Paa Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya New Stanley Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya Galerie Romain Louis, Brussels, Belgium A.I.F.A.C.S. Gallery, New Delhi, India Kumar Gallery, New Delhi, India Sirdharani Gallery, New Delhi, India Punjab University, Chandigarh, India

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi, India State Museum and P.U. Museum, Chandigarh, India Punjabi University, Patiala, India Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts Neuberger Berman Corporate Collection, New York, New York Slupsk Museum of Modern Art, Slupsk, Poland Bodo Glaub Museum, Köln, Germany Heinrich Böll, Köln, Germany Robert Thurman, New York, New York Hitachi Capital, New York, New York Tibet House, New York, New York Svenska Banken, Stockholm, Sweden Pierre Jeanneret, Paris, France Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, Bombay, India Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey Ajit Mukherjee, New Delhi, India Remo Galli, Bern, Germany Sir Anthony Bamford, United Kingdom

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

2010

2008

2007

2006

2005 2004

2003

1999

1995 1995

1990

1987 1978

“Return of the Seeker,” newfocuson.com “Luminous, Dye-Infused Works on Paper by Sohan Qadri at Sundaram Tagore Gallery,” artdaily.org “Meditation Man,” Baccarat magazine, Hong Kong “Seeing Is Believing,” HKstylebook magazine, Hong Kong “Modernism Beyond Modernity,” Asian Art News magazine, Hong Kong “Inner Journey,” Asian Art News magazine, Hong Kong “Do We Need God?” Resurgence magazine, United Kingdom “Ahead of the Curve,” Art & Antiques magazine, New York, New York “International Fairs,” Orientations magazine, Hong Kong “East West Dialogue,” Asian Art News magazine, Hong Kong “Art Sourcing,” Forbes Asia “Off the Wall,” Hong Kong Tatler “At the Fair,” Art & Auction magazine, New York, New York “The Seeker,” Resurgence magazine, United Kingdom “Portrait of a Tantric as an Artist,” The Telegraph, Calcutta, India “Creating Illusions,” The Indian Express, New York, New York “Sohan Qadri at Tibet House,” Asian Art News magazine, Hong Kong “Sakshi, The Seer,” Art & Deal magazine, New Delhi, India AntarJoti, Punjabi Sutras, Nav Yug, New Delhi, India Aforismer, Danish translation of English Sutras,” Omens Forlang, Denmark Boond Samunder, Punjabi Sutras, Amritsar, New Delhi, India The Dot & the Dots, English Sutras, Writers Workshop, Calcutta, India Mitti Mitti, Punjabi Sutras, Nava Yug, New Delhi, India The Dot & the Dots, Poems & Paintings, Stockholm, Sweden

TV AND RADIO APPEARANCES 2007 2007 1980

1979

Talk Asia, CNN International, Hong Kong Middle East Business Report, BBC News, London, UK Journey into Silence, documentary film by Doordarshan (Indian TV) Tantra –The Ancient Art of Energy, TV2, Sweden

Sohan Qadri, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sundaram Tagore Galleries New York 547 West 27th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel 212 677 4520 Fax 212 677 4521 gallery@sundaramtagore.com

Beverly Hills 9606 South Santa Monica Blvd Beverly Hills, CA 90210 Tel 310 278 4520 Fax 310 278 4525 beverlyhills@sundaramtagore.com

Hong Kong 57-59 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong Tel 852 2581 9678 Fax 852 2581 9673 hongkong@sundaramtagore.com

www.sundaramtagore.com President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Goldstein Designer: Russell Whitehead Printer: Printed in Iceland by Oddi Printing

Art consultants: Diana d’Arenberg Joseph Lawrence Benjamin Rosenblatt Alison Ward

First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Sundaram Tagore Gallery Text © 2008 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs © 2010 Sundaram Tagore Gallery All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover: Nadi

III, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 39 x 55 inches