The cup of life 2023 is an imposing curtain of almost 2000 cast-metal skulls drawing on Buddhist symbolism and poetry, created collaboratively by Nomin Bold and Ochirbold Ayurzana.

For the artists, the skull is a vessel for the spirit and consciousness confined within the human form. In European and Buddhist aesthetic traditions as well as contemporary subcultures, the skull is a memento mori, or a reminder of mortality, and a talisman discouraging selfishness. The two-eyed skulls represent the human, hovering between the single eye of evil and the three eyes of divinity.

Their arrangement is based on a Morse code transliteration of four stanzas of ‘Hymn to the universe’, a nineteenth-century poem invoking karmic cyclical states attributed to Luvsanchültimjigmed, the fifth Bogd Jebtsundambaan, the highest Lama and spiritual head of Gelug Buddhism in Mongolia. In keeping with the notion of sam. sāra, a concept central to Buddhism and other religions of South-Asian origin, The cup of life follows ‘Hymn to the universe’ in proposing human life as a continuous cycle of death and rebirth. Whether this journey is meaningful in itself is, for the artists, a question whose resolution might enable people to reach greater enlightenment and find a higher form of life in the universe.