11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Ursula 2021 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 80 x 80cm / Purchased 2024. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Image courtesy: The artist BORN 1984, ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIA LIVES+WORKS INULAANBAATAR Dulguun Baatarsukh describes her work as ‘fashion art’ — a unique intersection of textile design and contemporary art. She has a reputation in Mongolia as both a designer, celebrated for elegant one-off garments through which she seeks to convey emotion, and as a contemporary artist, with a long history of experimental practice as part of the Nomad Wave performance collective and the Blue Sun Contemporary Art Group. Her recent practice has extended to textile installation, where she experiments with natural fibres to create non-utilitarian counterparts to her trademark dresses, and refined painterly portraits of female figures that draw on textures and patterns. Dulguun’s portraits are enigmatic compositions that locate stylised figures on simple grounds, occasionally including collaged fabrics and other mixed media. While their delicate line work, large flat planes of colour and restrained tone are reminiscent of the fine-brush techniques of contemporary practitioners of Mongol Zurag painting, such as Nomin Bold and Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, Dulguun’s technical and aesthetic cues stem more from her training in design and drafting. Particular attention is paid to details of her subjects’ clothing, with patterning, stitching and even pockets and buttonholes rendered carefully and affectingly. Facial features are artfully distorted in a manner reminiscent of expressionist or cubist painting; though fluid, they are never monstrous. Rather, the portraits convey emotions like pensiveness or curiosity. From the base of a long, calligraphic line descending from an off-kilter eyebrow, the lips of Ursula 2021 offer a shy smile that renders the table-setting perched atop her head not so much incongruous as convivial. Also striking is the incorporation of patterns and fabrics into the composition of the face, as if to suggest a continuity between the clothing we wear and the countenance weaffect in public. Complementing this is the rack of garments in Nest 2024, which hang in full flow as if anticipating the bodies that will animate them. In the Asia Pacific Triennial, a suite of these paintings is positioned alongside two examples of Dulguun’s work in textile installation. Trace 2023 is comprised of two hanging panels of burlap embroidered with rope that forms arcs in alternating rows before cascading downwards. Created in the southern Indian state of Kerala using local textile techniques, the cotton surface of Note 2 2024 is similarly enhanced by dangling thread, giving height and physical depth to its impressions of eco- printed leaves. Both textile pieces have an earthy, refined quality and a rhythmic, symmetrical use of patterning that is sympathetic with the artist’s painterly production. Beyond the aesthetic, these consistencies are significant at a methodological level. Dulguun stresses her practice’s grounding in a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things, where seemingly independent elements are related by unseen frequencies that pulse across the web of existence: cause and effect; the complex interplay of natural forces; the rhythms and patterns of life. For Dulguun, things and actions are incapable of expressing themselves in isolation. The role of the artist is to intuit the frequencies that underlie them and articulate their continuity through art. REUBENKEEHAN DULGUUNBAATARSUKH ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 82 — 83