'X-Ray Shaman': A New Perspective About My Art

 

By Sarah Jenkins

We are living in an era deeply obsessed with looking inward, yet we have never felt more disconnected from our origins. In a world dominated by frantic digital feeds and a collective turning away from traditional institutions, a quiet counter-revolution is taking place within contemporary art. People are looking at modern canvases and experiencing an intense, unexplainable sense of gravity—a sudden, magnetic pull toward symbols they cannot consciously name.

This widespread desire to uncover a deeper, cosmic purpose is exactly what makes the work of contemporary Indian artist Dhiraj Singh so vital right now. By taking the cold, clinical tools of modern medicine and transforming them into fine art, Singh has unlocked a visual vocabulary that is not just modern, but ancient. Without intending to, his work has become a digital-age mirror to the oldest spiritual impulses of humanity, bridging the gap between modern radiography and the ancient shamans who walked the earth eleven thousand years ago.

At first glance, Singh’s medium belongs strictly to the twenty-first century. He constructs his pieces using medical X-rays, digital film overlays, and intricate, vibrant red geometric lattices. Yet, the moment these materials are assembled, the clinical sterile energy vanishes, replaced by a profound, heavy mysticism. On his canvases, individual skeletal X-rays are arranged vertically to build a monumental, stylized human figure. This layout functions precisely like a prehistoric totem pole or the enigmatic T-shaped limestone pillars uncovered at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. In those ancient spaces, early humans stacked biological symbols—wings, scorpions and skulls—to anchor their connection to the cosmos. Singh replicates this exact vertical architecture in his foundational series, ‘Urban Shaman’.

By hiding mundane everyday city objects—keys, car tyres and phones—within a towering, layered skeletal framework, he crafts a literal modern totem that anchors primitive ancestral instincts directly into the chaotic grid of modern city life. The most striking parallel, however, lies in Singh's conceptual framework. In mainstream medicine, an X-ray is simply a diagnostic tool used to find fractures. But in the history of tribal art, drawing the internal anatomy of a creature—its spine, ribs, and organs—is a cross-cultural spiritual phenomenon known as ‘X-ray art’.

From the ancient rock shelters of Australia to the painted drums of Siberian shamans, ancestors drew the insides of bodies to capture the unseen life force, or the soul. Singh himself notes that while the X-ray is a revealer of our physical inner self, his creative process transforms it into a “mystical revealer”. This transformation is beautifully captured in his piece ‘Trapped in Air’, where translucent, fragile skeletal fragments are suspended within rigid, invisible geometric dimensions, exploring the existential boundaries of the human spirit inside a mechanical world. When he overlays these skeletal forms with intricate red geometric meshes or jaali work, he mimics the grid-like patterns that anthropologists call entoptic phenomena—the universal geometric shapes the human brain naturally projects during deep meditation or altered states of consciousness. The jaali becomes a sacred veil, forcing the viewer to peer through a geometric portal to glimpse the hidden architecture of reality.

Ultimately, Singh’s work proves that human nature has not changed since the dawn of civilization. Whether carving a limestone pillar in prehistoric Anatolia or developing radiographic film in a modern studio in India, the artistic impulse remains entirely identical: a refusal to accept that we are just random, superficial biological accidents. We are creatures possessing an innate, locked potential, constantly searching for higher frequencies. By stripping away the skin and showing the universal framework beneath, Singh acts as a contemporary shaman for a technological society. He reminds us that beneath our modern clothes, our screens, and our everyday anxieties, we still carry the exact same skeletal blueprints, the same evolutionary drive, and the same timeless wonder that our ancestors carved into stone at he very beginning of the human story.