Chris Buckley: A Collector’s Life
Tuesday September 9th, 2008 at 7.00 p.m.
VENUE: InterfaceFLOR Room 201 (Second floor), Raffles City, 268 Central Tibet (Xizang) Road - in the office tower to the rear of the shopping mall with the entrance from Yunnan Road (between Hankou and Fuzhou Roads). Tel: 6340 3868
Chris Buckley, textile collector, designer, entrepreneur and writer, will share some collecting experiences over a decade and a half, and will reflect on the fate of traditional skills and the importance of collecting and research. The talk will be illustrated both with photographs and with examples from Chris's collection.
Chris is from the UK and was educated at Oxford, where he received a PhD in Chemistry. Aside from a short period in Japan he has lived in China since the mid 1990s. He made his first visit to Tibet in 1996, from which point his enduring interest in Tibetan art and culture has developed. He has been a student of Tibetan art, and a collector of crafts (especially textiles and furniture) since that time. Chris is just as much interested in contemporary Tibetan crafts as in the antique variety, and in 2006 he founded the Tibet Tanva weaving company to make handmade woven textiles, especially carpets. Part of Tanva's remit is to revive traditional skills, including a project to research and restore traditional natural dyeing to Tibet, in collaboration with the Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund (a Lhasa-based NGO).
Aside from Tibetan textiles, Chris is also broadly interested in Chinese textiles and costume, including antique Chinese silk textiles and costume and textiles from ethnic minority groups. He has made many collecting trips to Tibet and other parts of China. Chris runs the well-known Torana Carpet stores in Beijing and Shanghai, where the carpets from his weaving company in Lhasa can be found, as well as antique carpets.
PLEASE RSVP: Catherine Yin: catherine.yin@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
ENTRANCE: 30 Rmb for members, 50 Rmb for guests