We talked with Narantsetseg Khuyagaa, who received the Rising Voice Grant, awarded to a promising artist whose work shows originality and strong potential.
Narantsetseg Khuyagaa is a visual artist from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, whose work explores identity, femininity, and the evolving representation of Mongolian women. Growing up in a women-led household, her photography challenges the boundaries between beauty and grotesque, real and artificial, sharing untold stories of her culture with a global audience.
In This Way Up, Khuyagaa portrays Mongolian contortionists, symbols of both strength and elegance. Contortionism has been a fundamental cultural expression in Mongolia since the 12th century, and in this work Khuyagaa intertwines a celebration of this heritage with her interest in the female body, beauty, and the uncanny. This Way Up thus becomes both a recognition of her roots and a departure from the past, as she imagines and creates new forms of beauty. With delicacy, Khuyagaa explores the tension between seemingly contrasting themes and questions cultural tropes of femininity, beauty, and tradition, drawing deeply from her personal experience.
How did you first approach photography?
Family albums, Tumblr, and an iPhone 5!
I often felt out of place, and seeing how fleeting life can be, especially at the slaughterhouse, scared me. I had an urgent need to etch my existence onto something. I loved sequencing and curating photographs, and at some point I wanted to make my own images. I started photographing every part of my mundane life, documenting them before they, too, disappeared in time. Photography made those moments live on; it made them tangible. Over time, that habit became a practice, and the practice became a love for image-making. I kept exploring, experimenting, and learning every part of the craft.
What led you to explore “the boundaries between beauty and the grotesque”?
That boundary was my childhood—the one I tried desperately to run away from.
The city was polished and perfumed, while our life outside it was raw and smelled of iron. I hated the blood-stained white tiles and the gore as a child, yet I couldn’t escape it. The mark it left on me started to surface in my work: bugs eating away at a beautiful bouquet, and beautifully dressed girls displaced on a rundown farm. Beauty felt incomplete without the mark of what it survived. I am drawn to that coexistence of contrasting elements, and photography allows me to visualise and show that cruel and honest truth in the same frame.
How did you become interested in contortionism, and where did you find your subjects?
Contortion is part of Mongolia’s cultural heritage, and fascinated by how discipline becomes grace, I have always loved dance and movement.
When I moved back to Mongolia, I wanted to dedicate a project to my heritage, beyond the usual nomadic narrative. When I learned that UNESCO had denied recognition of contortion as our intangible cultural heritage, the project found its urgency. I began watching archival footage of Mongolian contortionists and visiting training spaces and small shows. Through calls my costume- designer friend Muune made to bands and coaches, I met young contortionists, and the production began. The photographs were guided collaboratively, with the performers’ comfort in mind. The series is a nod to our heritage, honouring both the craft and the women who carry it forward.
You’ve said that your practice explores sexuality and power in relation to womanhood. Could you tell us more about this?
I was brought up by women who were expected to be strong; vulnerability was taboo.
Seeing what that distance from one’s own body and mind did to my mother saddened and angered me. In my work, I try to bring that vulnerability back into view and explore whether it can exist in places built on hardness. As a woman, owning one’s sexuality can feel both vulnerable and powerful. Most of us have been objectified at some point, and we recognise it when it happens to others. I aim to make images where sensuality is cherished, not exploited. Desire, to me, belongs to the subject as much as it does to me; it isn’t something performed just for the camera.
Production matters. I work conversationally with small teams, and consent is ongoing and specific. Knowing and conversing with the women I photograph is crucial; good casting means I don’t project unnecessary fantasies onto my subjects, and they can be themselves. Photography carries power: who is photographed, how, and what is finally shown. I try to use that power with care. Who is in the room, how I direct, and how I light are seemingly small production choices that return power and agency to the person being photographed. The erotic, for me, is not just exposure; it lies in the subject’s gaze, posture, styling, and the way the light sits on their skin. The beauty of female sensuality, sexuality, and sentimentality is something I’ll always cherish and try to uphold. In the end, I’m trying to make pictures where a woman can be vulnerable, complicated, and in charge at the same time, seen as she is to herself, not as a role to be played.
What projects are you currently working on, or planning for the future?
For a while, my life has been about the sun, saturation, East/ Southeast Asian cinema, and the erotic.
Currently, I’m mid-production on a new personal project, an ode to the erotic and the pornographic, documenting Asian women and their sensuality. I aim to wrap up the first chapter within the next year and move toward publication. After that, my goal is to relocate to a bigger city (London/Shanghai) to expand my commercial and personal practice while continuing this body of work.
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