Narandulam Altantsetseg & Onongua Enkhtur

“A Full Embrace of Tears”, a collaborative performance work by E. Onongua and A. Narandulam, explores emotion, emotional memory, and their crystalline, translucent embodiment. Through voice, sound, and ice, the artists construct a sensory language that gives form to the tears one carries, the tonal register of feeling, and the passage through which inner essence becomes perceptible.

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The artists take the tear, one of the most fragile and transparent of forms, as the central image of the work. Yet here, the tear does not function solely as an expression of grief. Rather, it emerges as a distilled emotional residue: something preserved over time, clarified through duration, frozen by frost, and shaped by endurance. In this sense, the tear becomes not merely the trace of feeling, but a crystallized witness to what one has borne, withstood, and held within.

Everyone carries tears.
Some are shed.
Some remain internal.
Some are so transparent, so luminous, that they appear less sorrowful than radiant.
Some freeze.

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Within this work, understanding, silence, and endurance are imagined as forces that harden emotion into form; into something ice-like, crystal-like, almost tangible.

Here, tears are not presented as emotional rupture or catharsis, but as a language of interior transformation. The work does not seek to explain them, but rather to attend to them: to honor their transparency and to sense the hidden transitions they contain.

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Narandulam sings the phrase “A Full Embrace of Tears.” Her voice, carried through the elongated breath, resonance, and suspended temporality of urtiin duu (long song), moves through silence and vibration as though stirring the still water held deep within the human psyche. It is as if the voice calls the tears into presence, or lends sound to that which has long existed, quietly and translucently, within the body.

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In response, Onongua carries tear-shaped forms of ice into the space, placing them around the singer. These frozen forms appear like shadows of the voice, or like emotional fragments that have been carried for a long time and are now, at last, released into visibility. Voice gives them breath, the body gives them weight, and human presence renders them real.

 

A further significant gesture within the performance occurs when Onongua holds the frozen tears in her bare hands, cradling them in her palms over time. The hand, the warmest and most human part of the body, comes into direct contact with frost. What has hardened does not break; instead, it gradually softens, melts, and begins to flow. This action proposes an ethics of emotional holding: to remain with what has long been preserved internally, to meet it with understanding, to allow it duration, and to accompany it toward another state of being.

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Narandulam then receives the melted water in her hands. In this moment, tears pass from song into ice, from ice into water, and from water back into the body. They do not disappear; they transform. Their form changes, yet their essence remains. They remain transparent. They remain beautiful. They remain luminous through what they have endured.

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Through gestures of melting, holding, and carrying, the work also articulates an undercurrent of warmth, care, and compassion. To understand is to love; to remain with something difficult is also a form of endurance. Frost, in this sense, is not approached as something to resist or reject, but as a condition to be recognized, accepted, and respected. It becomes a metaphor for patience, for endurance, and for the silent labor of emotional survival.

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Frost here signifies the cold that settles within the heart, the hardening of unspoken words, and the quiet state of what has been carried inward for too long. Yet winter is not an ending. Without cold, there can be no thaw. Without frost, no movement toward spring can begin. Only that which has frozen holds within it the possibility of becoming fluid once more.

For this reason, tears in this work are not merely signs of suffering. They become a passage toward inner clarification: a moment in which one encounters the most vulnerable, radiant, and enduring part of the self.

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Within JAVAR, this collaborative work by Onongua and Narandulam invites viewers to acknowledge the tears they have carried, and to reconsider their crystal-like transparency, their sorrow-like depth, and their water-like vitality.

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Toward another spring…

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Curator: Ulziibat Enkhtur