Tsam Folks Say...

So if you ever tell me you've been thinking, "Maybe it's time to get a master's degree," I - as a caring and concerned friend - may recommend you ask yourself a few more questions before proceeding.  This week the question is, "Did you ever get over procrastinating?"  When you've put off your assignment til the night before, and you get a headache, will you be able to push through the pain and do the work anyway?  If not, are you tech savvy enough to deal with the inevitable issues that come up when you woke up at 5:30 to finish before school on a half-asleep brain?  Because that is where I was this morning.  I still managed to get 100% from a professor that I've heard is tough but excellent, but I just take that as proof that God really does watch out for fools and children.

This week you're getting a break from the art posts courtesy of Engrish.  Although she was quick to explain that she and Blondie hadn't been to many cultural events while I was gone (because there really hadn't been any), she was even quicker to deliver one.  Danshig Naadam is the religious flavor of Mongolia's manly sports festival, first celebrated in 1639 to commemorate my old buddy Zanabazar's elevation to the Peerage (or something like that...his title was Bogd Jebtsundamba Khutuktu rather than Sir Zanabazar, but you get the gist, right?)*  This year the timing was pushed back to the beginning of September, which is good, because when I took Evil's niece in 2015 it was in August and too hot to really enjoy.

The reason why I was REALLY looking forward to it is the fact that after five previous years in Mongolia I was still trying to see Tsam dancing.  Okay, so to be fair, I'd seen it before, not only at Tumen Ekh but at an event the owner of my school invited me to attend at the National Museum of Modern Art, but...well, you know me.  If seeing something is good, seeing it in its original context is even better.  And the previous time I went to Danshig Naadam, we somehow missed the Tsam dance.

See, Tsam wasn't intended to be entertaining.  It's not some crazy booty-shaking in fancy dress just for funsies...not that there's anything wrong with that.  I personally enjoyed the hell out of exactly that during my years in Korea.  But Tsam has spiritual significance, as was pretty apparent from my first look inside the Naadam stadium on Sunday.  Across the field I could see an enormous applique thangka - a Buddhist devotional image - hung from the roof of the stadium and facing the field.  According to its very short Wikipedia entry Tsam can be seen not only as religious instruction but also a form of meditation.  Which makes sense, because the music is not exactly the rockin'-est beatz.  Tsam dance moves to the sounds of cymbals and conch horns, the latter of which have a tendency to drone a little, and while it's not the kind of sound that will drift you off to Dreamland, there is something hypnotic about it.

On the other hand, it carries very well over a distance, and as Engrish and I left for the stadium from our rendezvous at the nearby shopping center, we were reassured that we were in the right place, and hurried on our way over.

I might have been a bit concerned we were missing the action, but the dance was in progress as I went in to claim some seats for us.  Engrish joined me a few minutes later after waiting to hear from Blondie, so she got to see a little before the masked dancer left the field.  I wondered if that was it, but before long, another dancer came out and performed, and eventually Blondie joined us and got to see it all for herself.  It's possible that she may even have been a little grateful that she didn't see the entire dance, because...well.  I'm just going to come out and say it: the dance is a little repetitive.  Maybe the conch horns sound a little like butt-trumpeting.  If it's enough for you to see just a glimpse of the dance, Tumen Ekh's daily performances are a wonderful opportunity to do exactly that.

But on the other hand...even though the seats in the stadium can't be considered comfortable by ANY stretch of the imagination, and the full dance seemed to stretch on a little, I didn't for a second wish I had missed the chance to experience it.

I was sitting in the shade on a cool, Sunday morning, with two of my favorite peeps, feasting on a culture I'd been largely cut off from the last two years.  I was finally experiencing something I'd hoped to see for most of the years I lived in Mongolia.  Sadly my dumb ass left the apartment without my Big Gun - I actually realized as I was walking out to get in the taxi, but I was worried about being late and also, I was lazy, so I didn't go back for it - so my photos were shot with my iPad.  Sorry for that.  Luckily after the dancing wound down the dancers came over to the altar set up in front of the thangka, so I got some decent shots anyways.

And THEN they handed out candy, and it was like a feeding frenzy.  If you've never been to Mongolia, you have to understand that Mongolians love candy.  It's not even that good chocolatey shit like we Americans hand out every Halloween...no these are just the hard candies like everyone's grandmother except mine keeps in a glass dish in their house.  I didn't join in the battle royale, but one of the grandpas kindly shared with Engrish.  It was sweet.  The gesture, that is, not the candy...we were ready for some real food by this point, and maybe our Western culture has some deeply ingrained beliefs about accepting candy from strangers.

*Liberties taken with info reported by Montsame

Art Nomad: B. Tserendash and D. Ganbold

The blogging for this year could be off to a better start.  Ignore for the moment the fact that I'm a few days late and several dollars short (arigato very much, Japan).  I like to joke around about the fact that I have six readers, but for the moment, it's actually true.  If you are currently reading this, you are one of a very short list of people privileged to my writing.  To explain why, I've gotta take the Wayback Machine to last January.  A friend of mine asked me to meet her for dinner because she needed to talk about her then-husband's escalating temper.  Between myself and her other friends, we got her out of the situation before any lasting harm was inflicted, but unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the tale.  Her ex-person (as he turned out to not be legally married to her under either Japan or US laws) managed to get ahold of email addresses of some of her friends and has ever since been spamming us with emails that range from pathetic ("This is killing me") to manipulative ("I'm going to kill myself") to just plain creepy ("I pray to God that something happens to you like this one day," which I'd gleefully inform him isn't how God works - and even if He did, I'm pretty sure I'm on better terms with Him - except that would require a response, and I've been avoiding that).  And then last week my friend let me know her ex-asshole looked up her new Facebook account, because my friends list is public, and the fact that I've never had anything to worry about as far as internet security goes was a thing of the past.  There's not much solid info in here, thanks to the fact that I adopted The Evil One's practice of using code names shortly after I started this blog, but I suppose if someone wanted to be a creeper badly enough, they could figure out a lot, especially if they knew my actual name.  So here we are.  Eventually I imagine it will be okay to make my blog public again, but for now, I'm erring on the side of caution.

But that doesn't let me off the hook as far as the blog goes.  I promised that I was going to blog y'all some Mongolian art, and that was just as well, since I sort of got stood up by an old student on Saturday morning.  To be fair, I was dubious when he suggested meeting at 9:30 am, and it turns out for good reason, but I had a book and - as he pointed out - I had a good breakfast, finally learning exactly what eggs benedict are at ROC in Zaisan.  I went to Merkuri from there to continue restocking my kitchen, since I had inexplicably rediscovered the desire to bake again after two years without an oven.  After a well-earned foot massage I was finally ready to see some art.

The first artist I actually saw the previous week after visiting the Union of Mongolian Artists show.  The Sengeragi Gallery (formerly Best Art) is in the same building, and although Art Avenue said that Batmunkh Tserendash's Nomad Art exhibition was only August 4-7, there it was, so I checked it out.

Sculpture is really not my thing, but I keep telling myself that I need to get over that.  That's cause I'm an art teacher, yo.  Of course, I'd never thought about it the other way around...that being an art teacher could help me get over my blocks about sculpture not really being my thing  Looking at Tserendash's sculptures didn't make me a better sculptor myself, but I felt like I had a better appreciation for them because I teach about sculpture.

For example, the first thing that stood out to me about Tserendash's work was the materials that he used.  Although I can't give you particulars about what kinds, he works primarily in wood, with metal embellishments.  There is striking contrast between the warmth of wood and the organic qualities of its grain against the metal, but it's interesting to see the ways in which Tserendash manipulates these qualities to make them more compatible; staining the wood a cool color, or shaping the metal into more organic forms.  Some parts of the work appear at first glance to be metallic, but on closer inspection turn out to be distressed wood.   This purposeful manipulation of materials begs the question of what the the thought process behind the choice was.  To make the sculptures lighter?  To make a statement about the impermanence of nomadic life?  I'm pretty sure I'm not versed enough in Mongolian art at this point to venture a guess.

The other thing I most enjoyed about Tserendash's work was the play of the shadows on the gallery walls.  One quality of sculpture is that it does have that third dimension.  You can view it from different angles, but this also means that when light strikes it (particularly the bright, directed light favored in galleries) there will be an interaction with the space.  The sculptures were interesting but seeing the shadows they cast suggested to me that the work was the contemporary successor of Mongolian artistic traditions.  But then maybe I'm stretching.

Queens, by D. Ganbold

I dropped in on the Altan Khaan Gallery after the Sengeragi Gallery, but didn't look critically until a week later.  Dorjderem Ganbold's exhibition, "Once Upon a Time in Mongolia," highlights the usual Mongolian themes, but expresses them using a fauve color palette and abstract treatment.  He is the grandson of a Mongol zurag painter named Ch. Minjuur, and it wasn't until I was getting ready to write this post that I figured out that Mongol zurag is essentially the Mongolian equivalent of nihonga.  If you've ever seen a rendition of a Naadam scene, or a thangka painting, these are typically painted with mineral pigments, although the pigments used seem to be different from the ones I used over the last year and a half (unless they aren't, in which case it's probably down to the fact that I favored the large grain sizes that get that beautiful sparkle in sunlight).

Autumn Melody, by D. Ganbold

With these pieces Ganbold aims to give an eternal sense of grandeur to nomadic life.  The scale of these works works well towards achieving this; although he had some smaller pieces, such as "Childhood," for the most part his paintings are at a relatively large scale.  What makes these especially effective is the contrast between cool backgrounds and warm, vivid colors in the foreground.  Even from outside the gallery the glowing effect of his color choices catches the eye and draws you in.

Splendid Altai Mountains, by D. Ganbold

I do have to say that I found the surface texture to be somewhat distracting.  The paint was neither as thickly textured as some of the visual texture might lead you to believe nor super smooth.  Either one of these would have been fine, but instead there were areas where the paint rose away from the canvas that - at least to me - detracted from the overall quality of the work.  But maybe that's just me.  If his goal is to preserve what he (in his artist statement) calls "true intangible assets of Mongolia," I would say that this is a successful body of work.

However...I'm sure this will come up again as I try to write about Mongolian art, but Mongolian art largely seems to incorporate the same themes over and over again ad nauseum.  Herders and herds and horses and the fucking badass Mongolian queens, Chinggis, the steppe, the mountains, deerstones, long script: I'm probably forgetting one or two, but you get the gist.  Don't get me wrong - these are important traditions to Mongolia, but I feel like contemporary art here is so obsessed with its past that it's blind to the issues of its present and future.  And the more I've studied art, the more I value work that can shock and challenge and make a statement.  So here's hoping for more of that in posts to come.