This website is one product of the long-standing partnerships between the Kazakh Research Institute for Culture (Astana, Kazakhstan) and many international museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Cultural History Program (Washington, D.C.). This website intends to introduce some of the range and quality of modern art in Kazakhstan, both to viewers from Kazakhstan and to a diverse global audience. We attempt to do this by presenting a short biography of each artist alongside a small sampling of artworks each has created, for our selection of preeminent living artists of Kazakhstan.

We recognize that any one print or publication of modest size can only include a small portion of the vast artistic productivity within this rapidly growing and developing nation. We are very aware that many more artists are currently active in Kazakhstan, and that no possible selection within one publication of reasonable size could claim to fully represent the variety and range of art produced.

Yet we are also aware that despite the great recent growth of Kazakhstan’s museum and art gallery sectors, very little information about Kazakhstan’s modern art is currently available in English and to international audiences. We hope visitors of this website will enjoy the present selection of artists and artistry, and that they may then want to learn more or visit directly Kazakhstan’s centers of art production and display. They will find a very active world of museums, galleries, studios, and creative spaces, often steeped in traditional Kazakh cultural forms and traditions, yet presented in many innovative and cosmopolitan media and formats.

The compilation and production of this website is part of a larger national effort within Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Culture and Sports, and in particular its Kazakh Research Institute of Culture, to enhance its partnerships with international museums, and to find new ways of introducing Kazakhstan’s art to a global audience. This process is also part of a series of activities carried out within the framework of Kazakhstan’s national cultural policy which aims both to rediscover Kazakhstan’s own national identity based on Kazakh history and culture, while also finding a uniquely Kazakh inspiration for transformation or modernization of Kazakhstan’s cultural life.

Scholars and art historians who look back from the future on these decades of Kazakhstan’s rapid growth and modernization will surely have much to observe and write about. They will note how the highly diverse individual artists of Kazakhstan sought out unique ways to integrate traditional Kazakh motifs, symbols, and themes, within artistic productions and media for a cosmopolitan art-market or global artistic forum. Each of the artists we have selected for inclusion within this compilation is inspired both by deep roots in Kazakhstan, and by contemporary global trends in art production.

The compilation of this website owes much to the Committee of Experts recently formed within Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Culture, for their suggestions about artists to be included, and about other means for recognizing and celebrating Kazakhstan’s national identity through the visual arts. A list of the Expert Committee members, many of whom nominated individual artists, follows this introductory note. We also thank the curators who assisted in assembling documentation about the artists themselves. We received many suggestions for the selection of artists to be included here, for which in the end we bear full responsibility – only hoping that this first attempt to introduce some of Kazakhstan’s pre-eminent artists to a global audience may be followed by many others.

It is our sincere hope that through this website, both Kazakh and international readers will discover or re-discover the depth and range of artistic production in modern Kazakhstan, and will be inspired to visit and experience first-hand both the depth of Kazakhstan’s cultural traditions and the dynamism of Kazakhstan’s cosmopolitan artistic landscapes.