Free spirit's positive energy

Sohan Qadri is often compared with Mark Rothko, the American abstract painter, and it's easy to see why. Both artists abandoned the figurative early in their careers, had a penchant for monochromatic backgrounds and used predominantly primary hues. And then there is that shimmering luminosity in Qadri's works that is redolent of the mystical magnetism of Rothko's colour fields.

However, the two artists were poles apart in form and philosophy. Rothko believed in the two-dimensional "flat form" that destroyed illusions; Qadri created sculptures on canvas and paper. Rothko was all about the tragedy of the human condition; Qadri celebrated the force of life in all of his work.

Born Sohan Singh in 1932, Qadri was raised by fairly well-to-do parents in a small village in the Punjab. His parents expressed a remarkable degree of religious openness by encouraging the withdrawn child to spend time with a Sufi Muslim sage and a tantric Buddhist guru living near the family farm. Years later, the artist took the name of his Muslim mentor on a whim: just before his first exhibition, he decided Sohan Qadri would look better than Sohan Singh when written on canvas.

But it was the Buddhist guru who planted the seeds of his lifelong devotion to tantric philosophy and art. He would ask the boy to make mandalas on the temple walls using mud from the ground. He also taught him yoga. As the artist once said in an interview, his guru was so skilled that when he breathed in, his eyeballs would pop out and he would go into a trance.

A boy who spent all his free time with two much older men discussing comparative religion was bound to grow up unconventional.

Qadri, who died in Toronto at the age of 78 in 2011, left India in his early 30s and spent the rest of his adult life living in Canada and Europe. Outside his home country, he found success as an artist and also the freedom to live an ascetic, peripatetic and alternative lifestyle. As a self-avowed anarchist who hated rules and systems, Qadri was one of the original inhabitants of Christiania, an old military camp in Copenhagen that was declared a self-governing area by squatters 40 years ago. This was the hippie era and he found kindred spirits who shared an interest in the cerebral aspect of his philosophy and the practice of sexual rituals that are at the heart of tantric Buddhism.

All this may seem a bit esoteric if not downright kinky. But gallery owner Sundaram Tagore is confident that the "positive energy" that emanates from Qadri's beautifully crafted pieces will find a new audience in Hong Kong. He is donating a signature Qadri, the blood red Untitled, to the SCMP Charity Art Auction to be held in September. The 99x69cm work features the serrations and dots that became the artist's private language for his tantric belief.