Abstract

This article examines Inner Me (2024), an installation-performance by contemporary Mongolic artist Bayanchuleet, as an embodied articulation of Mongolic shamanic animism within conditions of rapid social and cultural transformation. Across the steppe, Mongolic cosmology has long understood human life as inseparable from sky, earth, and ancestral presence, conceiving the world as composed of multiple coexisting realms in continuous interaction. While such relational assumptions persist within Mongolic ways of knowing, dominant narratives in contemporary China privilege linear models of development, progress, and artistic value. Inner Me confronts this tension through an immersive installation and live dance performance that stages the lived fragmentation experienced by young Mongols navigating between nomadic memory and urban modernity.

The installation is organized around the suspended roof ring (toono) of a Mongolic yurt, from which wires, mirrors, and fabric extend outward to form a dense spatial environment. Entering this structure with a shamanic drum, Bayanchuleet moves through the installation with gestures that oscillate between ritual rhythm and visible physical strain. His choreography transforms the installation from a symbolic setting into a relational field shaped by material forces, ancestral traces, and environmental conditions. Situating Inner Me as the culmination of the earlier works Unseen Tenger and Looking for New Totem, this article argues that the exhibition renders Mongolic shamanic animism perceptible as an embodied, spiral-temporal mode of relating in which ancestral presence remains palpable but no longer guarantees stable orientation.

The essay brings the work into conversation with Western feminist and Indigenous theorists including Leslie Marmon Silko, Donna Haraway, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Nathan Snaza, using their concepts as interpretive bridges that make the work more legible to Western readers rather than as frameworks that explain or subsume Mongolic artistic and cosmological practices. Through choreography, spatial composition, and embodied negotiation, Inner Me reveals a shamanic way of worlding that persists within contemporary conditions of fragmentation.