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OCR
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 preserving 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 contemporary 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. 345
