Soldiers who don't know themselves

Gerelkhuu Ganbold (Mongolia b.1988) brings to Mongol zurag (literally, ‘Mongolian painting’) a searing dramatic sensibility, producing mural-sized canvases of swirling battle-scenes that recall contemporary comics and science-fiction cinema; traditional epic painting; and the ever-popular genre of Mongolian equestrian art.

His paintings of the famed mounted warriors of the Mongol Empire allegorise life in present-day Mongolia, which he characterises as an eternal battle, a daily struggle for money and food while the powerful fight among themselves for influence.

The immaculately rendered phantom army of Soldiers who don’t know themselves is a frightening apparition. Arrayed across three imposingly stacked canvases, they are a metaphor for the tension and apprehensiveness of Mongolia’s younger generations.

Contemporary Mongol zurag is a critical revival of a style developed during the Mongolian independence movement of the early 20th century. Characterised by its ultra-fine brushwork, bright colours, flattened perspective, and themes drawn from everyday life, Mongol zurag synthesised elements of Tibetan Buddhist tangka painting, Chinese guohua and the Khitan equestrian art of the Liao dynasty (907–1125).

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 university subject in the late 1990s as Mongolia sought to reconstitute its national identity, Mongol zurag has been adopted by a passionate new generation of artists as a means of addressing the contradictions in their lives at a time of unprecedented urbanisation, financial precariousness and competing cultural influences.

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