Uranchimeg (Orna) Tsultem (Ph.D. 2009) is a scholar of Mongolian art and culture with an active research and curatorial practice in global contemporary art. Dr. Tsultem received her Ph.D. in East Asian and Himalayan art history from University of California, Berkeley in 2009, where she also taught and served as co-chair of the Mongolia Initiative Program at the Institute of East Asian Studies.
Dr. Tsultem has also taught at National University of Mongolia, Yonsei University in South Korea (as a visiting professor), and University of Iceland. She is a recipient of several prestigious fellowships, which include the Indy Arts Council Creative Renewal Fellowship (2024-2025), IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship (2022-2024), Research Fellowship from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at IU Indianapolis (IAHI) (2020, 2022), John Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress (2013) and American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2016).
Dr. Tsultem's research and publications include topics on ancient stone monuments in Mongolian steppes, a thirteenth-century Chinggis Khan's portrait at National Palace Museum in Taiwan, a nineteenth-century mobile monastery Urga (Ikh Khüree), art of 1960s in Mongolia and contemporary Asian artists' relationship to their art traditions. Dr. Tsultem has had a long curatorial career exhibiting Mongolian art internationally since 1997. She is an active scholar with six books published in Mongolia, in addition to her monograph, A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia, published in December 2020 from Hawaii University Press. She is Edgar and Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies and Associate Professor at Indiana University's Herron School of Art and Design.
Curatorial Statement:
MONGOL ZURAG: THE ART OF RESISTANCE
From Local to Global: The Painting Tradition Beyond National Discourse
Mongol Zurag (literally, Mongolian picture) is a painting style that was first developed by
Mongolian artists in the mid-twentieth century during the Cold War Era as a creative response to the
mainstream Socialist Realism which then was being reinforced in socialist states around the world.
Following the establishment of the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924 as the world’s second socialist
country, mass purges and the complete destruction of Buddhist art and culture ensued in the 1930s and
1940s. On the ruins of the Buddhist temples, a new capital city Ulaanbaatar (literally, Red Hero) was
built, with its architecture based on Soviet cities and buildings. The traditional Mongolian script was
replaced by an adapted Cyrillic script and a new culture took roots, shaped by young professionals
educated in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
The style of Mongol Zurag was invented as a new tradition –– as British historian Eric
Hobsbawm would have put it –– in this historical context due to the dire need for a national identity and
preservation of traditions. This exhibition introduces this case of artistic creativity during a period of
socio-political restraints through the Mongol Zurag works by Nyam-Osoryn Tsultem (1924-2001),
Mongolia’s pre-eminent artist and writer. Battling the political censorship and government’s intolerance
of faith and of the knowledge of Mongolia’s history, Tsultem became a leading figure in the formulation
of the Mongol Zurag painting tradition as an artist and the first Mongolian art historian. His paintings and
drawings in this exhibition are being exhibited and shown to the public for the first time.
This exhibition also demonstrates Mongol Zurag painting as a living tradition based on the
diverse works by three prominent contemporary artists: Baasanjav Choijiljav (b. 1977), Baatarzorgi
Batjargal (b. 1983), and Urjinkhand Onon (b. 1979). In the new millennium, these artists express their
resistance to neoliberalism through their creative work in the Mongol Zurag style. Continuing the legacy
of the twentieth-century masters, Baatarzorig criticizes the massive impact of popular culture from the
United States and from East Asia which has resulted in a new questioning of identity and recalls debates
among artists during the past century. Baasanjav’s visual representation of pervasive neoliberalism, which
shows how it has taken a strong hold in the form of “nature-banking” for business profits to use political
scientist Neil Smith’s term. Urjinkhand’s concern of modern-day incarceration, whether due to the
pandemic or to the obsessive dependence on smart phones, reveals it as a global issue. The creativity of
these artists in mastering the Mongol Zurag style and its specific features – such as the flat, decorative
quality, the delicate yet meticulous line work of the brush, the immersive viewing experience that
demands both a close-up engagement and a panoramic, bird’s eye view – is uniquely saturated with their
explicit disenchantment with the neoliberalism that continues to reinforce a global infrastructure which
supports and enables the “capitalization of nature” around the world, and in Mongolia in particular.
This exhibition “Mongol Zurag: The Art of Resistance” is organized in collaboration with the
Mongol Zurag Society, which is active in the field of Mongolian contemporary art since 2002.
Uranchimeg Tsultemin,
Curator and Art Historian
Edgar and Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies and Associate Professor
Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University-Indianapolis
The PROJECT TEAM
B.Nyamkhuu, Chairman, Mongol Zurag Society
O.Angaragsuren, Assistant Curator, Mongol Zurag Society
M.Otgontuul, Assistant Curator, Mongol Zurag Society
Lisa Cooreman, Fehnel Fellow, Herron School of Art and Design
