스킵네비게이션

❑ artist bio

Manish Lal Shrestha was born in 1977 in Nepal, Lives and works in Kathmandu. He has BA in Fine Art from Sir J.J School of Art, Mumbai in 2001. Manish started his own unique style in which he uses contemporary motifs since the mid-2000s. He is an recognized artist for such practices and considered as one of the visual artists who led Postmodern movement of Nepal that was nascent in the early 2000s. He has many solo exhibitions including: Project 1336 (2019) at The Taragaon and Sound of Existence (2018) at Dalaila Art Space and his works are shown all over the world including Netherlands, Srilanka, Pakistan, France, the US, Korea, Swiss, etc. He is an active artist in Katmandu art scene where he founded an alternative space, M Cube.

❑ introduction

Shrestha believes all mankind who surpassed time-space constraint through the arts may be connected and the spiritual vibration from the collective and positive energy released by such art practices would make grand ‘reverberation’ to reach every corner of universe in the end. For such interaction, he started the creation of positive and optimistic aura from the energy from the series of paintings such as SOUND OF WISDOM that took ‘bell’ as subject matter symbolizing such reverberation in the early 2000. This is further developed to make art together with large number of people applying community art format. For the piece, I KNOW TO LOVE LIFE, I KNOW TO LIVE LIFE… (2004), hundreds of local people, visitors, art lovers helped the artists to stitch clothes together with white thread to form a 6 meter high tapestry and installed in Bhaktapur Durbar Square, Nepal. PROJECT 1336: LIFE IN THE LANE (2017) is another example which involved with kniting together with local people a rope of 1336 meters in length same as the elevation of Kathmandu Gorge and parading Kathmandu Gorge with it.

Vertical Wave (2019), a new work that Shrestha will present for the Festival is also a 108 meter long tapestry that 1,500 of used clothes collected from the citizens of Busan are stitched together with thread and needle. Main material of the piece, ‘old clothes’ are the metaphoric object that holds people’s personal history, emotional milieu, aura, beauty, and the symbol for the chronological history of human societies. Connecting the used clothes is to mean to connect mankind for Shrestha. Through Vertical Wave he offers an opportunity for the audience to connect scattered stories of the individuals, tell their emotional vales, and share histories breaking national barriers in the long run. Also, he pays attention to the site-specificity of the border where meets the beach and the large park. Starting from a tree in the park, his tapestry grows to wrap around surrounding trees to make arch shape and heads toward the sea. Shrestha’s act of generating interaction between man and the nature reminds us of what kind of viewpoint we must have on the matter of ecology of contemporary society.