The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Language is not the only vernacular form appropriated by artists to express tensions in the formation and transformation of national identity: see Min Thein Sung’s wistful comics and Thompson’s plaintive song, Hetain Patel’s struggle to assimilate his family’s migrant identity with a love of Marvel superheroes and kung fu cinema, and even the references to 1920s proletarian culture in STAB’s Critical Animation Workshop Manifesto. 10 In this vein, Nomin, Baatarzorig, Uuriintuya and Gerelkhuu exemplify contemporary Mongol zurag, a critical revival of a painterly idiom developed during the Mongolian independence movement of the early twentieth century, but subsumed into a dogmatic school of social realism that emerged in the 1930s. Characterised by its ultra-fine brushwork, flattened perspective and themes drawn from everyday life, Mongol zurag synthesised Tibetan tangka painting with Chinese guohua and Liao dynasty equestrian art to express the ideals of secular nationalism. Re-emerging as the country sought to reconstitute its national identity in the late 1990s, Mongol zurag has been taken up by a passionate new generation of practitioners, who find within it the means to address the contradictions of their lives at a time of unprecedented urbanisation and financial precariousness. Baatarzorig’s paintings are particularly concerned with the loss of traditional heritage through a succession of regimes, from the bloody purges and ascetic culture of Soviet-style communism, to the rising inequalities and empty consumerism of global capitalism, which he expresses through epic composition and satirical humour. A recurrent motif in Uuriintuya’s paintings is a writhing mass of naked human bodies thrust together — struggling, copulating or just trying to coexist — cast against empty, melancholic expanses of picture plane. In Gerelkhuu’s vertically stacked triptych Soldiers who don’t know themselves 2013, the body is registered by its absence, the horde arrayed across its panels equipped with everything but their earthly forms. These paintings by Uuriintuya and Gerelkhuu offer an interesting polarity: Uuriintuya’s clumped bodies, as the theorist Shinjo Ikuo offers of a similar motif in the work of Okinawan artist Yamashiro Chikako, ultimately propose a ‘place where ethics is practised’, however cramped; 11 while for Gerelkhuu’s soldiers, there is no such possibility. In the tension between the two we might read a proposition for Mongolia’s future, an acknowledgment that a free and open past remains out of reach — for now at least — and the identification of a choice: either embrace and negotiate the new forms of togetherness or submit to the onward march of invisibility. 5 As untenable as it may now be to regard the world of the visible as self-evident, the same world has given rise to a barrage of images, a vast discursive field whose dominant register is sight. For those who hold the monopoly on radiation and infection, the skin remains a readily policeable boundary. Thus, while the politics of identity have occasionally proven reductive, fragile, and easily consumed by the categories of politics writ large, the feminist and postcolonial critique of the gaze is more relevant than ever. 12 Forced into representation, the body is stripped of all agency and sense; it is objectified in a relationship where only the privileged viewer has the authority to enjoy desire, to name and consume. ‘In the eyes of the media’, asks the young Taiwanese painter Chen Ching-Yuan, ‘how should an imprisoned body respond?’ 13 As Shinjo Ikuo notes, one of Yamashiro Chikako’s strategies is to ‘[confront] the person doing the gazing and say, “Your gaze is like this, isn’t it?”’. 14 In an early video, Yamashiro condenses into a single frame several key signifiers of clichéd Japanese views of Okinawa — the indigenous heritage of which is historically distinct from that of mainland Japan — as she suggestively licks an ice-cream in front of the chain-link fence around the island’s US air 56—57 BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE