Can Art heal a City?ULAANBAATAR BIENNALE 2025

Mongolians have always lived artistically.

From the fluid movement of horses across the steppe to the intricate folds of a deel, from the harmonics of throat singing to the symbolic threads of embroidery, art is not separate from life. It is embedded in gestures, rhythms, and values. It is not taught, but inherited. Lived. Embodied.

Mongolians take great pride in their cultural heritage—and rightly so. It is vibrant, fast, and moving. But beyond pride lie something else: a natural creativity that springs from a deep connection to nature, history, and intuition. A creativity that doesn’t rely on trends or formulas, but listens to the wind, the land, and the stars. A creativity that dares to ask: Why? And why not?

This is the spirit from which the Ulaanbaatar Biennale 2025 emerges.

Ulaanbaatar is a city of contradictions. A post-communist capital layered with Buddhist temples, Soviet-era buildings, yurts tucked into alleys, and new Asian style buildings with no taste. It is a city that feels like everywhere and nowhere at once—a collage of histories and hurried futures, where tradition collides with disruption.

It is messy. It is smoky. In winter, almost unbearable. Disorganized streets, no space to walk, play, and enjoy the fresh air—and yet, look closer. Peer behind a small door, down a narrow path, into a makeshift room. There, you’ll find unexpected beauty, raw creativity, and a kind of subversive brilliance.

A labyrinth of treasures.

This is the stage for Mongolia’s first-ever Biennale, initiated by the Capital City Governor’s Office, in collaboration with the Arts and Culture Department of the City Implementing Agency and the Arts Council of Mongolia (ACM). Taking place from June 6 to 20, 2025, the Biennale is more than just an event. It is both a reflection and a provocation:

How does a city so full of contradictions becomes a site for contemporary art?

Why, despite its challenges, does Ulaanbaatar feel so profoundly artistic?

Following Ulaanbaatar’s entry into the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in 2023, this Biennale marks a historic moment. The city joins 355 others across 90 countries that place creativity at the heart of development. In 2025, Ulaanbaatar aims to spotlight the media and visual arts—one of UNESCO’s seven recognized creative fields, alongside crafts and folk art, design, film, gastronomy, literature, and music.

Curated by Tian Zhang, a Sydney-based curator renowned for her socially engaged and community-focused practice, the Biennale spread across the city, featuring main exhibitions, side exhibitions, outdoor installations, performances, screenings, artist talks, workshops, and cultural programs.

But this Biennale is not just another show. It is an act of urban imagination.

It aims to meet the spiritual, aesthetic, and historical needs of its citizens while promoting cultural tourism and fostering international dialogue. It asks us to re-see the city—not as a broken or chaotic place, but as a living archive of stories, visions, and resilient creativity.

It asks:

Can art be more than just a show or entertainment?

Can it become a living language—a way of seeing, sensing, and reshaping our collective consciousness?

We believe it can.

This Biennale is an original form of Mongolian contemporary art—not imported, not borrowed, but grounded in our own lived reality. It invites artists and citizens to return to intuition, to reflect, to feel, to question.

Not just to look, but to see.

Not just to showcase, but to transform.

The question is not whether the city is ready for the Biennale.

The real question is:

Are we ready to imagine a different city through art?

Can this Biennale help us rebuild it, with critical beauty, with courage, with care?

Let us find out.

Together.

On the horizon, under the moon.

Ulziibat Enkhtur