London, Nov 25 (TIN) - A Tibetan artist who specialised in painting portraits of the Dalai Lama has been found in a state of severe shock in a public toilet in the Barkor area of Lhasa shortly after being released from a police detention centre, according to an unofficial source in Tibet. The public display of Dalai Lama pictures has been banned in Tibet since April.

Yungdrung, an artist aged 24 or 25 years, was described as "cowering with terror" when he was discovered, apparently as a result of having been tortured in custody, according to a source who had first hand knowledge of the incident and who arrived in India this week. The source asked not to be named.

The incident follows unconfirmed reports last month than an unnamed artist had been threatened with punishment by the authorities if he continued painting the Dalai Lama.

The painter was found by chance in a traumatised condition in a public toilet near his home in the Barkor, or Old Quarter of the city, on 27th October. "He was unable to recognise his friends and did not know where he lived", said the source, who described the artist as emaciated, weak and shaking when found.

Yungdrung is said to have spent the previous 58 days in custody at Gutsa detention centre, 3 km east of Lhasa. He was reportedly arrested in connection with his portraits of the Dalai Lama, some of which are said to have included the forbidden Tibetan national flag, although this could not be confirmed. Police are said to have raided his home and confiscated all his paintings.

Torture victims in Tibet are usually kept behind bars until any injuries have healed, apparently to prevent evidence of police abuse becoming public, except where there is a risk that a victim might die in custody. It is also unusual for punishment of ideological offences by Tibetan intellectuals to include imprisonment and torture - this kind of treatment is usually reserved for grassroots activists such as demonstrators, suspected agents of the exile government, or people disseminating unofficial information. If confirmed, the incident suggests a new and more aggressive policy by the Chinese authorities towards intellectual and artistic dissent in Tibet.

The painter, who comes from Nyemo 150 km west of Lhasa and first moved to the capital some 5 years ago, was taken to a hospital for medical treatment and has since been taken back to his family.

TIBETAN ARTISTS AVOID "DANGERS" OF REALISM -

Yungdrung was a student or imitator of the leading Tibetan modernist Amdo Champa, who revolutionised Tibetan art in the late 1950s by painting photo-realistic portraits of his then patron, the Dalai Lama, in a mural at the Norbulingka, or Summer Palace, in Lhasa. Amdo Champa, now in his 70s, was influenced by photography and by western religious art and still lives in the Tibetan capital.

In the previous two years 1994-95 Yungdrung became known in the Tibetan capital for painting portraits of the Dalai Lama, and is believed to have run into political or ideological difficulties after 5th April this year when the Tibet regional authorities announced a ban on the public display of pictures of the exiled leader.

The ban on pictures of the Dalai Lama, which in May this year led to the death of at least one monk in protests at Ganden monastery, 40 km east of Lhasa, has been widely enforced in Tibet since April and in some areas has been applied to private accommodation as well as public buildings.

Almost all images in Tibet of the Dalai Lama have been mass-produced colour photographs smuggled into the country from India, and paintings of him are extremely rare. Even in the relatively liberal period of the mid-1980s, when photographs of the leader were available everywhere in central Tibet, no Tibetan artists are known to have dared paint any portrait of the Wish Fulfilling Jewel, as the Dalai Lama is called by his followers.

"In 1985 or '86 when for the first time I heard a cassette a speech by His Holiness, then I got a very good feeling about him, and I thought about doing a portrait of him," said Gongkar Gyatso, one of the leading modern Tibetan painters of the so-called Second Generation. "But we knew it was dangerous, that maybe I would lose my job or end up in prison or something like that. I knew it was quite a serious thing, so I always took care not to make the government angry," said Gongkar, who founded the famous "Sweet Tea House" group of Tibetan painters in Lhasa in the mid-1980s. The artists disbanded their group in 1988 when the authorities said that they had to allow Chinese painters to join the group.

"In 1994, when the political situation was not so bad and there were many photographs of His Holiness available, I saw paintings of His Holiness on the throne-seat of several monasteries near Tsethang," said Gongkar, who fled into exile two years ago and is now on a scholarship at St Martin's School of Art in London. "I was really amazed."

"I knew the style of these portraits was that of Amdo Champa, quite realistic, with a lot of detail and very precise," he said. The paintings, often quite large and set in glass-covered frames, were not in traditional "thangka" style but were composed like western portraits, usually showing the Dalai Lama seated at a Tibetan table against a plain background, he recalled.

Yungdrung probably belonged not to the group of highly trained, state- sponsored artists but to the group of unofficial painters and craftsman who have no institutional links and who have studied by themselves or by finding their own teachers, usually doing "thangkas" or ornate cabinet decoration.

"The first group of artists were interested in the Tibetan situation but did nothing publicly," says Gongkar, who says that members of this group, including him, were concerned about protecting their families or their reputation and so avoided provoking political problems. "I think we were not like the second group, who were somehow more free and who took risks," he said. "This is the first time I have heard of an artist having a serious political problem with the Chinese," he said.

"When I was in Lhasa they were always telling us that artists and writers shouldn't do anything connected to various forbidden political things. But it seems to be becoming much stronger now," he said. "The situation in Lhasa this year seems really horrible", he remarked.

The Sweet Tea House artists avoided conflict, confirms Clare Harris, lecturer at the University of East Anglia in the UK and an expert on modern Tibetan art. "The kind of realism that Amdo Champa was involved in during the 1950s was then officially approved and sponsored, but it would be very much more dangerous to use that kind of realism now," she said.

"The Sweet Tea Artists used a sort of abstraction which was not immediately comprehensible in a political sense, using abstracted Buddhist motifs and images, such as silhouetted figures of the Buddha, rather than making a full frontal assault such as representing the Dalai Lama," Dr Harris added. "By not being realist in their work they tried to avoid the danger into which this man has fallen."

Up to six other Tibetan painters are known to have been imprisoned for political offences since 1987 - one of them, 25 year old Yeshe from Tarpo Lingka in Lhasa, died on 22nd August 1989 after five months in a Lhasa prison as a result of torture or beatings - but these were traditional thangka artists or house painters who were imprisoned for involvement in pro- independence demonstrations, not for their paintings.