Three Realms was a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Tibetan émigré artist and rising star Gonkar Gyatso. His meticulous sticker drawings were introduced to Australian audiences through the Sixth Asia-Pacific Triennial (2009–10) and, shortly after, he was included for the 2010 Sydney Biennale with its aptly titled theme ‘The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age’. By 2011, the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney had collected works by Gyatso. This recognition of the now London-based artist quickly culminated with this three-part retrospective put together in Brisbane by Griffith University Art Gallery’s (GUAG’s) Simon Wright.
The catalogue documenting the event was published after Realm One had occurred at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), which meant that installation shots could be included in it. Even before the publication appeared memories of the works lingered. In the first room at the IMA, Gyatso’s fields of small glossy stickers made letters which read Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, a mural spreading over three walls. The collage’s intricacy, with its grubbed up escaping figures, engaged the audience in a non-strident manner, but a troubling one nevertheless, as peering viewers could pick up the political references within the maelstrom of otherwise banal pop imagery. I remember needing to locate the work in a way that did not solely mean plunging back uncritically to the 1960s in the USA and Britain with Jimi Hendrix’s lyric in mind. Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, did after all have a feeling of Marshall McLuhan and of consumer culture around urban epicenters of Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. What, I wondered, were the points of difference in the iconography of