Between the lines with Sujan Dangol

A vast circle is crammed with densely packed houses stacked on top of one another. Drawn in black ink, their edges merge as they jostle in space.

The narrow strips between the houses have fluid shadows, but in the middle of this urban universe is a white hole. “That is a doughnut,” says a visitor, at the Siddhartha Art Gallery where artist Sujan Dangol’s meticulous line drawings are on display at the Tales of a City exhibition till the end of the month.

“I cannot impose my concepts or ideas on viewers, their interpretation is just as genuine and appropriate because they view it subjectively as their own background, thoughts and feelings come into play,” Dangol explains in his studio in Koteshwor. Light bounces off his round glasses as the 40-year-old artist's gaze turns to the large window on his left.

The studio is an open space with sofas, bookstands and tables about. In one corner is a large painting — “A friend is working on that one,” Dangol says — and metal and clay sculptures sit on various shelves. He is dressed in a long, brown corduroy shirt, and his hand hangs above a work in progress: another large canvas, nearly filled to the brim with tiny houses and streets.

It is clear that the drawings depict the tremendous transformation that has turned Kathmandu Valley’s rich urban-agro civilisation into a concrete jungle. Dangol’s sketches represent dizzying, densely packed towns with teetering temples and dilapidated homes, almost like a cartoon, or satire.

For Dangol, art is a three-point collaboration between an artist, the object and the viewers who exist in the space between the abstract and the real. The experience is incomplete even when only one of the three is missing. The drawings feel at once familiar and foreign — the sprawling urbanscape is part of our daily lives, but they have also acquired an almost metaphysical aspect.

A giant vajra, for example, looks as though wrapped in a shawl of windows and roofs — and Dangol invites the viewers to fill in the gaps, recognise and rediscover their own stories.

Sujan Dangol grew up in Mahabouddha near the Kathmandu Darbar Square when the historical towns of this emerald valley were still located along ridges with the slopes down to the rivers below devoted to agriculture.

“I still remember the sights, sounds and smells of eating rice on the balcony during the minpachas holiday in winter,” adds Dangol, lamenting that today none of the things he used to enjoy as a child are accessible or possible.

The concrete canopy of houses block out the sun, there are no public open spaces for children to run around in, there is the ever-present din of the city’s perpetual motion machine.

These feelings of loss and nostalgia permeate all of Dangol’s exhibits. The artworks are rigorous and complex: each cityscape is meticulously drawn in pen and ink, filled with stark emotional and intellectual intensity. He recreates history and architecture in a visual language that is uniquely his, built on the bedrock of his own memories and infused with elements of folklore.

Big Bell is a rendition of the one that stands in Patan Darbar Square, but its base is crammed with little houses and temples. Dark hills stretch behind, and at the feet of the monument are slabs that look like funeral ghat with black blobs spread about them.

It is an ominous piece, foreboding. The sun casts a shadow behind itself and, on closer look, the roofs are bare and have holes in them with wooden beams poking out. The bell itself looks weary, the roof above it is worn out, and it is almost like a deep sigh escapes this 38x48 inch-frame with an overwhelming sense of loss.

The other drawings evoke similar pathos. Carved Malla-era windows stand next to neoclassical doors, and somewhere in the middle are tall, flat and bare walls. But between them the galli is quiet and temple eaves have come undone. The ever-watchful eyes on the stupas look aged and tired, perhaps by the desolation they have witnessed.

With the touch of pen and ink, Dangol reinvents a visual vernacular of memory and loss. But Dangol does not want the messaging to be too direct or blatant. He says: “I am not a heavily conceptual artist … if I start a piece with too much intention, it disrupts my workflow.”

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Proud of his Newa heritage, Dangol aspires to develop a new grammar for Nepali contemporary art that builds on the culture and skills that he grew up around and the relics of which are still present. There is no western influence here: the styles are borrowed from gardeners, woodcarvers, tailors, masons and brick-layers, and also the struts, carved windows and exteriors of abandoned buildings.

“The cross-hatching in my drawings are inspired by my wife’s straw mats,” says Dangol. Miniature installations featuring straw mats and seeds by his wife, Sharmila Shrestha are also on exhibit in Tales of a City.

Sujan Dangol traces the origin of this series to 2012, when as his graduation installation he built a city of 1,500 cardboard boxes and cartons of various brand names in the Nepal Art Council. The installation was complete with streets and roads that people could walk through and interact with. Architecture and heritage have since heavily influenced his art and outlook.

“It takes over 500 or 1,000 years to build and develop an urban civilisation, and nurture its language, heritage, culture and cuisine,” says Dangol. “But when I look at Kathmandu today, I am saddened by the changes in the last 20-30 years, and especially following the 2015 earthquake. This is not normal. Development and progress should be gradual, not disorganised.”

Houses, says Dangol, are not just places of residence. The traditional brick, timber and tiles of the buildings with their carved wooden columns, windows and doors represent an invaluable legacy and expression of craft, history, experience and expectations that span generations.

“Individual houses are just as important as temples,” he says. And a street of houses has a collective ambience, so heritage conservation must look beyond just monuments to these ordinary neighbourhoods and their old dwellings that are being torn down to be replaced with concrete.”

The bahal, falcha and hiti are being overrun with selfishness and greed, the accelerated consumerism and obsession with money do not value the history and heritage of Swoinga, Kathmandu Valley.

Being passionate about literature, art and architecture, Dangol says depicting these changes in his drawings is an outlet for his aggravation with the accelerated and irreversible change happening all around.

One particularly gloomy drawing is Kalki that depicts the deity, one of the ten avatar of Vishnu, with fiery hair and wings, riding a leaping horse above a city as contrails swirl behind him. Kalki looks straight at the viewer with a deeply unsettling expression on his face — the rage in his eyes is shared by his horse which has a chain of skulls looping around his neck.

Kalki is associated with destruction, and is the prophesied incarnation of Vishnu at the end of the current Kali Yug cycle of existence in Hindu cosmology. The destruction is followed by Satya Yug, when the chaos and darkness end.

This is an important metaphor in Dangol’s drawing: destruction looming over a city, heritage on the verge of extinction. But, at the same time, Kalki is also the harbinger of cleansing and renewal.

The exhibition ‘Tale of a City’ is open until 29 November at Siddhartha Art Gallery, Baber Mahal Revisted, Kathmandu.

Read also:

Whose heritage is it anyway?, Marit Bakke

A time to every purpose, Sahina Shrestha

Restoring a piece of Nepal's history, Sahina Shrestha