'Cup of life' is a curtain of 1,967 cast-metal grinning skulls
Nomin Bold, Mongolia b.1982 / Ochirbold Ayurzana, Mongolia b.1976 / Cup of life (details) 2023 / Metal and aluminium / 1967 skulls: 13 × 10.5 × 6.5cm (each, approx.); 400 × 1400cm (installed) / Courtesy: The artists / View full image
An imposing four metres high and 14 metres wide, Cup of life 2023 (illustrated) is a curtain of almost 2000 cast-metal grinning skulls that combines painter Nomin Bold’s use of Buddhist symbolism with sculptor Ochirbold Ayurzana’s practice as a metalworker currently on display in 'The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art'. The skulls’ countenance is both grim and gleeful, their raw metallic patina accentuates the fleshy pink of their protruding tongues, bared gums, flared nostrils and gaping eye sockets, which variously number one, two or three.
Watch | Installation time-lapse
For the artists, skulls are ‘life cups’: vessels for human souls and consciousness that are confined within the human form. They represent subcultural currency and a convergence of European and Buddhist aesthetic traditions, where the skull is a memento mori, or a reminder of mortality, and a talisman warning against attachment to selfhood. The two-eyed skulls represent the human, hovering between the single eye of evil and the three eyes of godliness.
Their curiously rhythmic arrangement is based on the system of dots, dashes and spaces of Morse code, transliterated from four stanzas of ‘Hymn to the universe’, a nineteenth-century poem invoking karmic cyclical states.
Nomin Bold, Mongolia b.1982 / Ochirbold Ayurzana, Mongolia b.1976 / Cup of life (detail) 2023 / Metal and aluminium / 1967 skulls: 13 × 10.5 × 6.5cm (each, approx.); 400 × 1400cm (installed) / Courtesy: The artists / View full image
Nomin Bold, Mongolia b.1982 / Ochirbold Ayurzana, Mongolia b.1976 / Cup of life 2023 / Metal and aluminium / 1967 skulls: 13 × 10.5 × 6.5cm (each, approx.); 400 × 1400cm (installed) / Courtesy: The artists / View full image
Edited extract from the publication The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, 2024
Art that leaves an impression
Asia Pacific Triennial
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Free entry