In 2015, Mongolia opened its first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition was called Other Home. Its two artists, Unen Enkh and Enkhbold Togmidshiirev, built their work from the organic materials of nomadic life — felt, horse dung, wood, hide — and its curator, the art historian Uranchimeg Tsultem, framed a question the whole art world understood at once: what does home mean for a culture built on movement, arriving in a city built on water?
For a country whose modern painting had spent most of the twentieth century behind the horizon of the international art world, it was a threshold moment. There was no state apparatus behind it — the pavilion was willed into existence by the Mongolian Contemporary Art Support Association and its founder, Gantuya Badamgarav. A small nation of herders and cities stepped onto the oldest stage in contemporary art, and it did so the Mongolian way: by hand, and against the weather.
The painter who was already here
Mongolia has returned to Venice in nearly every edition since. But for this collection, one pavilion matters most. In 2022, the 59th Biennale’s Mongolian presentation, A Journey Through Vulnerability, was given to a single artist: Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav — Mugi, as Ulaanbaatar knows her — whose visceral paintings and sewn sculptures of birth, healing and rebirth had by then made her one of the country’s defining contemporary voices.
The collection holds twenty-seven of her works. The earliest were acquired in the mid-2000s — Peace Idol, above, is dated 2005 — when her hybrid figures, part woman, part bird, part talisman, were known mainly to those who climbed the stairs of Ulaanbaatar’s small galleries. Seventeen years separate that canvas from the Giardini. Recognition, in art, tends to follow rather than lead the patient work of looking.
A painting is a passport
What travels in a Mongolian canvas is not folklore. It is the record of a society in motion: the realist discipline of the socialist academies, the rupture of 1990, and the open, searching practices that followed — shamanic memory next to oil paint, felt next to video. Placed in a room in Venice, those histories read as clearly as any national narrative, and more honestly than most.
The journey from the steppe to the lagoon is long, but it was never a single leap. It was built one canvas, one relationship, one exhibition at a time — and some of its earliest steps are hanging in this collection.
