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CREATING MONGOL DSURAG AND RE-CREATING BUDDHIST ART TRADITION IN MONGOLIA
preserved to a certain limited degree within a profane national art form the so-called
Mongol Dsurag (Mongolian Painting) during the communist period. Therewith the
painting technigues of religious iconographic representation had been retained partly
in the new cultural constructs of state socialism. Mongol Dsurag was formed as
a secular art style promoting the communist regime and “socialist nationalism.” This
was an attempt by ‘national elites’ such as artists and scholars at fragmentarily pre¬
serving Buddhist art tradition or techniques, re-connecting to the pre-revolutionary
art practices, and at the same time promoting soviet-style European art elements and
contents fitting into political paradigm “national in form and socialist in content.”
After 1990, Mongol Dsurag has been again enriched with a variety of contem¬
porary experiments and techniques for the last decades. Hence, it no longer exists
as a clear-cut style as it was formed under state socialism, at least, in the case of
the referred artists. Although Buddhist art technique had been always perceived in
the discourse of Mongol Dsurag, a distinction in terms of techniques, institutions,
and practices between the two has appeared in the last decades. G. Piirewbat played
a significant role to distinct Buddhist art as a religious art form from the profane art
style Mongol Dsurag, which both had been merged in the communist time.
Fig. 1. Khosbayar Narankhiiii “Ten Grams”, 2020,
watercolour, canvas, 90 x 70 cm. Courtesy © Khosbayar Narankhiii.
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