Kunsang Gyatso:
A speck swallows
the sun
Kunsang Gyatso:
A speck swallows
the sun
September 18– December 7, 2025
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Kunsang Gyatso: Detail of Goddess of Tangerine, 2023, painting, wood, concrete, plexi, foam, dried tangerine
Kunsang Gyatso: Detail of Goddess of Tangerine, 2023, painting, wood, concrete, plexi, foam, dried tangerine
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 18, 2025, 4:30–7:30pm
A speck swallows the sun, the first solo exhibition of Jackson Heights, Queens-based artist Kunsang Gyatso, brings together a selection of paintings and sculptures that integrate motifs from Tibetan Buddhist spiritual traditions, particularly the forms of the "torma," cone-shaped ceremonial objects often made of butter and barley flour. His abstract paintings—and sculptures made from cement, grains of rice and needles—borrow from these ritual objects to consider themes of animism, migration, loss, inherited sensibilities to form, and the potential for abstraction to hold memory or induce change. The exhibition's enigmatic title, "A speck swallows the sun," is inspired by a poem written by the 15th century Indian mystic poet Kabir. Encapsulating a sense of impending calamity and anxiety, both personal and collective, this phrase reflects a seemingly impossible inversion of power and scale, where a small, insignificant entity undermines the immense and grand, suggesting a space where smallness becomes potent and meaning emerges from paradox.
Kunsang Gyatso was born in the Himalayan region of Helambu in Nepal, home to the indigenous Hyolmo community, an ethnic Tibetan group. His art practice is informed by his layered history of migration, first from the village community to Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, and later to the United States. Working across varied media, his work interweaves interests in abstraction, materiality, ritual, tradition, ecology, and personal history.
Kunsang lives and works in Queens, NY. He received his BA in Painting from Hunter College, New York. His work has been exhibited in group shows at Wrightwood 659 (Chicago, IL), The Rubin Museum Of Himalayan Art (New York, NY), among others. He was a guest artist for the Open Studio program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
More info coming soon.