Pandemic Diptych

A line of figures waits patiently in a field of flowers and sheep, moving toward a large curtain. Blue-gloved hands emerge from it to check temperatures and deliver a vaccination. Any viewer who experienced the COVID-19 global pandemic can probably identify with the figures’ face masks, weary expressions, and sense of isolation and resigned waiting. The complex emotions surrounding the vaccines are subtly conveyed by the figures: the backward glance of the woman leading her child to the curtain, the disembodied hands delivering the vaccine, and the ambiguous status of the character on the far left, entwined in a floral fog.

A few details highlight the artist’s combination of traditional and personal symbolism. The figure at the far right, rising from a cloud, is a soldier in antique Mongol armor, a symbol of protection. He holds a shield that reads “6 FEET” with a graphic of two separated people. The figure third from the right is covered with small people that represent worries and mental burdens, but the rabbit at the top is a Buddhist symbol of resolution. The crows that rest on top of the curtain at the left are Buddhist symbols of transcendence. Do you identify with any of the waiting figures?

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu is a contemporary painter from Mongolia. She was trained at the Institute of Fine Arts at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture in Mongol Zurag (“Mongolian Painting”). A “national style” of modern painting developed in the 20th century, Mongol Zurag is comparable to other national styles like Nihonga in Japan or Guohua in China, which combine elements of traditional and modern painting.

Dagvasambuu’s paintings are often visionary works of disturbing beauty. The artist borrows conventional stylistic elements from Mongolian religious art, such as repeated, geometric decorative patterns, meticulous fine-lined details, flat pictorial space, and planes of color. She also adapts Buddhist and Mongolian symbolic motifs, but updates and combines them with elements and details from contemporary life. These seeming contradictions express a very personal symbolic vocabulary for the artist while also reflecting a shared global experience. Her seamless combination of traditional style and contemporary subject accentuates the surrealistic dreamscapes that her figures inhabit.