Drawing as much from caricature and political allegory as from traditional painterly motifs, Baatarzorig Batjargal brings satirical humour to the serious content of his work. His Mongol zurag (painting) displays strong elements of social criticism, revealing the influence of Chinese political pop in its recognisable historical figures and juxtapositions of traditional and consumerist imagery. With an immense cast of characters, Nomads 2014 reads as a portrait of Mongolia’s march through the ages and into the present day.

A style of Mongolian painting that developed in the early twentieth century, Mongol zurag was characterised by refined brushwork, flattened perspective and themes drawn from everyday life, synthesising elements of Tibetan Buddhist tangka painting, Chinese guohua and the Khitan equestrian art of the Liao dynasty (907–1125). Painted a century later, Nomads shows how the style’s visual language has been adopted by a new generation of artists, who find within it the means of addressing the contradictions of their lives at a time of unprecedented urbanisation, financial precariousness and competing cultural influences.