Printmaking Helps Rutgers Graduate Student Heal From Traumatic Events
February 23, 2024
Kabi Lama has twice experienced international natural disasters. He joins other Mason Gross students whose artwork hangs in the president’s office suite
Kabi Lama’s ink drawing and mixed media work “Manjushree Hand & Sword” is a bold and chaotic depiction of the creation of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, inspired by Buddhist scripture. As the story goes, Lama says, the deity slashed through the mountains with his flaming sword, opening a gorge that drains a great lake and allowing a new habitat to emerge.
Lama’s artwork is influenced by what he calls the “mystical interplay between destruction and construction,” two opposites he is intimately familiar with as the survivor of two devastating natural phenomena.
In 2011, studying printmaking in Japan, Lama experienced the tsunami that claimed the lives of over 18,000 people. Then, in 2015, after returning home to Nepal, Lama lived through the earthquake that struck near Kathmandu, in which 9,000 people perished.