Oldal 335 [335]
CREATING MONGOL DSURAG AND RE-CREATING
BUDDHIST ART TRADITION IN MONGOLIA
Maria-Katharina Lang
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Tsetsentsolmon Baatarnaran
National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar
The suppression of Buddhist tradition in the communist era played a significant
role in the social imagination of the “revival” and “innovation” of Buddhist art in
Mongolia. Artists are in a pathway to (re-)identify and (re-)create the Buddhist art
tradition from pre-communist time. The Buddhist Art School of Gandan Monastery,
as well as private schools and artists started to strive for producing “Mongolian Bud¬
dhist art.” Based on fieldwork in the years of 2014-2019, including interviews with
artists, monks, art collectors, and professors, this paper examines the ways of (re-)
creating Buddhist art in Mongolia and its transformation in different social-political
situations.' It further discusses how Buddhist art was secularised and nationalised
as basis for the Mongol Dsurag painting style in the socialist time, and flourished
separate from secular art within the Buddhist revival after the 1990s. Furthermore,
Mongol Dsurag as a new cultural construct inherited from the socialist time has been
(re-)nationalised and institutionalised after the collapse of the communist system.
However, it has also been diffused with a variety of contemporary techniques and
styles in the last decades. Buddhist art is being commodified at the same time being
instrumentalised to express national identity in Mongolia.
Introduction
Mongolian art has been and still is characterised by its permeability for multiple ele¬
ments, various cultural and material flows from different regions, and the freedom
to choose which elements to incorporate to create a specific Mongolian style of art.
Thinking of chronological loose phases of what we use to call earlier “Mongolian art”
following images come to one’s mind: rock art, deer stones, animal style bronzes,
anthropomorphic stone figures, ongons (Mong. ongyon; Khal. ongon), archaeological
objects related to the various steppe empires and the Mongolian Empire, Ilkhanid
miniature paintings, Dsanabadsar and his school and Mongol Dsurag (Mongolian
painting). Buddhist art that reached Mongolian lands first via trading routes usually
labelled as Silk or Steppe Roads and was further established in the time of the Mon¬
golian Empire under Kublai Khan (1215-1294) and later strengthened again in the
' The research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): PEEK-AR 394-G24; https://disperse¬
dandconnected.net/en/
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