A contemporary Kazakhstani artist of Korean origin. His works include photography, video art, installations, and graphic art. Key methods in A. Ugay’s practice cover collage, deconstruction, archiving, metaphor, visual citation, and family ethnography. Key themes are memory, trauma, identity, migration, contemporary mythology, and nomadic modernism.
A. Ugay received his education at the Kyrgyz State University (Faculty of Law, Bishkek, 1998–2002) and the T. K. Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts (Master of Arts, Almaty, 2013–2015). In the 1990s, together with Roman Maskalyov, he co-founded the art group “Armored Train,” where they created “cinema objects”: short films shot on 8mm and 16mm film.
In his practice, A. Ugay references and reinterprets ideas from his contemporaries – for example, he develops Rustam Khalfin’s concept of “Pulota,” placing it as a sculpture at the Republic Square and filling it with the collective memory of the place (“Pulota (Obskuraton #5),” 2017). He explores the relationship between memory and national identity, using a composite image of an archive (“More Than Dreams, Less Than Things,” 2014) or personal photographs, documents, and family stories (“Geography of Memory,” 2002–2018). The artist researches the memory of the past in a new context. In this way, he combines 8mm film footage of the utopian Monument to the Third International with a 3D render (“Bastion,” 2007). Similarly, he archived disposable film cameras used by Almaty residents to capture their visions of the city in a steel time capsule (“12 Seconds,” 2021).
A. Ugay’s works have been exhibited in Kazakhstan, South Korea, and internationally: the 9th Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, 2005), the 52nd Venice Biennale (Venice, 2007), “Younger Than Jesus” (New Museum, New York, 2009), “Promises of the Past” (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010), “Project 35 Volume 2: The Last Act” (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2016), the Busan Biennale (Busan, 2022), and the International Festival of Films on Art (Montreal, 2025).
Information about A. Ugay and his works is stored in the collection of the Documentation project – the archives of the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture (“12 Seconds,” 2021) and the Soros Center for Contemporary Art – Almaty (SCCA).
Photograph from the Aspan Gallery website