Path to wealth 2013

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu is a leading practitioner of contemporary Mongol zurag (Mongolian painting), drawing on traditional patterning to reflect the experiences of Mongolian women. She frequently includes recognisable motifs from traditional Buddhist painting and East and Central Asian aesthetics, as well as psychologically charged imagery of contemporary life. Her paintings combine poetic and everyday imagery, creating subtle contrasts between the manufactured and the natural or organic, and between intense detail and flat planes of colour. Path to wealth resembles the common Buddhist symbol of a lotus flower, from which dangles a collection of out-of-scale household objects. The lotus stem is composed of a writhing mass of human bodies – a recurrent motif in Uuriintuya’s paintings.