After working internationally, exhibiting
works in numerous countries, and living as a global nomad for over a
decade, I have recently settled back in Ulaanbaatar, the bourgeoning
capital city of the newly democratizing Mongolia. Decades ago, here, in
Ulaanbaatar, I obtained formal training in the traditional Mongolian
painterly style called the? Mongol Zurag,? which takes its roots and
inspiration from Buddhist iconographic paintings, with an emphasis on
finely detailed lines, traditional motifs, and subjects derived from
history and nomadic cultures of central Asia. To begin with, Buddhism
played a major role in how I discovered my passion for art. When I was
growing up as a teenager during the 1980s, the communist regime
repressed any means of artistic expression that did not serve as a tool
of authoritarian propaganda. This meant that? Mongol Zurag? was
officially banned along with the freedom of thought and all religious
practices. Yet, although officially banned, Buddhism was still widely
practiced, and it was not difficult to find religious texts that
contained paintings and illustrations of deities, monsters, the
underworld. These? religious? images gave me my earliest inspiration
for creativity and hence influenced me profoundly. The pleasure I took
in meticulously copying banned images from heterodox texts taught me
that an artist should be courageous enough to seek freedom of
expression. Hence, I have always imagined myself to be a firebrand,
someone who aspires to seek and illustrate truth and beauty. Despite
the early influence of Mongol Zurag, today, I do not identify myself
primarily as a Mongol Zurag artist. I now work with various techniques
and incorporate numerous artistic traditions as disparate as
traditional Japanese art, modern tattoo art, and even fashion design.
Over the years, I have taken up oil paint as well as watercolors. In
recent years, I have also been experimenting with abstract content that
reflects the troubles of living in modern capitalist society. These
experimentations and the evolution of my works reflect the constant
search I undertake for my own identity as well as the search for
Mongolian collective identity in times of profound uncertainty and
change following the end of communist era. Through my works, I aim to
illustrate where we came from, what we have lost, what we have gained,
and the contradictions and the dualities we face in the age of
technology and mass consumerism. One of the recurring images in my
early works are of women dressed in traditional garments from different
periods, with eccentric coiffures and headdresses of various Mongolian
ethnic groups. These women are reimagined and historicized figures,
done in a decided color palette and with an homage to the biggest names
in the history of Western art. My interest in the artists of the
Western tradition were spurred following Mongolia?s transition into a
democracy. The adoption of western influenced elements came from a
genuine interest in art and visual language that was inaccessible
during the socialist era. Works such as Steppe Riders (2008) or Friends
(2009) merged my heightened sense of pride in Mongolian history, which
was heavily censored and filtered before, and foreign visual culture,
both of which seemed exotic to me at the time. Despite the Western
influence, however, the heroines of the visual stories I tried to tell
were all Mongolia's nomadic women. Their close relations with nature,
their hard life out on the harsh Mongolian steppe, their unique
inner-world, and the customs and traditions they carried on gave me a
tremendous inspiration and subject matter for most of my early works.
Through the distinctive features of these Mongolian women's
expressions, I tried to tell a secret story that has never being told,
of happiness and misery, of humanity's relations with nature, and of
history and contemporary lives and how they connect with us. This
period of pure inspiration, pride in our collective history, and an
almost direct historic translation was succeeded by inner-direction,
and my later works reflected on the stories of the self and others. In
Voodoo Family (2013), for instance, I offered a commentary on the
socialist era civilian informant culture, through the button-eyed doll
family plagued with generations of mistrust, greed, and tattletales.
Such a reinterpretation of the past became possible only following the
end of the over 70 yearlong socialist system when artists, for the
first time, are given the freedom to offer their truth and
retrospection on the society they lived through. By contrast, The
Modern Conqueror (2013) is my critique of the contemporary Mongolian
society?s obsession with its past glory. In this work, I dressed the
famous Chinggis Khan in a humble, button-up shirt, green blazer and
gave him a soviet era medal honoring his achievements. The medal
symbolizes the hollowness of the achievement oriented modern social
life. Irony, satirical language as well as use of found objects is
becoming more common in my later work. This latest reinvention
coincides with my move back to Mongolia after twelve years of living in
abroad. As one starts to see the society from the inside rather than
the romanticized version from the outside, scorn and admiration, praise
and critique are fused together on my canvases. In Buddha (2019), I
covered the silhouette of the Buddha entirely in literal medals, which
are actual badges that were once given out to heroes, workers, young
pioneers, mothers, and every possible reason to honor human beings. The
work is meant to reflect the dualities of price and worth, worship and
superstition, glory and neglect. It also is meant to capture the sense
of loss we collectively feel when a whole society unequivocally and
unexpectedly transitions to a new and uncertain future.
