Art Nomads: Zula Tuvshinbat

Alternate Title: This Exhibition Should Have Come With A Trigger Warning

Well, it had to happen eventually.  If this was my last year teaching - and it just might be - it makes sense that this is the year It would happen.   The thing that happens to every teacher, eventually, and you know as it unfolds exactly what it is:

The Worst Teaching Day of Your Career.*

For narrative purposes, it would be fun to say it started like any other, but to be completely honest, it did not.  I had decided it would be good for my Art III students, especially my AP students, if I took them out into the world to see some Real Art.  I took them to galleries in what my students informed me was UB's "Shibuya" - the intersection between the big library and KFC.  Only, silly me, after 9 years in Mongolia I had decided that it would be fine to take them to these exhibitions even though I hadn't previewed them because every other exhibition I'd seen in UB was tame.  I knew the third show, the one that involved tufting, had a little abstract nudity, because I'd seen an image from it on the gallery's website, but since one of my students had talked about focusing on the body in their work, I decided the risk outweighed the benefits.

I was wrong.  So very, very wrong.

We made it to the third gallery before it happened.  The first one we hit was pretty standard Mongolian subjects - horses, families, flowers - and style.  The second was landscapes and yaks.  A lot of yaks.  We had lunch at Fat Hen - the students' request, and always a tasty treat.  I was ready to head back to the school after briefly stopping into a new "contemporary" art gallery, Lkham.  Most of the artwork seemed okay at first glance.  Working with abstraction has that effect.  The technique - tufting - also helps...it's hard to feel threatened by a rug.  At least, until you realize that rug is a snake-penis growing out of a man's torso and about to strike a stylized vajayjay.

Well.  When we walked in, and I realized that some of the work was a bit more "confrontational" than I was expecting, I probably should have just called it a day.  But the thing about being an art teacher is that the human body is a pretty significant theme in art, and even more so contemporary art.  So I muttered that along with something to the extent of "don't like, don't look" and off we went. 

"2 CUTE 4 U," 2023

The art was beautiful, and really well crafted, and the kids seemed to enjoy seeing something different.  One of them brought up the Cesar A. Cruz quote often misattributed to Banksy: "Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable," and how this exhibition really helped them to understand its meaning.  But another mentioned - somewhat jokingly - that this probably wasn't an exhibition to take students to if they identified as ace or were gender non-conforming, and suddenly I had visions of my students posting their photos to social media, angry parent calls, and myself packing up my apartment and heading home jobless 8 months sooner than expected.  Probably because I'd been keeping closer track of US news than was good for me, but still.

"Loyal as a Dog," 2023

So I spent the long bus ride in traffic back to the school sweating.  I informed my principal about it, and talked to the students - let them know that if they were uncomfortable with the art that that was part of the artist's intent, but that they could and should talk to their parents, asked them to be mindful of where they posted the pictures, and hoped for the best.  My principal reminded me that we were in Mongolia, not the US, and that our parents weren't overly concerned with these sorts of things, and my friends who saw the work when my students excitedly showed them photos consoled me that it really wasn't that bad.  Still, I'm glad that I'll be making art instead of teaching it for the foreseeable future.

*Fun fact: my siblings and I were responsible for several of these in our day, so I guess karma's a bitch.