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A little sweeter than your average skate video, this brand new short film by Uukhai, a Mongolian skateboarding association, sheds an intimate, honest and unpretentious light on a burgeoning community in Ulaanbaatar. The video features interviews with skaters involved with the organization, and tons of footage of street skating shot this summer. This look at a blossoming scene is the perfect inspiration for the jaded. Their old school is young, and they are devoted to bringing up brand new skaters. It’s also become a focal point for expatriates and repatriates. Take nothing for granted, certainly not your pristine sidewalks! Uukhai is working to raise funds to provide young skaters with decks, components, and eventually an indoor skatepark. Support from abroad is very much welcome, and rarely bestowed on this community. In a city that offers young people very few creative outlets, Uukhai is supporting skating for all the right reasons, and could use your support as well. Dig in! – THE UUKHAI DOCUMENTARY travels time to bring you the past, present and future of skateboarding in Mongolia. As it is a brand new sport and lifestyle, success is inevitable. Original and local skaters of the city of Ulaanbaatar, explain their perceptions of skateboarding on how it changed their lives and what it could do for the young guns to come follow in their footsteps. Step into their lives and get a firsthand look of what it takes to be an upcoming skateboarder in the dusty, rugged and cold streets of the historic country that is Mongolia. DIRECTED BY Odmandakh Bataa PRODUCED BY Uukhai NGO FEATURING Erdenedalai Purev Enkhjin Batnasan Sergelenbayar Batjargal Odmandakh Bataa Batbayar Lkhamsuren Malou Rose Binderiya Sanduijav Tobias Ulbrich Munki Lhagvasuren Aaron Szott Albert Morgado Jack Arendt Ankhbayar Ch. Bilguun S. Tengis B. Orgilsaikhan N. FILMED BY Odmandakh Bataa Enkhjin Batnasan EDITED BY Odmandakh Bataa Enkhjin Batnasan SECOND CAMERA Erdenedalai Purev Sergelenbayar Batjargal STILL PHOTOGRAPHER Enkhjin Batnasan Malou Rose Sergelenbayar Batjargal TEAM MANAGER Malou Rose email: uukhaiskateboarding@gmail.com
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A little sweeter than your average skate video, this brand new short film by Uukhai, a Mongolian skateboarding association, sheds an intimate, honest and unpretentious light on a burgeoning community in Ulaanbaatar. The video features interviews with skaters involved with the organization, and tons of footage of street skating shot this summer. This look at a blossoming scene is the perfect inspiration for the jaded. Their old school is young, and they are devoted to bringing up brand new skaters. It’s also become a focal point for expatriates and repatriates. Take nothing for granted, certainly not your pristine sidewalks! Uukhai is working to raise funds to provide young skaters with decks, components, and eventually an indoor skatepark. Support from abroad is very much welcome, and rarely bestowed on this community. In a city that offers young people very few creative outlets, Uukhai is supporting skating for all the right reasons, and could use your support as well. Dig in! – THE UUKHAI DOCUMENTARY travels time to bring you the past, present and future of skateboarding in Mongolia. As it is a brand new sport and lifestyle, success is inevitable. Original and local skaters of the city of Ulaanbaatar, explain their perceptions of skateboarding on how it changed their lives and what it could do for the young guns to come follow in their footsteps. Step into their lives and get a firsthand look of what it takes to be an upcoming skateboarder in the dusty, rugged and cold streets of the historic country that is Mongolia. DIRECTED BY Odmandakh Bataa PRODUCED BY Uukhai NGO FEATURING Erdenedalai Purev Enkhjin Batnasan Sergelenbayar Batjargal Odmandakh Bataa Batbayar Lkhamsuren Malou Rose Binderiya Sanduijav Tobias Ulbrich Munki Lhagvasuren Aaron Szott Albert Morgado Jack Arendt Ankhbayar Ch. Bilguun S. Tengis B. Orgilsaikhan N. FILMED BY Odmandakh Bataa Enkhjin Batnasan EDITED BY Odmandakh Bataa Enkhjin Batnasan SECOND CAMERA Erdenedalai Purev Sergelenbayar Batjargal STILL PHOTOGRAPHER Enkhjin Batnasan Malou Rose Sergelenbayar Batjargal TEAM MANAGER Malou Rose email: uukhaiskateboarding@gmail.com
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Asians love theme restaurants, and Mongolians are no exception. I’m not sure how it compares to Tokyo’s bikini girls in gundam suits, but this is still intriguing… Anand Erdenebileg spotted this in Ulaanbaatar. A new Korean restaurant that kept the old facade, but stuck a brand new meme on the roof. Do they loop PSY’s one international hit from open to close? Do they offer private dining in a sauna? Do they “horse dance” when they bring the tab? I’m tempted to find out.  
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On the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, framed by never ending new construction of luxury housing, and upscale office and retail developments, sits a park that will have to wait until winter’s end to continue its own development. The National Garden Park is part of a new vision for Mongolia’s capital. It has echoes of public green space in South Korea, and the new construction surrounding it is modeled after foreign high rise developments. All in all, a vast departure from the Soviet architecture and urban planning the city was built on, and world’s away from the impoverished “ger district” on the North, East and Western fringes of the city. Mongolia is on a fast track to becoming an Asian Tiger, but its most symbolic native predator will always be the wolf.

Tiger Beer’s international art project, Tiger Translate returned to Mongolia and reunited with New York based artists, FAILE for the creation and installation of The Wolf Within. They worked with Mongolian artist, Batmunkh to create the permanent sculpture, and with the help of the Mongolia Arts Council, they also had a chance to collaborate on stencil pieces around the city.

FAILE and GR friend and sculptor, Charlie Becker, tell us more about the evolution of the project from stencil, to sculpture, to 5 meter high fiberglass re-imagining.

GR: Can you say a few words about the collaborative process and taking concepts from 2 dimensions to 3?
F: We’ve worked collaboratively all our career so it’s very natural for us to have the help from another artist in the process of realizing one of our ideas. Charlie has been our go-to-guy to help us in the process of bringing our images to life. It’s usually a time consuming process. One of the biggest challenges comes in getting the emotion right, to capture that usually involves several revisions before getting it right but it always leads to amazing results in the 2D to 3D transformation.

CB: Coming from a background as a designer, It’s second nature for me to work in collaboration. When I work as a for-hire sculptor, my role is to capture the artists’ intent, not to push my own vision. But Patrick and Patrick really understand and trust me to interpret what they are looking for.

The challenge in bringing FAILE’s pieces to life is that they can combine things from different 2D sources  that can’t exist together in the real world. Getting the scale and anatomy of a horse’s head to merge convincingly into the neck of a human, for example. Or a relief that’s so deep that you can see all around it, requiring distortion to make the perspective look right from all angles.

I seem to have an ability to understand where the artist is coming from, and to work in the mindset of the people I’m working with. In the few instances like this where FAILE has worked with other sculptors, I tend to act as an interpreter of their style and vision, since I’m bilingual – I speak both “artist” and “sculptor.”

A lot of figure sculptors work in a heroic style, either from working on monuments, or – here in LA – sculpting superheroes. Most fine artists I’ve worked with are at the opposite extreme, looking for the subtlest emotions, the spaces in between emotions, or the  combination of several emotions. I liken it to the difference between acting for the stage, and acting for the camera. In the theater, you are emoting so they can see you in the back rows, but on camera, there is much more opportunity for subtlety. In trying to capture “Eat with the Wolf” I’d say that character is going through an emotional upheaval, simultaneously experiencing fear, joy, anger, wonder, awakening, and maybe even a few more.

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One less iconic image for tourists to take pictures of when they visit Ulaanbaatar, with this statue removal. The reports say that this is the last Lenin statue in the city, but it’s certainly not the last one standing in Mongolia. Darkhan, north of Ulaanbaatar, has a few Lenins here and there, and a gallery in the Darkhan Museum is replete with  original paintings by Mongolian artists illustrating an imaginary visit to confer with Mongol leaders. Darkhan is closer to the Russian border, and Russian coverage of the removal of the last Lenin in UB isn’t terribly cheerful. I think our Lenins will be sticking around for a while. Video of the removal of the statue is included in the BBC coverage of the story. Throwing of shoes is a pretty serious insult in Mongolia. Just letting the soles of shoes on your feet touch someone else, can spark a brawl without a prompt apology, so chucking old shoes at the downed Lenin was a strong sentiment of disapproval. The Soviet Union saved Mongolia from being consumed by China, and for decades it was one of the only nations to recognize Mongolia’s sovereignty, but it came at a terrible price. The Cyrillic alphabet, and the wreckage of monasteries and temples all across the country are two prominent reminders of seventy years of a complicated live-in relationship. Lenin is going up for auction — legally, not like stolen dinosaur bones.  Starting bid is under $300, a good price for the budget-conscious bourgeois historical artifact collector.
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