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Worms, Horns, and Surfaces: Interview with Multidisciplinary Artist Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar


Secondary Growth (exhibition view), 2025. Image courtesy of artist.
Secondary Growth (exhibition view), 2025. Image courtesy of artist.

Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar (b. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) completed his Bachelor in Arts (BA) at City University of New York, Hunter College in 2015 and his Master in Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. His works have been shown at BLUM, Los Angeles (2020); Frieze, New York (2020); Half Gallery, New York (2021); Art Basel Miami Beach (2021) and Art Basel Hong Kong (2024); Red Ger Creative Space, Arts Council of Mongolia (2022), and Lkham Gallery (2024). In 2019 he represented Mongolia at the 58th Venice Biennale, Italy.


In August 2024, Anthroposphere editor Regina Kong interviewed Jantsankhorol (Jantsa) in his studio in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, a few months before Jantsa's solo exhibition at Lkham Gallery. The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. All images are courtesy of the artist.


 

REGINA: I love being in your studio. I was last here a month ago, right after Naadam [a traditional Mongolian festival held in the summer]. This time the energy your works are giving off feels different—I can feel them clearly out of the corner of my eye. What are the questions you’re asking in your practice right now and how does the materiality of your practice address those questions?


JANTSA: I guess the question would be something like, ‘How is it being continued?’ The reason I’m thinking in that way is that I’m not seeing something as an end. A lot of the sculptures I’m making are assemblages that use dust or other forms to create continuity. 


I’ve been using sawdust, glue compounds, and stone glue that is typically used for sticking kitchen stones and islands. But I’m not using the stone glue to glue things together; I use it as a coating layer on my sculptures, or even sometimes like clay, to make the surface of the objects covered more sturdy and rigid, like a protective layer. It’s kind of like putting things together stronger, becoming whole. 


I’ve also been using horns: Goat, sheep, sometimes ox. Sometimes people will have them laying around but it’s hard to find them in large numbers so we go to meat markets. Even if we wash the horns and place them under the sun, they still get worms. The worms kind of finish the cleaning job and they dry in the sun together with what’s inside. The Mongolian summer is short so everything needs to be dissolved or eaten by things quickly. 


Distance of Deepness, 2015.
Distance of Deepness, 2015.

REGINA: It seems a lot of your work centres around ways of relating to, understanding, and making sense of both inner and external worlds. What does environment mean to you?


JANTSA: I used to spend summers in the [Mongolian] countryside. You get exposed to many different ways of living there. Nomadic people back in the day were even more no-waste—they used everything from the animal, from nature. The reason for moving is seasonal, but also for saving pasture land; if you stay in one place for longer, there would be no grass, and there would be no chance to regenerate and heal the soils. 


And also, Reincarnation and Karma. For example, if there is a wounded horse, in Western movies they shoot them in the head because they love them. But in Mongolia, they don't do that. They let them suffer by themselves. We don't get involved because it's believed that the animal needs to go through its own suffering in this lifespan so that into the next one, it will have less bad Karmic experience. 

Amalgamation series 3, 60 x 40 cm, mixed media on photo paper, 2024.
Amalgamation series 3, 60 x 40 cm, mixed media on photo paper, 2024.

REGINA: Was there a period in your life where you remember the urge to become an artist felt sharper or more urgent? Since you grew up in a family of artists, I'm curious how you think that may have shaped you. 


JANTSA: My dad says my uncle used to paint horses; he could draw without disconnecting the line. Later I saw the drawings and they were really good. Other than that, I guess I had a stubborn attitude towards making things. As a kid you have a lot of tasks around animals in the countryside or just in the household area. You pick up cow dung or help fix fences and then learn this pattern of how you approach doing tasks. I think that really helped me today.


REGINA: Could you speak more about that experience of being out in the countryside in Mongolia?


 JANTSA: We learned to ride horses at a young age, and then help with the sheep and the animals. And then, like I said, collect cow dung—one of the fun and hands-on things that’s affected my practice. We have to pile the dung in this organic shape, like a small mountain. You could use a shovel, but we cover it with our hands. It creates this outer shell that dries in the wind, and then it’s burned in the winter.


REGINA: And how big are these piles?


JANTSA: Human size. When I was first told to do this task, I was really disgusted. I was in first grade and you could see all these insects and worms, but then also straws of grass processed through the cow’s stomach. Once you get to start, though, it's really fun. It’s affected me because I now treat the surfaces of things as if creating this outer shell, an outer layer of protection.


REGINA: I’m really interested in what you say about the idea of surfaces, what’s revealed or hidden. What is it about the idea of surface that interests you?


JANTSA: It's about temporarily making a surface then breaking and using it. Watching sheep and goats get injured, even a small scratch can turn into a big wound because the flies would come in and spread the eggs, and then it becomes this colony of wounds. But then in the hot sun and on the ground, the worms wiggle and then slow down, and die. They become dry and brittle and part of the soil. But during that small period of time in the wound, they were striving—it was their lifetime. These small examples are still left in my memory. 


That’s why for my first exhibition, Hybrid Resistance [at Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia], there was an idea of temporality, impermanence, emptiness, and temporary life cycles. I used expanding polyethylene foam and started thinking of comfort zones—this idea of an environment that we strive to feel comfortable in. The foam is used for sealing empty spaces and holes in windows so the material itself was this contrast between fake chemicals and an organic outer layer. But then also, like those worms, it was all a temporary kind of thing.


REGINA: I think there’s something really important about temporarily suspending reality. Whether with writing or making an artwork, when I’m really deep in it I feel like I’ve made my own world for myself. It’s like you have to almost trick yourself. Your work reminds me that there are many more realities than what I am initially perceiving and believing. 


JANTSA: I also think that being an artist is believing in and having this urge to share what you find odd. 


REGINA: What are you making for your upcoming exhibition, Secondary Growth?


JANTSA: In terms of ideas, it’s a continuation of what I’ve been doing. Primary growth is a scientific term for when plants grow vertically, so secondary growth is when they grow horizontally.


I’m going to have an old car brought to the tenth floor of a building and it will have the same kind of treatment with horns becoming elements of protection and sense of time. This horn substance is a kind of Mongolian-ness or immunity because it is becoming stronger and then growing gradually. That piece works with whatever is happening on the streets or among us as hybrid immunity, a continuation.


Reserved Anxiety, cast bronze, 45 x 36 x 45 cm, 2024.
Reserved Anxiety, cast bronze, 45 x 36 x 45 cm, 2024.

REGINA: Could you expand on what you mean by immunity?


JANTSA: In my work I see immunity as resistance. I believe that we have this natural protective mindset. We resist and protect what is our own, the self and status of oneself. Whatever new ideas we face we try to resist from our experiences but there’s also acceptance if there’s resistance. Over time these things become more one with another. From my perspective it’s not only us facing new ideologies it’s also our stories, myths, legends. Some aspects are forgotten. Some aspects are continued with new small bits taken into the narration of the story. Even in terms of physical bodies in organic worlds, things mutate and adapt, like how we resist viruses but then still store them in the spine as a hard drive.


REGINA: So immunity doesn’t mean that you’re completely free from something—you can be immune but still have that thing you’re resisting inside you, too. It’s like an understanding of oneness—there aren’t strong boundaries between the self and the world around it. 


JANTSA: I think in Buddhist medicine there’s even this understanding that our human aura is invisible bacteria just floating around. Whatever the consequences, whatever the actions are, the final result is still continuation—it’s becoming better than the previous state even if something bad happens.  


REGINA: In some ways it’s like everything is the same story just in a different form.


JANTSA: It could be. I feel like if one thing is created or derived from something, it has its own linear path and along the way it gains or loses particles or ideas but still it’s going. Or maybe it can be forgotten…


REGINA: This is helping me understand what you meant by finding ways to think through continuity in your artwork but also in forms that may not feel immediately continuous. It’s like showing how continuity is actually composed of moments of discontinuity.


JANTSA: The problem for me is that I can’t fully put that into the work. So I guess that makes it also a continuous act of trying, from my perspective.


REGINA: Maybe that’s the eternal question energising your practice. Since you can never get the answer, you can keep making the work.


JANTSA: It’s good because if I get to the final destination it will be done for me.


REGINA: Like a spiritual exercise. 


JANTSA: Yeah, in a way it helps me get through life. 


REGINA: Jantsa, thank you for being so generous with your time and experiences, and for inviting me to your studio again. 


JANTSA: Thank you for thinking of me as worthy of sharing.


Temporary Bodies,  2015.
Temporary Bodies, 2015.

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