8 hours with Odonchimeg Davaadorj in Paris

Clay, film, paint, textiles, words, bodies—in Odonchimeg’s hands, these modes of expression merge to challenge material boundaries. Contrary to its weight, a clay bird takes flight with only a thin red thread anchoring it to the wall. Though seemingly fragile, the thread is the bird’s root, which allows the bird to fly high without losing its way, as Odonchimeg explains.

Drawings are composed of a mesh of fine, articulated lines but juxtaposed with washes of color that draw the viewers’ eyes from the clarity of the foreground to the murkiness of the background and back—a rebirth. A tour of the art in Odonchimeg’s home and exhibited in galleries around the world reveals interconnected worlds which are rife with fragile tensions that are nonetheless the unbreakable bonds that keep the elements in these worlds in balance.

Odonchimeg’s watercolor paintings are exemplary of gradients of strengths—accents marked by dense pigmentation that transition to light washes—that seem to echo the energy required for a working mother. Between working and hosting us, Odonchimeg prepared for her children’s day at school, picked up her children from kindergarten, and brought them to a nearby park to play afterschool.

This constant shifting of gears throughout a day requires understanding, intimately, the importance of finding our roots in the connections—no matter how strong or tenuous—between ourselves and other people, things, and environments. At Peter Wu, we aim to make garments that are woven from similar threads of inextricable narratives and processes of transformation that Odonchimeg beautifully represent in her multimedia work.