Starting Tuesday, April 14, 2026, a site-specific work by Mongolian artist Bekhbaatar Enkhtur (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 1994) will be on view in the South and Southeast Asia and Himalayan Region galleries of the MAO, conceived in dialogue with works from the museum’s permanent collection.
Inspired by depictions of guardian lions—symbolic protective figures traditionally placed at the entrances of temples and codified during the Ming and Qing dynasties, later disseminated across Inner Asia, including Mongolia under Qing rule—Bekhbaatar Enkhtur’s sculpture offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the idea of religious offering.
In Untitled (2026), made of hand-moulded beeswax, the organic element—unstable and fragile—carries strong symbolic value. By calling into question the nature of sculpture as a “representation of matter,” the work evokes concepts such as impermanence, imperfection, transience, and the perpetual mutability of life in all its forms and developments, notions deeply rooted in Buddhist philosophy and religion.
Conceived specifically for the MAO, the sculptural intervention takes traditional iconographic language as its point of departure, reworking it to offer a new interpretation.
Whereas in tradition the male lion embodies sovereignty and control over the material realm, and the lioness with her cub represents continuity and the transmission of lineage—within a symbolic system that also intertwines with the figure of the Tibetan Snow Lion, an emblem of fearless strength and of the so-called “lion’s roar,” a metaphor for the authoritative proclamation of Buddhist teaching—in Bekhbaatar Enkhtur’s work the cub is isolated and deprived of the adult lion. In this way, the structure of authority and protection is suspended, allowing the fragile and vulnerable sign of continuity to emerge.
The work will become part of the MAO’s collections.
