Vanishing Heritage 失落的传承

Some 800 years ago, Mongol warrior Genghis Khan united the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian plateau and formed the largest land empire the world has ever seen, the Mongol Empire. Interestingly, the Mongol Empire was mainly composed of nomadic people who, according to the season, moved around carrying their traditional yurts—rounded white tents that could be assembled in roughly two hours—and the livestock that provided them with warm clothes and sustained their mostly dairy-based diet. Even with changes in rulership, civil wars, and the influence of foreign religions, their lifestyle remained unchanged and was passed down through generations. The nomadic culture was still prevalent in Mongolia until the early 20th century, when everything changed.

“We’re losing our heritage at a grand scale that I find heartbreaking. Now Mongolians are following the direction the world is going. In the city, everything is standardized, from apartment buildings to the means of transportation—our traditions and nomadic culture conflict with this modern lifestyle. It’s almost as if heritage is something to be displayed only in a museum,” says Ulaanbaatar-based multimedia artist Baatarzorig Batjargal.

Batjargal expresses his concern with the rapid disappearance of the nomadic culture and other Mongolian traditions through large and colorful paintings, which he populates with a myriad of characters, including animals, historical and religious figures, and pop icons. Each with its own symbology, these figures represent the different forces that defined the complicated recent history of his country. To get to know his characters and the symbology behind them is to understand the history of Mongolia over the past one hundred years.

Perhaps the most symbolic thing about his work is the style he paints, the Mongol zurag, a folk style that relates intrinsically to Mongolia’s ancient traditions and the culture of the nomadic people. As it’s typical of contemporary zurag, Batjargal’s works can look ancient at first glance. They almost invariably depict Mongolia’s mountainous landscape and show flattened perspectives, traditional patterns, and a rich iconography reminiscent of wall paintings and Tibetan thangkas. We see many shamanic and Buddhist deities, warriors, and the ultimate symbol of mobility for nomadic herders, horses.

However, a closer look reveals seemingly disconnected elements that almost feel like intruders in the scene: frightening mice with Mickey Mouse ears, tie-wearing predators, deities in superhero costumes, astronauts, and famous personalities like the Joker, Freud, Dalí, and Benjamin Franklin. The latter appears in Batjargal’s work exactly as he does in the American hundred-dollar bill.

“If I speak about each element that appears in my works, it will take a long time,” Batjargal laughs. To sum up, he depicts “characters from the past, present, and future, which coexist in a single space. The past comprises myths, rituals, tengerism, shamanism, and wild creatures; the present is represented by characters such as Mickey Mouse, wolfs, and rabbits; and the future is shown with the presence of technology and its advancements,” he explains.

Batjargal chose the zurag style because it stems from the same pictorial tradition of old Mongolian paintings, with no limitations of time and space, allowing for a multilayered expression with many perspectives and meanings. He’s part of a movement of Mongolian artists that uses the zurag to express their sentiments of confusion facing the social and political changes the country went through over their lifetimes, notably the problematic transition from communism to capitalism.

Mongol zurag translates literally to “Mongol painting.” It developed at the beginning of the 20th century as a secular art form, marked by the depictions of figures and scenes of daily earthly life. One of the first pieces attributed to the style was One Day In Mongolia, by Baldugiin Sharav, painted between 1911 and 1913. It depicts scenes from a regular day in the mountains of the Gobi Desert. The painting shows the traditions of the nomadic herders while emphasizing the prominence of nature in their lives.

A decade later, the Mongol zurag suffered the consequences of the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 that brought communism to the country under the guidance of the USSR. Since the communist ethos dictated that art production should concentrate on glorifying socialism, there was an effort to suppress anything the Soviets would consider archaic. That’s not to say the art form disappeared; it survived in specific environments, helping underground artists maintain their sense of cultural identity alive.

With the fall of the communist regime and the institution of a democratic system in 1990, a new generation of artists gave a fresh breath of life to the Mongol zurag. By the end of the decade, the style had made its way to academia. It became a proper subject at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture, where Batjargal studied Fine Arts years later.

Born in 1983, Batjargal remembers his childhood under the centrally planned communist economy as a carefree time. “Everyone was going to work; kids were going to school, and, at the end of the day, everyone met at home for dinner,” he says, but he realizes that his childhood memories do not represent the whole reality of Mongolia under Soviets. “There were also too many problems. For instance, the state took people’s assets. This happened to relatives from my mother’s side a few times. The oppression levels were also very high, and many intellectuals were falsely accused of things. Some even died as a result,” he says.

Communism was what brought the first real wave of modernization to Mongolia, and the changes seriously affected the nomadic lifestyle. The regime made many decisions regarding the lives of the nomadic herders, restricting their mobility and even nationalizing their private livestock. As a result, communities were broken, and skills and costumes were lost.

Batjargal was still in secondary school when the communist regime fell in 1990, and, like most Mongolians, he knew little about democracy. Still, the side effects of the country’s transition into the capitalist system were rapidly visible, especially in the capital. “From 1990 to 2000, Ulaanbaatar felt almost like a collapsed gray city, full of chaos. Crimes were prevalent, and I could see many alcoholics, homeless, beggars, and orphans everywhere,” he remembers. On the bright side, Western products, like Coca-Cola, were readily available for the first time and, with satellite technology, Mongolian society opened to the world. “After 1990, different ideas and movements were introduced. I could watch channels such as MTV and many types of films,” Batjargal says.

During the 1990s, many Mongolians who previously lived as nomads moved to brick apartments and houses in the city. And, since they could, some even carried their yurts. In the 2000s, it was common to see the white rounded tents assembled on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar. The children of nomads began to aspire to blue or white color jobs—or else they wanted to become big stars. Even those who defied modernity and kept their nomadic lifestyle couldn’t help but let some of the technological advancements into their lives. The almighty horse was progressively replaced by motorcycles or jeeps, and satellite dishes became standard additions to yurts everywhere.

Mongolians became more exposed to the outside world than ever before through foreign TV. Batjargal grew up watching Disney cartoons, the well-known narratives that uphold American values, symbolized, above all, in one character: Mickey Mouse. “The reason I started drawing Mickey Mouse is that I watched it when I was a child. It was when Western culture came in quickly and with great power. Things that appear to be Western were highly valued. My memories of that time are tied to Mickey Mouse,” Batjargal says.

He sees the character as the most prominent cultural ambassador of the West, “a hero that spreads the Western culture in different places. Children and people everywhere see and learn this culture, lifestyle, and philosophies through it. If we think about it, Mickey Mouse is a character that transforms and changes. It’s easy to think of a Kazakh kid near the Altai Tavan Bogd Mountains wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and of table cloths with Mickey Mouse patterns. Often you can find such things in the countryside of Mongolia, too. I think the same happens across Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and regions that used to follow the Soviet regime,” Batjargal says.

He even establishes an ironic parallel representing the worldwide indoctrination power of the happy rodent. “Mickey Mouse, in a trivial way, can be compared to the red star during the Soviet era, considering how widespread they both sank in,” he says. Batjargal’s depictions of Mickey Mouse are frightening. His version appears with glaring, crazy eyes and mischievous expressions, often taking the position of Buddhist deities across his paintings and several sculptures.

Another element that’s incongruous to the Mongolian landscape but that appears in his paintings is the figure of a shark, an intruding threat, like Mickey Mouse and the red star, swimming defiantly above it all, in a landlocked region. Curiously, Batjargal associates the shark with the British Navy and its predatory expansion over parts of the world. The animal is “the wolf of the water,” as he puts it, and “the predator of the sea.” The predator of the land would be the wolf; and of the air, the falcon. These three animals carry heavy military connotations, just like the camouflage patterns he sometimes includes, a direct allusion to the notions of power and aggression.

Batjargal likes to play with the dichotomy of predator and prey when depicting animals. Together with the various sharks, wolves, and falcons, we see many rabbits, which he reveals symbolize the nomads during the soviet era. “The rabbit is an animal that reproduces fast, but that is easy to manipulate,” he says. Another interesting recurrent element we see across his work is the red neck scarf, a clear nod to the Young Pioneers. From 1922 to 1991, this large youth organization amassed most children born in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and one of its central doctrines was Marxist-Leninist atheism. The red scarf is a sign of indoctrination by the Soviets through youth education.

As we look attentively at Batjargal’s paintings, more and more elements emerge, most of them relating to the collapse of Soviet socialism and the arrival of Western capitalism in Mongolia, a mismatched assortment representing the collective stupor of a country torn between foreign ideologies. However, Batjargal notes he’s not criticizing any side. Naturally, he hints at dissatisfaction, but, above all, his work is a commentary on how everyone in the world is influenced by either one of these ideologies—or both simultaneously.

It’s not always easy to grasp Batjargal’s symbology or even the relationship between the elements he depicts. In fact, the meanings behind his works sometimes also evade him, the author. It doesn’t matter; clarity and realism are far from being his goal, and that’s one of his uniqueness when compared to other artists working on similar lines. “There are many artists who practice the Mongol zurag in Mongolia. I personally take direction in imaginary fields, things happening in our mind, instead of realism,” he explains. 

And as he prepares for an upcoming solo show in London, his interest in the unconscious thoughts that take place inside the human mind has been only expanding. “Recently, I’ve been investigating the notions that, above all, exist in our minds but are not set in reality, such as the ideal worlds of communism, capitalism, or even religions like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity,” he reveals.

His work is indeed infused with beliefs that define the Mongolian psyche. Across all of his pieces, just like Sharav’s One Day in Mongolia, Batjargal acknowledges the longstanding respect Mongolians have for nature. “Mongolians believed that the world is alive, offering the finest food, such as milk, to the spirits of the mountains, lakes, and the sun,” he says.

To Mongolians, nature is not only a means of subsistence but a source of spiritual fulfillment. Given the essence of this relationship, it’s not surprising that nomadic herders are ready to lift their base and even move livestock every time the natural environment around them changes.

Sadly, beyond authoritarianism and cultural invasion, nature has also become a threat to this lifestyle. Climate change and the effects of overgrazing for commercial purposes have been causing desertification in areas that were previously vital grasslands. As a result, more and more nomads abandon the countryside and flock to Ulaanbaatar—a city that already ranks as one of the world’s most polluted capitals—progressing their cultural demise.

Batjargal believes that the phenomenon of cultural extinction is analogous to what we see in animal extinction. He points out that customs and traditions of indigenous people are disappearing in the same fashion that some animal species are also going extinct—both because of the impacts of modern life. To him, the solution is to revisit the origins and reclaim the ancient, quintessential philosophies in which Mongolian society is rooted to pass them on to the newer generations before they disappear forever.

“Mongolians have always had a deep relationship with nature, and the philosophy of life has always been living in harmony with nature,” he says. “It’s a philosophical question of how we coexist with these distinct entities—the creatures in nature, the earth, the sky. As an artist, I strive to put these into my works to pass down this idea of coexistence with nature to the new generation.”

Batjargal’s powerful message resonates beyond Mongolia. Loss of heritage is a global issue, and he’s aware of that. With the growing international attention his work has been receiving, he’s thrilled to see his message reaching a broader audience. “Nowadays, my works are presented in international biennales and are getting recognized abroad. Art is a language without a need for translation. Through this language, my ideas reach many people regardless of where they are from,” he says.

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Contributor: Tomás Pinheiro, Lucas Tinoco
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li
Mongolian Translation: Purev Batdelger
Images Courtesy of Baatarzorig Batjargal & Jack Bell Gallery