OVERLAY: Worlds Within Worlds

Buddhist iconography meets Daoist cosmology meets the present. This two-artist exhibition brings together Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso and Chinese ink painter Fu Xiaodong. Both artists are now considered leading figures in the contemporary art scene. About Migrant Bird Space presents "Overlay: Worlds Within Worlds," a two-artist exhibition bringing together Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso and Chinese ink painter Fu Xiaodong. The exhibition opens on 10 September 2026 at Migrant Bird Space, Berlin. Although these two artists work in different mediums and different traditions, they both arrive at a shared question: what happens to an inherited worldview when it has to survive inside a new one. Gyatso rebuilds the image of the Buddha out of the visual debris of consumer culture, while Fu Xiaodong reworks the cosmology of classical Chinese ink painting to hold the pace and fragmentation of contemporary life. Rather than staging these as opposing worlds, both artists work to locate the relationship between them ― treating what looks like contrast as a single, continuous condition. Gonkar Gyatso grew up in Lhasa during the Cultural Revolution, a period when Tibetan religious art was suppressed and traditional life dismantled by state policy. He went on to study Chinese painting in Beijing, Thangka painting in Dharamsala, and fine art in London. His training path runs directly through the ruptures of twentieth-century Tibetan history. His large-scale sticker paintings and sculptures reconstruct the Buddha figure from thousands of small consumer and pop-cultural fragments, offering a working proof of how a sacred image keeps functioning by taking on new materials without losing its shape. His work is held in major museum and institutional collections across Europe, Asia, and North America. Fu Xiaodong, born in 1978 and based in Hangzhou, trained in classical Chinese painting and calligraphy before becoming one of the most rigorous voices in Chinese experimental ink practice. Her paintings return repeatedly to Daoist cosmology ― its logic of transformation, permeability, and continuous change ― and test that logic against the present: mountains dissolve into the structure of circuit boards, brushstrokes trace the rhythm of urban transit, ink behaves like data as much as like water. Her 2024 solo exhibition in Shinshu, Japan, was named Exhibition of the Year, and her writing on ink painting and aesthetics has become part of the wider critical conversation around post-traditional Chinese art. "Overlay: Worlds Within Worlds" is built on the premise that inherited worlds do not vanish when new ones appear. They overlap, adapt, and keep shaping how reality gets read. Placed side by side, Gyatso's and Fu's work makes that overlap visible ― not as nostalgia, and not as a clash between old and new, but as a live structure that both artists actively work with. The exhibition asks not what reality is, buthow it gets organized, and what it looks like when several ways of seeing the world sit inside the samelife at once. "Overlay: Worlds Within Worlds" runs from 10 September through 6th November, 2026, at Migrant Bird Space, Berlin. Koppenplatz 5. Gallery hours:1-6pm The artists will be present at the opening at 7pm on 10 September. Read more Toggle Painting Drawing Sculpture Prints