Every nation that comes late to the museum invents a style to arrive in. For Mongolia that style is Mongol zurag — literally, “Mongolian picture” — and its birth can be dated with unusual precision: 1911, the year Mongolia declared independence from the Qing empire, and the year Balduugiin Sharav, called Marzan — “the joker” — painted One Day in Mongolia.
That famous canvas, now in Ulaanbaatar’s Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts, holds an entire civilisation in a single flat field: weddings and funerals, felt making and horse breaking, gossip, mischief and mourning, hundreds of small figures drawn with a miniaturist’s line and no single point of perspective. Its grammar came from Buddhist thangka painting — mineral colour, ultra-fine brushwork, sacred flatness — but its subject was suddenly, defiantly secular: not deities, but a people, seeing itself.
Interrupted, preserved, reborn
The socialist decades bent the style to new purposes. Zurag’s flatness and clarity survived in poster and pageant, but its themes were rationed; the academies taught Soviet realism, and the old religious workshops that had trained the finest line-painters were closed outright. What survived did so the way most Mongolian things survived the twentieth century — quietly, in private, hand to hand.
Then came 1990. With democracy, zurag was reborn as deliberately as it had first been invented: taught again at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture from the late 1990s, and taken up by a generation who found in its flat, teeming space exactly the right instrument for a country urbanising at speed — herders’ grandchildren in traffic jams, the steppe visible from the apartment window.
The inheritance in this collection
The collection holds over a hundred works in the Mongolian style, and they show how alive the inheritance is. Khosbayar Narankhuu (b. 1977) paints queens, herders and horses into gold grounds that remember both thangka and Klimt — ornament as devotion. Amarsanaa Galmandakh (b. 1974) works like a costume-historian with a painter’s eye, resurrecting aristocrats and soldiers of the 8th to 18th centuries with archaeological patience, one braid and buckle at a time. Around them, dozens of others borrow the style’s flat space and jewelled colour for entirely modern ends.
Sharav would recognise the line. He might not recognise the subjects — and that is precisely the sign of a tradition in good health: it is being used, not preserved.
