Born in the city of Ulaan Ude, Buryad-Mongolia, Yuma Radne started painting from an early age and attended an art school since she was 5. Having started developing her own style, she began participating in groupshows in Siberia sinde she was 14, after appearance in local newspapers.
Soon after she dropped out of school and began painting full-time. Radne held her first solo show at the National Museum of Buryatia in 2018, being 17. Same year she moved to Saint Petersburg to study monumental painting in Shtiglitz Academy. In 2019 she had rejected the traditional way of education there and flew to Austria, where she studied painting in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with an exchange year at Slade School of Art.
In her paintings Yuma researches her difficult identity, coming from an asian diaspora in a post-soviet, siberian society. Through sensitive and poetic figurative language, she indirectly the celebrates ancient traditions and practices. The paintings are both vulnerable and empowered, deploying a personal symbolic lexicon to offer glimpses into an often- overlooked cultural experience and national identity.
Yuma currently has a solo show, titled “Playing with hands”, at Incubator, which runs until March 2nd.
Profile picture by Brynley Odu Davies
Installation pictures by Studio Adamson
Hi Yuma! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in London?
Yuma: Hi Ruben, it’s a pleasure! Usually I wake up later than I envision, have breakfast because I’m always hungry when I wake up, and cycle to the studio. Just cycling along the canal alone makes me so happy, I think of so many thoughts and then remind myself not to think anything at all, I try to cycle and have a clear, empty mind. I arrive to the studio and change into my painting clothes, chat with my studio mate if he is there – or start painting. Then I paint, if I make some detail work, I just focus on that, or listen to an audiobook/podcast. If it’s something more abstract or first layers – I like to listen to music. This continues for more or less 12 hours, with a few breaks. In Vienna I did night shifts, where I was painting till 4-5 in the morning, drinking that caffeinated drink club mate, so that there would be no distractions. Here in London, it’s a bit dangerous to do that, so I have changed my schedule and try to leave the studio at 10pm. Feels so healthy to do that! Don’t know if I succeed this schedule in spring though, maybe warmer days will make me stay longer.
I’m curious, growing up in Ulaan Ude, Buryatia-Mongolia, what kind of kid were you? What did you enjoy doing, and how did you spend your time?
Yuma: I don’t know – I think I was a normal happy kid. I spent a lot of time playing in a forest, trying to build “tree houses”. with friends. We ended up digging out a pit in the ground to pretend it could be our imaginary house, but in a few weeks a dog thought it was a great place to give birth.
Every summer I was “stuck” in the countryside by the lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. By the way, not to brag but this lake is so ancient and cool and it contains 20% of the drinking water in the WHOLE planet. How crazy is that? It is a holy lake for us, we call it Baigal Dalai (Baikal Sea) in mongolian.
Anyway, every summer my parents would leave us with sisters there, and it was fun. However, when I became a teenager, I was desperately trying not to spend the whole summer there and searched for routes to escape – get a bus to the city or something. Funny how now, as an adult, priorities change and I’d prefer spending my whole summer in the countryside by Baigal Dalai, again and again.
And then at some point you decide to leave Mongolia to study abroad. Can you tell me more about that?
Yuma: When you’re 14, it is time to receive a passport, and, therefore, you need to come up with a signature. I made mine in latin alphabet, because already at that age I thought I will live abroad and need a signature in latin.
So, my moving abroad was not a quick decision, it was rationally and carefully thought through. At 16 I googled: best art academies in Europe. In an alphabetical order, A… Austria. Academy of fine arts Vienna. Voila! I just felt something special. Everything was far away and almost impossible, and I’ve never been to Europe. But somehow I just felt something specifically for Austria. I didn’t want Germany, France, Italy or anything else. I just chose Austria and got a bit stubborn with it. It wasn’t easy – firstly I had to prove my maturity and live a year in Saint Petersburg, then I spent a year in a small town in Linz, Upper Austria. Finally, I moved to Vienna and spent the best student years I could wish for.
You dropped out of school early and later left the Shtiglitz Academy, rejecting the traditional path of art education. What was missing for you in these institutions?
Yuma: I was just a rebellious teenager really. I used to skip classes a lot, there was a period of my life where I would wake up in the morning, but instead of going to school, I’d wander around the city, often asking homeless people to pose for me. They had nothing to do – I had nothing to do. I guess, I wanted to learn about the world, but I didn’t care so much about school. I knew it was not a place I could receive knowledge from. In Saint Peterburg, I didn’t like how imprisoned I was. We were not encouraged to develop our own ideas. We were only trained for technical skills, which is a rare knowledge nowadays, but I never considered staying there longer than a year.
How did studying in Vienna and London contrast with your experience in Saint Petersburg? Were there specific moments that changed how you viewed your own work?
Yuma: Even Vienna and London have such a contrast, let alone Saint Peterburg. In Vienna, you get a free education, you can study for as long as you want, you get a 24/7 studio access, and a special “professional artist” card that grants you free access to most of the museums in the whole world. It’s pretty good. In London, people are paying so much money, and they have to graduate within a certain timeframe, and they can’t even stay in the studio after 10 pm. Both have pros and cons, but in my experience, Vienna wins, haha.
Of course, Saint Petersburg has made me more tough, I came to Austria with a thick skin I didn’t even need. Saint P. has made me so exhausted, it was a bit of “Whiplash” vibes. I took some of that behaviour with me to Vienna, I guess.
Ok Yuma, let’s talk about your work now… Your work explores the complexities of identity as part of an Asian diaspora in a post-Soviet Siberian society. Can you tell me more about how these tensions manifest in your paintings?
Yuma: My work explores that, but they’re also just paintings about what’s it like being alive. They’re both tied to such a specific topic, and also could be seen as something completely unrelated to it. I would like a viewer that doesn’t know anything about my background to see the paintings and still feel them. You don’t have to know about buryats to understand them. In the bigger, cosmic sense, it is not that important.
In my work, I explore universal themes, which are sort of layered behind that form of a indigenous culture, because that’s the language I’ve developed. But it doesn’t mean that my paintings are only about buryats. They’re not about my experience, they’re not even mine – they just came to existence through me. That’s how I prefer to see it.
What aspects of Buryat-Mongolian culture do you celebrate in your art? Are there specific symbols, stories, or rituals that frequently appear in your work?
Yuma: I try to avoid directly using specific symbols and rituals in my painting, if they belong to a certain mongolian aspect. I think sometimes when it’s too specific, it becomes not far away from a cute little postcard you could get from your mongolian trip. I use different ideas that are certainly based on my culture, but I then recycle that idea to make it more abstract and universal.
Do you feel there is a lack of representation or understanding of Buryat culture in the broader art world? If so, how do you see your work contributing to that conversation?
Yuma: Of course! Has anyone ever heard of buryats? It’s okay that nobody knows about us, I also don’t know every small ethnicity that exists in the world. But I am a buryat artist, all my art is, therefore, buryat, and contributes to the buryat culture. It is an important thing to do, because none of the minorities of Russia are striving. All oppressed. All had their language cancelled. All regarded as second class citizens. It is a conversation that needs to happen in those regions.
So why is it important for you to represent your heritage?
Yuma: It wouldn’t be important for me if I was from a bigger ethnicity, where we have our own country and focus on global matters. But for us, we are so deprived that our goal is to simply survive, not let the buryat language be forgotten (as it is already in UNESCO’s list of dying languages). I’m not trying to represent my heritage as much as I am trying for buryats not to get extinct.
Really, I just make paintings, that’s all I can do. I’m not trying to be an activist or be crazy political. I just paint things I imagine in my head, and it takes such a cultural shape by some weird hidden powers.
You currently have a solo show at INCUBATOR Gallery, in London, titled “Playing with Hands”. How did that come about and what’s the story behind the title?
Yuma: I got lucky because initially I was preparing the works for a solo show in Copenhagen, which got cancelled. It’s sad when things get cancelled, but in this case, it was lucky because I got the chance to show the works in London with such a great gallery after all!
After having painted two works for that cancelled show, I didn’t know what to do and if I should continue pushing the theme. Someone gave me an advice: “just keep making work as if you have a solo show. Then, it will come about and you will already have the work for it.” So I did.
I had the whole thing in mind. The title, “Playing with hands”, is a simple direct line, because in all of the main pieces the characters are playing with hands: playing cards, armwrestling, checking the water with a finger (which is, sort of, “playing” but in a dangerous way, because under the water there is a monster), playing rock paper scissors. In that painting, actually, instead of a rock it is a well, that’s how we play in Siberia. The scissors, when lose, have to fall down into the well, so the player usually has to put their fingers inside. And the paper just covers it! All the paintings depict cultural elements between something uniquely buryat and something soviet. It was almost an anthropological research for me, to find those intersections.
And what was your inspiration behind these new bodies of work?
Yuma: My first inspiration was humour and childhood – the starting point. Then, it became the dumpling – “buuz” in mongolian. In Mongolia, buuz are a local staple. Passing by cafes in Ulaan Ude, the capital of Buryatia, you will find almost every other place being called “Buuzroom”, “Buuz place”, “Happy buuza” etc, among various local memes like “You’re not buryad if you don’t like buuz” and so on. It was funny growing up, and I’ve always loved dumplings.
Buryats have been lately shaped by Russian education and culture. Years of repression left us with little of our heritage. We are “not Asian enough” anymore, so we cling to symbols like buuz. It’s a cultural compensation – buryats emphasise this aspect of our food, to make up for so many other cultural losses. You won’t see it in Outer Mongolia, it’s really a buryat thing. Like this, in my work, I use a dumpling as a symbol of tragedy. The whole national identity got reduced to the size of a dining plate.
How many dumplings can you find in my show?
Can you walk me through your creative process from beginning to end result?
Yuma: It all starts from an idea… That’s the most mysterious part, and the most important. Then I make many different sketches, figure out the composition, the size… Then I start it on the canvas, already knowing what I have in mind. But the canvas takes me on a journey, where the final painting never ends up exactly how I imagined. There are things I might have to sacrifice on the way. It’s a battle. It can be so emotional. And then it just stops… and another one begins. A never ending battle. Sometimes I feel like painting comes out of me, like sweat. You know, like I am not in charge.
Ok Yuma, now to something totally different. In a parallel universe who would you be? and what would you be doing?
Yuma: If I didn’t sweat with paintings, maybe I’d be an anthropologist! The next thing to art is science. I’d be doing some research and discussing it with my sociologist-sister. It’s a fun science because you’re almost not a part of the society anymore, society is a part of your research, so you step away from everything. You’re in it, but in your mind you’re isolated from the whole world. Sociology and anthropology can literally research any topic in the world. They’re such smart people as well.
Anybody you look up to?
Yuma: Bosch, Caravaggio, Botticelli, Goya… you know, the masters I could never reach.
Alright Yuma, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Yuma: Lord of the Rings is the movie I rewatch every year. I am weirdly obsessed with this movie and know everything about it. My favourite movies of the past years are Тokyo!, The square, Night on earth, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring, A pigeon sat on a branch reflecting on existence, Chungking express. I also recommend everyone this movie I watched on youtube about Buryatia in 1930s – Storm Over Asia/The Heir to Gengis Khan. It’s so beautifully made, and it’s black and white and has no voices!
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
Yuma: Chintamani by Celine Dessberg. Celine is a half french half mongolian musician based in Paris! Shoutout to my friend Celine! Bonjour lol! Also, Sangjidorji – Urna. Another amazing mongolian singer!