Kanchan Chander’s mixed media female torsos convey universal messages on gender

Kanchan Chander is a multifaceted artist working with a variety of mediums and most of her work focuses on unearthing different aspects of the feminine form. In a career spanning 45 years, she has prolifically undertaken numerous solo and group shows around the world. Gauri Gharpure presents an overarching take on Chander’s art philosophy, thoughts on academia, and words of advice for emerging artists

Chander has worked with various mediums, from prints, to sculptures, to mixed media, to paintings, among others. When she started her career, she was a painter and a printmaker. Even when her son was born, she kept painting in small format but was unable to pursue printmaking because one required a studio with all the facilities of a press and equipment which she did not have access to. Additionally, she had a full-time job and old parents and her printmaking practice reduced. Today, though she does not have a printmaking studio, she goes to different places and makes prints because it is a medium that is very dear to her heart. She does painting and mixed media in her own studio. “I love all these mediums. When I am doing mixed media, I get tired and then I switch to painting and then I switch to drawing. I don’t have any particular timing of when I use a medium,” she says.

Chander is highly influenced by Frida Kahlo, Amrita Shergill, David Hockney, Christopher Ofili, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kathe Kollwitz to name a few. “Over the years they have left a big impact on my work. You will also see the influence of a lot of music legends and often see scripts of lyrics in my works because music is very important in my life. I cannot live without music,” she shares. There is also a predominance of female figures. Frida Kahlo and Amrita Shergill get a prominent display and so does Marilyn Monroe. Then, there also seems to be a reverence to mystical characters like Devi, Ganga, Yoginis, and Yakshis. She says she was inspired by the strong personalities of these figures and their powerful works.

These feminine and women-oriented themes came about to be the focal point of her practice. When asked why the feminine manifests so copiously in her works, Chander takes us back to her early years of practice when she used to focus on making mostly prints. These prints, she says, had female forms in different poses. She started off printmaking with exclusive themes on gender, on the female form and women in different poses. Then she improvised her method and thematic representation and started making only female torsos. “Being a woman I had a soft corner for women’s issues and the atrocities they were going through. I didn’t want to come out on the streets and protest and so my way of giving an ode to womanhood was doing it through female torsos,” she says.

Making torsos, as opposed to a full figure, gives the work a unique universality and makes it easier for any viewer to relate to it, Chander believes. “I didn’t want to identify who the person is, whether it is you, me or somebody else. So the female torso is a universal factor through which you can depict so much. If you go to Indian temples you will see sculptures at Khajuraho, you see that beautiful, graceful lavanya they have, the tribhanga pose. So the torso itself conveys sensitivity, motherhood, sensuousness, fertility.

I didn’t want to make hands, feet, and face. At the same time I also do works which are only faces or only hands because you see, hands, the mudras convey a lot. If you are talking with someone and you look at the hands, a lot can be interpreted through it. I have always admired Indian dance so the mudra poses, hands, gestures are very significant to me,” she explains.

When creating dialogues around gender is one’s passion, their impression about breaking the glass ceiling in the art world becomes pertinent. When asked about what she feels about the situation of women artists in the field, Chander says that even though we have a lot of women artists in India who are strong, powerful, and successful, the ratio is low because probably once they get married it is difficult for them to take out the time, bear the financial aspect of buying the materials. Perhaps it is tough for men too, she ponders, because they have to support their families and it is not easy to survive through art. “I think we are doing better than many other countries but there is one sad thing that is happening. There are also a lot of ladies out there and they have no clue about art and they do art and they are promoted by their husbands or their husband’s company. So in a way I feel that is not fair to the artists who are genuine. Men just try to help the wife by giving a few lakh. The works are pathetic yet they have a sold-out show because they are connected whereas a pure artist is doing good work but is not able to do this,” she says.

In 2021, Chander had an online show on Artsy by the Art Heritage Gallery titled ‘She, who is like a river.’ Talking about how it came to be, during the middle of the pandemic, Chander shares, “I have always shown my works to Amal Allana. She liked what I had done and offered me the show. Majority of the works in the show were done during the pandemic. I think it was a successful show; both the gallery and I worked hard to share it on social media. Amal Allana chose the title because I think there is a lot of fluidity in my work. I use a lot of rivers. Also, once I had told her and Tariq Allana, the Director, her son, that you should take life like a river. As it flows down, a lot of elements come in it, debris, dried leaves, yet as it reaches the ocean it leaves on the side the things which it doesn\’t need. So basically I was comparing it to life because as we go ahead we see so many things happen. So many people come, so many unwanted people come into our lives. So as we go on in our lives, we should just discard what we don’t need and move on. I think she liked it very much and chose the title.”

Chander also weighed in the prospects of the digital wave ushered in by the pandemic. “The advantage of digital is that it does not involve the physical logistics of putting up a show so it is much more economical. But then, there are certains things. My work needs to be seen physically because there is so much of tactile, there is so much of layering, so much of stuff which I use in my mixed media which is not justified in the digital. You cannot see them properly. There is also an issue with depicting the scale. Sometimes people cannot understand that on a digital platform. Like the triptych I did, people did not realise that it was a 5 by 9 feet of work. Also from the point of view of the collectors, I feel if they are spending so much money they would like to see the work personally. So I think that aspect, the gallery handles. The advantage is that you can send it to more people internationally. The NFT has picked up a lot during the pandemic though there is utter confusion of what exactly is NFT; some people have understood and some have not understood,” she says. The pandemic has made her more disciplined and focused, she confesses. “I used to socialise a lot, I used to like going out, but due to health reasons I have to cut down on socialising. I can’t go out and have too many glasses of wine or eat too much. The pandemic has actually made me realise that I need to work more because while I was growing up there were old parents, personal problems, and personal tragedies. Now my son is settled as a stage director; he is a painter himself, he is also with Abir. So now I am totally free to focus on myself,” Chander shares.

Struggles have enveloped her at different junctures and a particularly demanding period was when Chander taught at the College of Art and also at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi; her radical approach to pedagogy did not go down well with her colleagues and seniors. Elaborating on the experience, she shares that she was a very passionate teacher and when she joined the College of Art, she harboured dreams to bring the college to international level. She says she was way ahead and executed site-specific installations around 30 years back which was not common that time. She also used to travel a lot and on her own initiative used to take photos of artworks and bring those to college; they never paid me for all this. She used to do things out of the syllabus so that if her students could not go to shows abroad, at least they could see it through the slides she had brought. “My senior professors were anti all this but you see those students, today some of them are doing well. Unfortunately government institutions sometimes employ people who have degrees but they have no knowledge of art. So I was dealing with people whose IQ level was very low and who were very conventional and traditional. So there was always a friction. But it was a very male-dominated institution. While my professors were there things were alright but when they started retiring and the new lot came; they could not take my success, they could not take my personality so they mentally harassed me a lot and I had to leave without pension,” she shares. She continued by helping students make portfolios for universities abroad. She feels the syllabus in government institutions is way behind compared to some private colleges coming up now.

Talking about emerging talent, she mentions how she came across some beautiful woodcuts when she judged online events during the two years of the pandemic. “Whether it is sculptures or paintings or prints, some beautiful work is being done. The sad part is that they might not reach the right galleries. Because with galleries also what is happening is that they are picking up the elite artists, artists who, sorry to say, come from a high background. Art has also become elite. It is so sad. If they are talented, then fine, sone pe suhaga (all the better), but if they are not talented and come from blah blah families, then they are being promoted. I am proud of my son, he has done well during the pandemic and was able to sell a lot online and his peers,” she says. Her advice to emerging artists is for them to follow their heart; even those who come from remote areas, who come from a lower-middle class. “Don’t get lured into this thing of a carrot being shown to you of marketing and all that because very often the curators and galleries are demanding and try to influence your work. Just be dedicated, keep the fire burning, and be honest because honesty pays in the end,” she says. Chander warns emerging artists of succumbing to the demands of so-called market trends. “I interact with a lot of younger artists and I see difficult mediums such as printmaking, woodcuts and there are such beautiful works being done all over India. But the thing is printmaking is difficult to survive, so they either have a side job, or they become frustrated because they cannot sell prints. So, then out of force they go into drawings or paintings. The unfortunate thing that is happening is that the society and the galleries and sometimes the curators demand a certain type of work from younger artists which I feel is a hindrance to their creativity because the younger artists are trying to go with the trends. So the artist must have the strength to carry on with what they want to pursue and this is quite rare. They are carried away by what the market is demanding.”