One person show in the venues of the Tretyakov Gallery is viewed by Russian contemporary artists, even the most renowned ones, as an event of paramount importance in their artistic careers. For Dashi Namdakov, a sculptor from Buryatia, whose numerous exhibits held in the galleries of Russia, America, Europe and Asia have already brought him international acclaim and recognition, a chance to demonstrate his sculptures, graphic work and jewellery pieces in one of the best rooms of the Tretyakov Gallery in Lavrushinsky Pereulok, must be the most important and challenging moment in his professional biography. A one-man show in the major national museum is both a sign of deserved recognition of Dashi Namdakova’s achievements, a high appraisal of his place and role in the cultural life of contemporary Russia, and an act of true confidence in the talent and personality of an artist, who is still quite young, that he will choose the right way in his future career. For the Tretyakov Gallery, too, such an exhibit becomes quite a significant event. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the museum opens an exhibition of a talented and original contemporary artist who represents regional Russia. By the end of the 20th century Buryatia, like many other Russian regions, had demonstrated a tendency to revive local national culture, a call for finding the peoples’ roots, for ethnic cultural identity with the enormous Asian continent that includes the Siberia with Buryatia and Mongolia, too, where, for centuries, the feelings of ‘kinship’ and ‘neighbourhood’ between the closely living peoples have intertwined in an intricate pattern. The mythological and poetic Weltanschauung, typical of these Asiatic cultures, is, growingly, finding its way in the original poesy, theatre, plastic arts of the present-day Buryatia. The work of Dashi Namdakov, who became known as an original artist in 2000, comes as a proof of this process. Dashi Namdakov received the best schooling of a sculptor in the Krasnoyarsk State Institute of Arts from which he graduated in 1992. Feeling at home in the professional language of the European sculptural arts, he manages to create highly original pieces inspired by the Buddhist, or, to be more accurate, Lamasery imagery and subjects, including elements of the shamanic mythology and the traditions of the Turkic peoples of the Siberia, of the Buryat epic legends and tales and of the ancient art of China and Japan. His works are far from being reminiscent of the great cultures of the Bronze and Iron Ages, or from being simply illustrative of the myths and legends depicting historical heroes of the remote times. The artist invents his own imagery world, intricate and powerful, combining the spiritual traditions of the past and the present-day realities. His world is ‘crowded’ with fictional heroes who look fantastic and, at the same time, strikingly authentic. ‘The Dashi World’ has been the subject of many articles, monographs and books. Art historians, philosophers, archaeologists interested in the Oriental arts professionally have been trying to find out or comment on the origin of his heroes, their relationships, the hierarchy of his Gods and Celestials. They have been discussing the archetypical and mythological, sacral and magic traits in their characters. Still, any attempts to understand the Dashi World only from inside prove to be evidently inadequate to realize the whole of ‘the Dashi Phenomenon’. This is certainly, first and foremost, the phenomenon of an artist, determined by his talent and intuition. At the same time, his personality of an artist, subjectively and objectively concentrated on highly different events and cultural features of the new millennium. Dashi Namdakov is undoubtedly a phenomenon of the 21st century. It could not have appeared some fifteen – twenty years before it did, for neither the culture, nor the public spirit of Buryatia were prepared to accept his art. One may say that Dashi was born quite ‘in time’. That is why, while analysing and trying to understand the Dashi Phenomenon, we ought to base our assumptions on the parameters and ideas of today. It is interesting and fruitful to view Dashi Namdakov’s work from many aspects in the context of the 21st- century culture like a kind of a crystal that gradually shows its facets, knots at the meeting of its edges and surfaces. Similarly, Dashi Namdakov’s work shows its calibre, much more concise and going beyond the boundaries of just a national art, aware of, and responding adequately to, the keen interest in the Oriental spirituality, new to the European mind, disturbing and fascinating. To put it differently, his work was born in response to the demand of the time. The fact that his work has an appeal for the viewers in many countries can also be explained by a wide-spread interest in Buddhism, which is not accidental, for Buddhist mythology, being one of the most fertile and versatile in the world, has become one of the most popular. Nowadays, mythology exists in the public mind as a great legacy of the human civilizations and as part and parcel of the present-day intellectual inspiration. Even Sciences have started to view mythological images as quite acceptable ideology. Modern culture has brought forth a special term – fantasy – that first through literature, and then through films and TV serials, has become very popular. Fantasy should not be mixed with Sci-Fi or viewed as a fashionable craze. Fantasy came up from people’s profound interest in mythology, folklore and history of the religions. J.R.R. Tolkien, the founder of the genre, who ‘crowded’ the world of his books, full of complicated relationships, with a host of imagery characters placing them in the middle of exciting and spellbound events, was a brilliant connoisseur of Celtic mythology, ancient Irish sagas and Welsh folklore. Prolific Buddhist mythology can also be an exhaustless inspiring source of the same kind of works of art. It seems acceptable to view Dashi Namdakov’s work as a fantasy-like phenomenon, as expression of the trend in sculpture. Analysing his sculptures one cannot help noticing that they are full of a special sense of time. They embody a special Weltanschauung that possesses some profound feeling of the infinity of life here and now, where the cultures and events of the past do not disappear but continue their existence in the present day co-relating with others and losing none of their independence and significance. Carrying on the idea, it may be interesting to weigh such Oriental Weltanschauung against the changes that have been happening in the Western ideology of the historical views on the world cultural development. The concept of its linear, non-stop character that prevailed in the 19th century had given way, by the mid-1950s and especially by the end of the 20th century, to the concept of co-existence of different time layers. The history of cultural development, then, becomes a permanent interchange of their places and not just onward march of epochs. A convincing illustration of such an approach may have been the exhibition project The Universe of a Nomad initially shown abroad in 2006, in the venue of the admirable new State Exhibition Centre named Millennium (the Peking Museum of World Art) and later, in 2007, in a few other major museums of China. The central hall of Millennium housed a big collection of Dashi Namdakov’s works along with a unique collections of archaeological diggings and ethnographic monuments from Central Asia and the South-East Siberia, loans from the museums and scientific centres of Buryatia, Irkutsk and from some private collections. Huge graphic panels, dynamic bronze sculptures and decorative animal jewellery by Dashi Namdakov, like the embodiment of the spiritual memory, symbols and traditions of the past, looked congenital among the ancient artefacts: swords and golden adornments of Hun and Turkic horsemen, ritual objects and attributes of the shamanic cult – true bearers of historical symbols. All that created a vivid impression of the nomadic civilization. The artistic and university audiences were delighted with Dashi Namdakov’s work and received him enthusiastically and gratefully. They viewed him as a master who, because of his talent, managed to revive their common past and present it in all its beauty and power as a live component of the contemporary Oriental culture. The show at the Tretyakov Gallery lets its viewers discover an unusual, unknown world. Moscow’s lovers of art with their mostly European tastes may find it difficult to understand the depth of the originality of the Buryat artist. Some may just enjoy the aestheticism and the undeniably accomplished mastery of his sculptures, their clear silhouettes, natural subtlety, exquisite surfaces, the master’s absolute feel for the material, the emotionally high-pitched sheets of his graphic work. But to get a true vision of his art, to accept, without reserve, the work of an artist who generously and trustingly shares with us his fascinating and mystic world, one have to realize that this world of his has been backed by a giant of Oriental culture that has never, for thousands of years, been out of joint and by the culture of the modern Orient looked at with interest and anxiety by the whole world. Powerful developments, which are under way in the economic, political and cultural spheres in the 21st-century Orient, resemble the shifts of the tectonic plates and have actually a world-wide character. So, if we want to live in peace in our multinational Russia, we have to learn how to be, paraphrasing the great poet, less lazy and more curious. We ought to know the culture of our own country and try to understand the art of the nations ‘living next door’ in our large common Home. Dashi Namdakov is an artist of profound and subtle intellect, thinking broadly and topically. He creates his original imagery in a comprehensible language of plastic arts and actually allows his viewers a rare chance to feel the presence of a live great civilization here and now. Dashi Namdakov’s show can be considered a serious step made by the Tretyakov Gallery in making up a collection of truly contemporary national art. Lyudmila Marts, Head of the Department of the 20th –century Sculpture, Tretyakov Gallery