“I went to Tibet four years ago and began to know about its culture,” Chen Yuqi, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong said. “At that time, when I saw thangka, I thought it was very beautiful. This time I am lucky enough to come to the birthplace of thangka to learn the art, and I’m especially looking forward to the next 40 days of study.”

On July 7, the “2018 Thangka Workshop: Junior Thangka Artists Internship Program” was launched in Tongren County, Qinghai Province, in which 13 students from Hong Kong will spend 40 days in learning the thangka handicraft. During this time, in addition to studying thangka art at the Thangka Academy, the students from Hong Kong will also undergo an art exchange with thangka painters in order to understand how to convey expressions in thangka painting.  

Located in Tongren County, Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, “Regong”, or the “golden valley”, is known as the “hometown” of Tibetan painting. Thangka is foremost of the Regong arts, and in 2009, it was listed by UNESCO as a human intangible cultural heritage item.

According to Wu Hanzhong, chairman of the Qinghai-Hong Kong Youth Exchange Promotion Committee, thangka is a unique form of painting in Tibetan culture. Wu would like more students from Hong Kong to learn about traditional Tibetan Buddhist culture, including thangka art.  

“In 2016, we organized the first group of Hong Kong students to study thangka painting in Tongren County. The students all completed the painting course, and after returning to Hong Kong, they exhibited their own works at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, which attracted a lot of attention and inquiries from visitors. For the people of Hong Kong, thangka is particularly mysterious and interesting,” Wu Hanzhong said, adding that the second group of Hong Kong students has come to study, using thangka as a medium for strengthening cultural exchange between Hong Kong and Qinghai.

Huang Qinning, a student in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, believes that thangka painting requires a lot of skills, and it is necessary to understand many feelings and thoughts. To this end, she hopes that through this learning exchange, she will be able to understand Tibetan culture on a deeper level, so that when she returns to Hong Kong, she can help her friends better understand Tibetan culture, too. 

Wu Hanzhong said that the Thangka Handicraft Learning Program is only a small part of exchange efforts between Qinghai and Hong Kong. He hopes that in future, cultural exchange will be used to strengthen interactions between the two places.