by Tilovalo

The Mongolian State Academic Theater of Opera & Ballet was established in 1931 in the State Central Theater. It was a beginning that would produce one of the biggest professional organizations in Mongolia.
From the 1950s on, hundreds of Mongolians went to the U.S.S.R. to train as musicians, composers, singers, and dancers and musicians from the Soviet Union moved to Mongolia to help establish conservatories and theaters.
“In the 1950s, we hardly had a single person who knew about Mozart. Maybe there were two or three. Communism spread classical music. Our success today is directly connected to the Soviet Union,” said Natsag Jantsannorov, a Mongolian State Honored composer.
That success is perhaps best measured by the vitality of the State Academic Theater, which performs 14 operas and 14 ballets a year, with multiple performances given to full houses every weekend from October to July.

Born in 1985, Badral Buyantogtokh is a young painter and belongs to the new generation of contemporary Mongolian artists.
His sparse and modern style is quite dark and the subjects painted are often portraits.
B. Badral graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in 2007 with a painting major. His work has been shown in various group exhibitions in Ulaanbaatar, including UMA’s annual “Spring” exhibition. “The Extra Object” is Badral’s first solo exhibition.

by Tilovalo

Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav is one of the most famous female Mongolian painters. Her characters are women, especially herself. When I see her paintings, I feel like I’m travelling deep inside of a woman’s heart.
J.Munkhtsetseg, like many of her characters, has long hair. Ancient Mongolians believe that hair absorbed the knowledge and feelings of its owner. So they could express themselves through their hair.
J.Munkhtsetseg was born in 1967 in Mongolia. She graduated from the College of Fine Art in 1986 and graduated from Academy of Theatre Art in Belarus in 1998.
“Asian Art News” one of Asia’s top art magazines, published an article about her and covered one of her works in 2009. British art critic Ian Findlay wrote about her and this portion of his article shows us that how great of an artist she truly is:
“Munkhtsetseg found her subject in women -- steely, bare-breasted women -- who represent a rejection of totalitarianism’s puritanical propaganda in which women, even though at the forefront of society, never appear to be equal to men. These women, carefully constructed in the artist’s mind, are then deconstructed on canvas to represent women’s spiritual freedom and their relationship to the world around them in all its complexity. Women in Mongolia, Munkhtsetseg notes, have always been equal and this is why she doesn’t try to take a feminist point of view.