Path to wealth

In Path to wealth a tangle of bodies comprise the trunk and base of the tree from which dangles a collection of out-of-scale household objects, including a frying pan, a bathtub, a teapot and a picture frame. The influence of Buddhist painting is also apparent here, with the bodies melding into swirling clouds often featured around Buddhist deities, and the primary form resembling a lotus flower, which grows in the mud yet grows to a bright bloom.

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu’s (Mongolia b.1979) work is an example of contemporary Mongol zurag, a critical revival of a painterly idiom developed during the Mongolian independence movement of the early twentieth century. Characterised by its ultra-fine brushwork, bright colours, flattened perspective and themes drawn from everyday life, Mongol zurag (literally, ‘Mongolian painting’) synthesised elements of Tibetan Buddhist tangka painting, Chinese guohua and the Khitan equestrian art of the Liao dynasty (907–1125). It emerged to address themes of secular nationalism at the time of Mongolia’s declaration of independence from the Manchu Qing empire after China’s Xinhai Revolution of 1911.

As Mongolia came under Soviet influence, Mongol zurag was subsumed into the officially mandated socialist realist style that would dominate Mongolian culture from the bloody Stalinist purges of the 1930s until the Democratic Revolution of 1990. Established as a subject at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture as Mongolia sought to reconstitute its national identity in the late 1990s, Mongol zurag has been adopted by a passionate new generation of artists who find within it the means of addressing the contradictions of their lives at a time of unprecedented urbanisation, financial precariousness and competing cultural influences.

Drawing on traditional patterning and the experiences of Mongolian women, Dagvasambuu’s paintings combine poetic and everyday imagery, creating subtle contrasts between the manufactured and the natural or organic, and between intense detail and flat planes of colour. The work is representative of the graphic and symbolic qualities of Dagvasambuu’s practice, and includes recognisable motifs from traditional Buddhist painting – and East and Central Asian aesthetics in general – as well as psychologically charged imagery of contemporary life. One recurrent motif in Dagvasambuu’s paintings is a writhing mass of naked human bodies thrust together – struggling, copulating or just trying to coexist – cast against empty, melancholic expanses of picture plane. Economic liberalisation has precipitated rapid urbanisation in Mongolia, with nearly half the country’s population now concentrated in the capital, presenting significant social, infrastructural and environmental problems for a habitually nomadic people.

Exhibited in 'The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' (APT8) | 21 Nov 2015 – 10 Apr 2016