‘Thangka Aesthetics’: Decoding the Visual Representation of Sonthar Gyal’s The Sun Beaten Path (2011) and The River (2015)

This paper aims to engage critically with the aesthetic exploration of Sonthar Gyal’s Tibetan films, which comprise The Sun Beaten Path (2011) and The River (2015). The paper reinforces the importance of the elaboration of ‘Thangka aesthetics’ in the films. In other words, these two films embody the auteurist characteristic that expresses the director’s core of repeated cinematic/artistic praxis – ‘Thangka aesthetics’. Further to this, these two films adapt the aesthetics of the Tibetan Thangka painting style to tell their stories, in order to grasp the deeper socio-cultural and ideological meanings/significances in the text and beyond.