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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 Buddhist 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 elements, 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 Mongolian 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://dispersedandconnected.net/en/ 333
