Review: Impermanence

Kesang Lamdark's iridescent (below) welcomes visitors and dominates the entrance to this excellent group exhibition of contemporary Tibetan art.

A Tara is a female bodhisattva or Buddha, whose form - identified by its colour - can represent a Buddhist virtue. For example, a white Tara denotes compassion and serenity.

A pink Tara is unknown in Tibetan iconography, but this garish version constructed with chicken wire covered in dripped plastic with pink fluorescent lighting could be imagined to represent the less virtuous behaviour of paid sex. Kesang's brazen sculpture hints at the serious and divergent political and social pressures confronting modern Tibet. "Impermanence" is a loosely themed show comprising 16 artists from the wide Tibetan diaspora.

Using the constant flux of the Buddhist view of the world as an understandable starting point, the artists tackle unrest towards Chinese hegemony on the Tibetan plateau, and the loss of Tibetan language, social and religious freedom and the onslaught from Western culture, media and social behaviour.

These pressures are best seen in Gade's , a set of 10 "books" arranged in a lined sequence giving a fantastic tableau of real and imagined stories, creatures and unlikely landscapes of Lhasa, inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's , which Gade, on reading, thought was actually describing Lhasa.