Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu (Mongolia)

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu (b.1979) is a contemporary master of the Mongol Zurag painting, and is widely respected for her innovations in this style. She notably integrates traditional Mongolian and Buddhists motifs with contemporary themes, as she chronicles the lives of women and everyday, mundane life across the seasons in her post-nomadic homeland.

Her works are included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Queensland Art Museum (Australia), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, and the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. Most recently, her work is on view in an exhibition at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art in collaboartion with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art.

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu’s painting style is distinct and immediately recognizable as she blends elements of Mongol Zurag, Tibetan Buddhist imagery, Asian miniature tradition with contemporary figuration and surrealism. The artist’s style is distinguished by imaginative forms and complex compositions rendered with delicate and meticulous details. Her visual vocabulary draws from Buddhist and Mongolian folk traditions which she blends with references to technology, social media, online games, avatars, blockchain and metaverse etc.. Her narratives are conceptually rich, intimate and relatable, but also they are never linear, but mysterious, associative and open-ended. Uuriintuya creates a personal cosmology where universal, personal, real and imaginative, dreamlike and concrete, historical and contemporary exist together.

An evocative and persistent motif which inevitably draws  attention are the colorful clouds, which often serve as a setting for her numerous whimsical vignettes. For many the clouds would be a reference to the sky, but in traditional Buddhist paintings they could also represent another plane of existence, an elevated state, or signify distance from the present and more. Unsurprisingly, all these meanings seem to fit Uuriintuya’s paintings. Her clouds accommodate the existences of her thought forms, the constructs from her mind informed and directly inspired by her present-day experiences and objects. Abstracted and presented on this new plane of her imagination’s reality, her clouds take intentional shape on her canvases. Or, as if taken for a closer observation, mixed up in a dream-like form, they make up a larger part of a body filled with various versions of emotional states (of being), depicted as human figures hiding in the clouds that swirl within the confines of the larger human form.