Titled Open Your Eyes, Polish curator Iwa Kruczkowska-Król took experiences of traveling as a starting point and encouraged artists to re-activate their alertness and sensitivity to their environments—natural, built, social, or otherwise. Thus, the travels of ZUUN Art 23 were also one of its artistic points of departure. Specifically, Kruczkowska-Król called for an attention to ‘small objects’ through all of our senses—visual, sonic, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile—and an openness to experimenting and telling larger stories with specific ‘small objects’. Like contemporary art projects elsewhere in the global community, ZUUN Art 23 was thoroughly multi-media and challenged the traditional separation of media and disciplines in the fine arts. S. Batsaikhan, Executive Director of Blue Sun, explained, while preparing for the residency programme, that the point of ZUUN Art was to push artists beyond their comfort zones, encourage them to do new things and take their practices to new territories, and, thereby, bring contemporary art in Mongolia to a new altitude. For example, Batsaikhan would say: those who were trained as painters should experiment with performance art, those who were experienced in performing should experiment with video works, and those who were used to photography or filmmaking should experiment with painting or sculpting. Therefore, the core ethos of ZUUN Art was a call for innovation, not only upon artistic forms and styles articulated in the moment but also on the entire identities or perspectives of artists as agents of change for artistic futures. How artworks turned out at the end of this relatively short residency was less important than the internal epiphanies and transformations artists were to experience.
This year’s programme constituted the second edition of ZUUN Art, first initiated last year in Zuunkharaa, Selenge province, as part of Blue Sun’s 20th-anniversary celebration. ZUUN Art is the latest rendition of the Art Camp, a project previously organised regularly by Blue Sun since 2004, where Mongolian artists typically based in the city (Ulaanbaatar) and international artists visiting the country would travel and conduct artistic experiments together in the countryside. While built on the same foundation of urban-to-rural travels—perhaps a contemporary way of living, remembering, and preserving nomadic cultural traditions that are becoming increasingly distant from urban settlers of Ulaanbaatar—ZUUN Art signified a new chapter in the history of Blue Sun, where the team sought to further professionalize its operations, refine existing practices, and set in motion new directions for contemporary art in Mongolia. Unlike the Art Camp where participation was open to all who presented themselves, participation in ZUUN Art was selective, and efforts were coordinated to realize curatorial themes of the project.
Contemporary art residencies are typically sites of exchange, and ZUUN Art 23 is no exception. Participating artists collectively spent two days at the factory site of Makh Impex, which generously supported the ZUUN Art project, in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, from 8-9 August, then took the train together up north and stayed for five days at a campsite near Shaamar sum (‘district’) in Selenge aimag from 10-15 August. Living communally and constantly socialising together was as much a part of the residency programme as the painting, sculpting, recording, cinematographing, or performing that happened—to live together in the countryside (‘hödöö’), dealing with the mosquitoes, the flies, and stinging nettles, was very much constitutive of artists’ creative processes. The Selenge camp also hosted around 15 visitors for three days from 12-14 August. Adapting to, interpreting, and responding to the spatial, temporal, and ecological conditions of the project sites, especially the Mongolian countryside and the movement between the urban and the rural, was also an integral part of the residency programme, the cultural-artistic exchanges it sought to promote, and the creative processes of participating artists.
At the closing presentation of the ZUUN Art 23 in Ulaanbaatar, 17 provisional works created by artists during the week-long residency programme were exhibited. Part of the fun of participating in an art residency was the unpredictability of situations and outcomes. Even though I was at the project sites with the artist throughout the residency and actively observing the happenings there, many of the provisional works exhibited at the concluding presentation still came as a surprise to me. While a few artists, such as O. Tsenguun and R. Chinzorig, responded to the residency’s theme, Open Your Eyes, by taking up the ‘eye’ itself—a prevalent symbol in traditions of Buddhist art and Mongol Zurag (literally ‘Mongolian painting’, a heterogeneous school/style of Mongolian painting that emerged through 20th century artistic interpretations of national traditions, both Buddhist and secular, socialist and contra-socialist)—as a figure of inspiration and examination, others, such as Kaffe Matthews, G. Zolboo, and Alexey Myslitskiy, worked creatively with multiple media to capture and reimagine the transient sights and sounds of the environment, pushing us to attend to significance of the wind, the plants, and the animals with which we coexisted and cohabited in Selenge. This catalogue, then, will present to you visually the creative processes and works created during ZUUN Art 23, alongside the art film Khun Nar 2, which will show the sounds and moving images that cannot be captured in still through a printed book. May these reservoirs of our memories be able to transmit even just a fraction of the joy, inspiration, and deeply spirited (үнэн сэтгэлийн, их сүнстай) connections we shared on our collective voyages during ZUUN Art 23.
Jenny Tang
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