Schoeni Art Gallery is pleased to announce Mongolian artist Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajavs, also known as Mugi‘s, first solo show in Hong Kong and China.

As the international art scene and market continues to strive to find the new threshold of all frontiers (whether it be the visual, conceptual or financial), Mongolian artists have gamered more and more attention. Mugi is one of the most famous female contemporary artists in Ulaanbaatar (UB), Mongolia. Recently, a reporter for the National Geographic picked one of her pieces, which will be exhibited at Mugi‘s Earthbound Solo, as a comment on the Mongolian artists rising intemational popularity, which he attributes to taking on edgy subjects‘. The artwork, SOS, was a life-size soft sculpture of a mother and her baby both wearing gas masks, which had been exhibited at the National Gallery in the Mongolian capital. Beyond the visual edge and interpretation of pollution waming, an issue that all capitals share, especially in Asia, the sculpture illustrates Mugi‘s work subject matter: the feminine and its relationship to Mongolian tradition, cosmogony, mythology and symbolism.

Mugi‘s work is rich with what appear to be contradictions and are actually the very originality and strength of her visual expression, supporting the cohesion of her message through all three bodies of work: paintings, collages on sa paper, soft sculptures, which all are in conversation with one another both in terms of fonn and content. The artist for instance attributes the genesis of the sculptures to her paintings as she describes them as a three dimensional elaboration of her first craft. Depicting womanhood from the universal to the personal, coming from a standpoint of equality indigenous to Mongolian history and society, dwelling on shamanism or traditional Mongolian medicine and contemporary global unbalances with Mother Nature, Mugi uses her hands, bmshes or needles to reveal her own introspection as well as the cultural one her country is still undergoing, healing personal and collective losses in the process. In stillness in her paintings, reminiscent of icon paintings, to softness in fabric sculpture, inspired by such unique intemational vanguard artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith or Hans Arp as well as by Mongolian Buddhist sculpture master Zanabazar (1635-1723), but also by stage design, which she studied in Belams, and traditional Mongolian clothes making, her works have equally unexpected qualities in each medium; there is the texture and materiality in painting, the earth and stone natural tones (blue or green possibly evoking traditional omaments of Central Asia), or the flexibility and metallic human produced tones (maybe another appropriated reference to Zanabazars art) of her sculptures. Using Westem media to explore Mongolian roots, traditions and beliefs, notably shamanistic ones, Mugi articulates aspects of culture that travel beyond borders.

In recent years, Mugi has explored the female body, with an emphasis on hair (a symbol of physical power and rooting in Mongolian culture), motherhood and the relationship with animals, which are used as symbols whether illustrative, such as birds representing heart beats in traditional Mongolian medicine, or spiritual as in the Mongolian beliefs in their healing power. Her paintings uncover extemal appearances through nudity and convey sentimentality and stoicism (the later being an attribute of the nomadic Mongolian people), while her collages are looking beyond the surface and unveiling internal organs, which are at the source of life and life~giving and even life-affinning in society through descendants. The soft sculptures communicate the resulting questions and anguish from being at the mercy of this unseen biological mechanism within us. Healing is at the core of her work, both through the process of creating and also through seeking understanding, in that sense the collages are perfectiy binding the paintings and soft-sculpture in the artist's personal and cultural quest for identity. In that regard, depicting nudity in itself is a statement as it departs from the mles of the totalitarian puritanism of Social Realism. Uniquely original, her art falls in no yet defined Westem category. Of seeing other artists‘s works and being inspired by them, Mugi declared: "lt makes me reflect on myself because it is very difficult to be oneself.‘

This exhibition is held in collaboration with Teo + Namfah gallery.