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.
