The Eye That Was Called Grandpa: Painting the Dalai Lama Underground. A Portrait by Airco Caravan

June 6th 2026

By Trudy Giordano

This is one of sixteen fragments. None of the sixteen studios who painted them saw what we're about to show you. Full reveal at aircocaravan.com.

In 2013, frequent magazine contributor and friend, Dutch conceptual artist Airco Caravan, began her project "Made in China" by sending sixteen fragments of a Dalai Lama portrait to sixteen painting studios across China. Each studio received a small, cropped, unrecognizable piece: an eye, an earlobe, a fold of yellow cloth, or a curve that might have been a hill. She requested oil paintings in an abstract style, never revealing the true subject. Because images of the Dalai Lama are banned in China, the only way to have his portrait painted there was to ensure that no single painter ever saw the whole image.

When a studio called to ask why she wanted just one eye, she told them it had belonged to her recently passed grandfather and that she wanted his eye on her wall. The ear, she said, was a gift for a boyfriend who loved music. The yellow fold of the robe became a mango. A curved line became a hill, then a curtain; she rotated fragments ninety degrees so the geometry wouldn't give her away. Sixteen studios, sixteen honest, unrelated paintings, each one true to the small story she'd given them. None of them was lying; each executed an accurate reading of an inaccurate premise.

Together, the Chinese painters created an illegal, iconic portrait, symbolizing peace and unity in many different ways

She reassembled the sixteen canvases in Amsterdam that summer. Each was oil on canvas, cut and sent as innocuous decor, and all were returned as something else entirely. Fragments, a grandfather's eye, a mango, a hillside, resolved into the image each painter had been prevented from seeing: the Dalai Lama's face, whole, completed by people working in good faith and in total ignorance. Together, the Chinese painters created an illegal, iconic portrait, symbolizing peace and unity in many different ways. Two years later, a version of the portrait reached him during a European tour by a Tibet advocacy group. He is said to have joked about the artist's red hair, then simply said thank you, the same two words anyone might offer for a gift, now carrying sixteen studios' worth of unknowing labor.

That's the core mechanism this issue returns to: misinterpretation isn't usually a failure of the signal. The photograph was clear; the instructions, clear. What varied was the frame each painter received, and a frame determines what the eye can see, even before it's studied. Grandpa's eye and the Dalai Lama's eye are, pixel for pixel, the same eye; the difference is the story that arrives with it.

He turned 91 this week, still in the same maroon and saffron he's worn since before most of Airco Caravan's painters were born, still banned in the country he can't return to. Portraits of him remain illegal there. The robe itself, reassembled in its entirety in a photograph, would still fail to clear customs. But cut into sixteen unlabeled pieces and called a mango, an ear, a grandfather, it traveled through the same country freely, painted by hands that never knew what they were completing.

Nothing about the face changed between the fragment and the whole. Only the permission changed—and 'permission' was never about the literal image. It was about the caption beside it, the story or label that tells the viewer what they're allowed to recognize, shaping perception before the eye even sees.

Happy 91st birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

For the full reveal of the artwork, visit https://www.aircocaravan.com/work/madeinchina.

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