Coal Smoke and Crystal Pillars — Painting Ulaanbaatar

Let me talk about a few of the locations behind these paintings.

The city series has been easier to trace back through references, simply because the imagery is more concrete. During the pandemic, the streets were unusually empty, which gave me space and better vantage points to observe the city. I ended up making many urban sketches during that period. Among those works, however, several were not based in Taiwan, but in Ulaanbaatar.

Strangely enough, my trip to Mongolia happened back in 2014. At the time, I was completely absorbed in my research on pandas (there’s some amusing evidence of this on my Instagram), and the idea of painting cities never once crossed my mind. Yet years later, while sorting through old photographs during the pandemic, I found myself remembering the face of Ulaanbaatar.

My friend and I first spent six days living in a ger out on the grasslands. On the way back, we stayed for a few days in a hostel in Ulaanbaatar. To us, the city felt more like a supply station than a destination: a place where we could finally take hot showers and eat something other than lamb milk, lamb meat, and dried cheese.

If I had to describe my impression of Ulaanbaatar, it comes mostly from those few days of wandering around the city. As the capital of Mongolia, what struck me most was how flat it felt. It did not possess the rigid grandeur often associated with communist architecture, though it shared the same sense of openness and rough simplicity. It lacked the refined material culture and ornamental detail I had seen in places like Xinjiang or Tibet, yet the interiors of the gers and the clothing still carried a distinctive visual character of their own.

AI managed to articulate something I could not quite put into words back then: it was a city of collage-like contrasts, tinted in the colors of coal smoke. The cold greys of the Soviet era, the vivid tones of nomadic culture, Buddhist architecture rising from the grassland tradition, and suddenly, here and there, gleaming towers of glass and steel.

Those clusters of skyscrapers felt almost like crystal pillars erupting from the steppe, even though I never literally painted them as crystals. But I think I managed to capture that low-saturation sense of exposure and bareness the city carried within it. In a way, revisiting the memory through painting became far more interesting than simply looking back at photographs.