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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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