Sunanda Khajuria: Journey of an Artist :From Painthal to Harvard
Painthal is a picturesque village located on the foothills of the Mata Vaishno Devi shrine near Katra in Reasi district of Jammu province of the J&K UT. Nestled among the Trikuta Mountains at 839m elevation, the village offers lush green fields, pine trees, birds, monkeys, Baolis( water springs) and serene views of the valley. With its peaceful surroundings, traditional houses and warm-hearted people, it reflects the true rural beauty of Jammu. The nearby Painthal nullah and magnesite hills add to its natural charm. A historic village with deep cultural roots, Painthal is the birthplace of Padma- shri Shiv Nirmohi , a well-known scholar and author of several books on Jammu's culture, heritage, and folklore.
From this small village of Painthal to Harvard University and Wuhan University of Technolgy (China) , Sunanda Khajuria has become one of the most internationally recognised contemporary painters to emerge from the Jammu and Kashmir UT.
Born in 1979 to Mohan Lal Khajuria, a former Sarpanch of Painthal, and Manorama Khajuria, Sunanda spent her early childhood in the picturesque landscape of the Jammu foothills. That landscape, she says, remains a cherished source of inspiration. Her formal journey began at the Institute of Music and Fine Arts, University of Jammu, where she completed her BFA in Painting, followed by an MFA in Painting from the College of Art, New Delhi, where she later taught for several years.A recipient of many awards, Khajuria was also selected as one of the 13 artists for the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute’s 2020-2021 Visiting Artist Fellowship at Harvard University. Sunanda Khajuria lives and works in India and China.
Her search for a wider visual vocabulary took her to China. She completed an Advanced Research Programme at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and earned her PhD in Fine Arts from Wuhan University of Technology, where she now serves as Assistant Professor. It was this long immersion between India and China that shaped the central question of her work: how do we find a sense of home across countries, languages and traditions. Perfect. Fluent in both written and spoken Chinese, which Sunanda Khajuria studied professionally as part of her doctoral research.
Khajuria's visual language is unmistakable. At its centre is the female figure , not a portrait, but a symbol. Around her appear birds, shoes, vessels, clouds and aeroplanes : motifs for aspiration, fertility, femininity, migration, travel and desire. She works in acrylic on linen and canvas, and in natural pigments and Chinese ink on silk, as well as ink-and-colour drawings presented in traditional Chinese book formats. Drawing from South Asian storytelling traditions, contemporary cross-cultural influences and Taoist philosophy, her paintings explore what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and what can emerge between different places and cultures.
In 2020-21, she made history as the first-ever artist from Jammu and Kashmir to be selected as a Visiting Artist Fellow at Harvard University's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. Her honours include the Second National Award from the Chinese Government (2024), the Princess Sirivannavari Fellowship in Thailand (2020), the Suzhou Art Award (2017), a Lalit Kala Research Grant and scholarships from the HRD Ministry and AIFACS. Her practice has been nurtured since 2008 by New Delhi's Art Heritage Gallery, founded by Ebrahim Alkazi.
Her global presence was highlighted in her solo exhibition, "Beyond Borders: Who I Am Between Homes," on view from 7 to 30 August 2026 at IA&A at Hillyer in Washington, D.C. Selected through IA&A at Hillyer's Call for Proposals programme, the exhibition will feature canvas and silk works that challenge fixed ideas of origin, nationhood and cultural identity. Her previous solos include ,'I Have Lost Me: Birds of Passage(2022) and 'Moving Landscapes'(2016) at Art Heritage, New Delhi. She has shown in the International Triennial of Graphic Art Bitola, North Macedonia (2025), ASEAN Culture and Art Creation Season-6, Xiamen (2025), Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, South Korea (2025), and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2023). Her work featured as a cover story in 'Art & Deal' in 2022 and in Harper's 'Bazaar India-Art Issue' . She has also participated in NADA Miami, India Art Fair and Mumbai Art Fair.
From Jammu to the world, Khajuria's work reminds us that home is not a single location, but a layered experience remade across borders.
What is Special About Sunanda's Art ?
Khajuria’s paintings operate at the intersection of the personal and the mythical, a visual diary rooted in the foothills of the Trikutas yet fluent in a contemporary global idiom.
The practice of Sunanda Khajuria, born in Painthal, may be read as a syncretic autobiographical mythology in which the Pahari folk sensibility of her native landscape coalesces with the disciplined aesthetics of Chinese ink, calligraphy and wash on silk. Formed through advanced study at the China Academy of Art and doctoral research at Wuhan University of Technology, her method internalises Chinese pictorial philosophy rather than merely citing it.
Grounded in a Taoist ontology of perpetual flux, her oeuvre, most notably the continuing series Moving Landscapes, posits woman as both protagonist and optical centre. The female figure is rendered as itinerant and aspirational, a bearer of terrain who carries mountains, rivers and hamlets upon her head or within the folds of her garment. Around her constellates an oneiric lexicon of birds, shoes, clouds, aeroplanes and dragonflies, a symbolic apparatus through which concerns of femininity, fertility, transit and unconstrained desire are articulated. This conflation of body and geography becomes a meditation on migration, memory and belonging.
Her visual language is marked by calligraphic assurance and deliberate spatial economy. Compositions deploy extensive negative space derived from the principle of liu bai, allowing the void to function as breath and movement. Narrative is sequential rather than perspectival, unfolding laterally in scroll and triptych formats.
Chromatic intensity is central to her project. The palette eschews naturalistic flesh in favour of unmodulated planes of acid green, indigo, ochre and maroon, recalling Pahari miniatures but rendered with a contemporary surreal flatness. Figures are elongated and hybridised, privileging affective resonance over anatomical correctness.
Thus Chinese influence operates at three levels: technical through ink and natural pigments on silk, formal through scroll formats and reserved grounds, and philosophical through an understanding of matter as incessantly mobile. The synthesis transforms recollections of Painthal into a universal eco feminist fable.
Commentary on four paintings of Sunanda Khajuria
(1)
The painting is built around a single powerful trick -:a blue rolling suitcase floating on a black void, unzipped to reveal a dreamscape inside.
The palette is deliberately artificial and high-voltage. Electric blue for the case, acid lime green for the reclining figure, hot magenta for the two swans, cherry red for the little house and the beret on top. Nothing is naturalistic. The colours clash on purpose - blue against red, green against magenta - to create that anxious, jet-lagged, neon-light feeling of being between places. The deep black background makes everything glow harder.
The style is flat, graphic, and highly decorative, like a contemporary miniature or a silk screen print. No realistic shading or perspective. Outlines are clean and thick, patterns are stylized - the waves and clouds are rendered as swirling ornamental motifs, the feathers as layered paper cut-outs. Everyday travel objects - the trolley handle, green sunglasses, umbrella, wheels, zip - are painted with the same importance as mythic elements, which collapses the real and the imagined.
The theme is portable life. What do you carry when you move? The case holds not clothes but memories: a dreaming figure, two migratory birds carrying a blossoming branch, a porcelain bowl with a house and mountains inside it like a portable homeland, a small horse, two airplanes caught in folds of fabric and cloud. The zipper is the border between outer appearance and inner world - outside, functional travel gear; inside, longing, home, flight, and exhaustion all packed together.
This work presents a pair of cowboy boots rendered as vessels for a complete landscape, a strategy that defines the painting's visual intelligence. The style fuses meticulous oriental landscape brushwork with flat contemporary pop treatment. The boots themselves are modelled with glossy volumetric colour and crisp contour, while the terrain within them, with layered orange mountains, stylised auspicious clouds, a blue crane and plum blossom, is executed in the language of Chinese shanshui and folk minhwa painting. Colour application is central to the impact. A saturated vermillion field dominates both boots, creating a luminous ground that holds the composition together. Against this, complementary pigments are applied in flat unmodulated planes, acid green for the reaching figure and hand on the left boot and electric cyan and indigo for the birds and crane on the right. The palette rejects naturalism in favour of symbolic intensity, with pink, yellow and blue cloud scrolls vibrating against the red. The theme is travel as interior condition. The boot, an emblem of western movement, becomes a world that is carried rather than walked upon, holding sky on one side and earth on the other, with a minute narrative at the toe of a figure with a car on a boat that introduces human migration and quiet absurdity. Influence draws from Chinese wash and silk painting, Indian miniature flat colour, pop kitsch and surrealist object transformation, producing a weightless world where landscape is in constant flux.
This work is characteristic of Sunanda Khajuria.
Her style is figurative and narrative, rooted in a sophisticated use of the brush that consciously reasserts painting at a time when it has taken a secondary position in contemporary practice. Figures float in space, surrounded by everyday objects that also appear to be in motion, creating a weightless world that remains in constant movement despite its apparent stillness. a4d5
Colour application is central to this effect. Khajuria uses bold, vibrant, flat acrylic colour to infuse large empty surfaces with energy and depth. In this painting the acid green field contrasts with the lime yellow skin, the saturated red blouse and the patterned blues and pinks of the bird and skirt. The palette is deliberately unnatural, following her training in Chinese traditional art, calligraphy and wash techniques.
Sunanda Khajuria's "Cloud Emerging from the Peak" is a powerful synthesis, not an imitation, of Chinese aesthetics.
The Chinese influence is structural, rooted in her scholarship in advanced Chinese art and residency at Red Gate in Beijing. She employs the full material language of Song dynasty gongbi: mineral pigments on gold-washed silk, precise hemp-fibre texture strokes for the shan shui mountains, and formal motifs such as xiangyun auspicious spiral clouds and the red-crowned crane of longevity. Conceptually, she draws on the Taoist trope of huzhong tiandi – the entire universe contained within a small vessel.
Her critique of that tradition is what renders the work contemporary. In classical literati painting, the painter is absent and nature is infinite. Here she inverts it: a single female figure, crouched in a very human, labouring posture upon the clouds, becomes the creator, actively painting the mountains into existence from a basin. The composition is audacious – weighted at the top with a vast, empty gold void below – which makes the creator feel both divine and isolated.
The subversion is also gendered. The scholar-painter role was historically male. By centring herself, partially nude beneath a flowing red robe, vulnerable yet in command, she reclaims that immortal authority. The pop palette of the clouds : candy yellow, aqua, orange , set against the antique gold ground is her Indian sensibility breaking through. It is less about China as exotic other, and more about using its visual grammar to articulate her own experience of migration, memory and world-building between Jammu and Beijing.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Sunanda Khajuria’s practice offers a compelling reassertion of painting as a site for storytelling, memory and female subjectivity.
Emerging from Jammu and shaped by formal training in New Delhi and extensive study of Chinese wash, calligraphy and Taoist philosophy in Wuhan, her work moves fluidly between cultures while remaining rooted in an intimate, psychological landscape. Her work exemplifies this synthesis: a flat, vibrant colour field, an elongated and weightless female figure, and symbolic companions such as the bird, book and dragonflies that speak of aspiration, transformation and unconstrained desire.
Her bold application of acrylic, with saturated and deliberately artificial hues, does not simply decorate the surface but structures its emotional and philosophical depth. By allowing figures and objects to float free from gravity, she visualises a world in constant flux, echoing her core belief in movement and change.
Ultimately, Khajuria’s contribution lies in how she elevates the everyday experience of women into a universal language. Her paintings, and more recent projects such as Beyond Borders, invite the viewer to consider questions of identity, belonging and what we carry across geographies. In doing so, she secures a distinctive position within contemporary Indian art as an artist who bridges the local and the global, the personal and the political, with quiet resilience and lyrical power.
( Avtar Mota )
PS
My special thanks to Prof Lalit Gupta for some crucial inputs for this write-up .
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.