11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Life cup 2023 / Metal and aluminium / 1967 skulls: 13 x 10.5 x 6.5cm (each, approx.); 400 x 1400cm (installed) / Courtesy: The artists NOTE 1 Nomin Bold, email correspondence with the author, 1 February 2024. When rendered in English, these four stanzas of ‘Hymn to the universe’ read: A boundless universe, resilient and everlasting, An insatiable parasite, ceaselessly consuming, A cosmos of eternal sorrow, A perpetual ignorance, unyielding and vast. The four oceans of an infinite universe, A land where six unthawing elements reside, Unending progeny, perpetually multiplying, An indomitable foe fuelled by vengeance. The realm of unborn creatures, existing in limbo, An inexhaustible soul, enduring and enduring, A life without end, stretching into eternity, A heart of darkness, boundless and profound. Karma, unceasing and everlasting, Debts to be repaid, impossible to evade, An unending ocean of births, A boundless sea of deaths, eternally flowing. Life cup 2023, a ‘curtain’ of grinning skulls, combines painter Nomin Bold’s use of Buddhist symbolism with sculptor Ochirbold Ayurzana’s practice as a metalworker. An imposing four metres high and 14 metres wide, the work consists of some 1967 cast-metal skulls, a recognisable motif in Mongol zurag and Tibetan thangka painting, which are suspended on taut metal wires, fixed floor to ceiling. The skulls’ raw metallic patina accentuates the fleshy pink of their protruding tongues, bared gums, flared nostrils and gaping eye sockets, which variously number one, two or three. Their countenance — at once grim and gleeful — proliferates across an arrangement that is both orderly and varied, as if algorithmic or geomantic, suggesting an underlying logic that is simultaneously cosmic and random. For the artists, skulls are ‘life cups’: vessels for human souls and consciousness that are confined within the human form. They represent subcultural currency and a convergence of European and Buddhist aesthetic traditions, where the skull is a memento mori or a reminder of mortality, and a talisman warning against an attachment to selfhood. The two-eyed skulls represent the human, hovering between the single eye of evil and the three eyes of godliness. Their curiously rhythmic arrangement is based on the system of dots, dashes and spaces of Morse code, transliterated from four stanzas of ‘Hymn to the universe’, a nineteenth-century poem invoking karmic cyclical states. The poem is often attributed to Luvsanchültimjigmed, the fifth Bogd Jebtsundamba and the highest Lama and spiritual head of Gelug Buddhism in Mongolia. Sources say Luvsanchültimjigmed created the hymn in 1841, at the age of 26, after clearly perceiving a series of worldly phenomena, interconnections and natural law. 1 In keeping with the notion of sa sara, a concept central to Buddhism and other religions of South Asian origin, Life cup follows ‘Hymn to the universe’ in proposing human life as a continuous cycle of death and rebirth. Whether this journey is meaningful in itself is, for the artists, a question whose resolution might constitute a form of enlightenment, enabling the transcendence of earthly life to a higher plane. Viewed in the context of this timeless contemplation of the universal, the installation’s configuration is strikingly contemporary. Not only is the skull motif resonant with popular symbolism — Ochirbold singles out its talismanic power in motorcycle culture — the work’s commanding scale and rectilinear form recalls multi-screen video installations that are fixtures of contemporary art exhibitions like the Asia Pacific Triennial. Such thematic and stylistic convergences are common to the practices of both artists, and prevalent in Mongolian art generally. Ochirbold’s iconic ‘consciousness’ sculptures use seriality and repetition to explore variations on the theme of a single figure confronting the enormity of their footprint in mute admonition of the impact of human activity on Earth. Nomin’s intricate works employ the techniques and iconography of Tibetan thangka and Mongol zurag painting to illustrate contradictions of twenty-first-century existence. Both artists’ practices reflect a broader tendency in Mongolia’s contemporary culture to question the loss of a sense of unity with nature in the process of the country’s continued urbanisation and globalisation. Accordingly, Life cup articulates deep connections with endangered cultural heritage through an internationally legible visual language, seeking broader conversations while situating its cosmic propositions firmly in the here and now. REUBEN KEEHAN NOMINBOLDAND OCHIRBOLDAYURZANA NOMINBOLD BORN 1982, ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIA OCHIRBOLDAYURZANA BORN 1976, SUKHBAATAR PROVINCE, MONGOLIA LIVE+WORK INULAANBAATAR ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 160 — 161