The exhibition ‘The Book – The Medium’, now on view at Aspan Gallery in Almaty, marks the opening chapter of an ambitious long-term research project by the young curator Alen Li. Focusing on what he describes as the “golden age of Soviet Kazakh book illustration,” from 1965 until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the exhibition is the first of four planned instalments tracing the history of Kazakhstan’s print culture—from the Russian Empire and the early Soviet period to the years of independence. According to Li, the project as a whole is expected to take five to six years to complete.

The exhibition brings together works on paper and rare books from ten private collections, including holdings from the families of the artists themselves. Among the featured figures are Evgeny Sidorkin (1930–1982), who played a pivotal role in shaping a distinctive national style of Kazakh book illustration; Salikhitdin Aitbayev (1938–1994), one of the leading painters of Kazakhstan’s generation of “Sixtiers”; Boris Pak (1935–1992), an accomplished graphic artist and intellectual; and several other important representatives of Kazakh art.

According to the exhibition curator, the period between 1965 and 1991 witnessed the flourishing of several publishing houses, including ‘Zhalyn’, ‘Zhazushy’, ‘Oner’, and others. Their books are not only on display but may also be handled and read. The gallery has been conceived as a hybrid space, somewhere between an exhibition, a reading room, and a Soviet living room where one might spend a leisurely weekend immersed in a book. The installation recreates the atmosphere of the period through Soviet armchairs, coffee tables, bedside cabinets, desk lamps, carpets, and even a pot of Tradescantia. These carefully chosen details add another dimension to the exhibition, shifting the emphasis from the book artist alone to the relationship between the book and its reader.

Some of the rarest books are displayed in glass cases, while digital reproductions of their illustrations can be explored on a nearby screen. Yet the book covers themselves are no less compelling. They introduce visitors to the work of Albert Guryev (1937–2011), whose original graphic works are absent from the exhibition. Nevertheless, Guryev was a pivotal figure in late Soviet Kazakh graphic art. After graduating from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute in 1963, he chose to settle in Almaty because Evgeny Sidorkin was working there; having encountered Sidorkin’s work at the Moscow Manege, he had been profoundly impressed by it. The books on display reveal the distinctive qualities of Guryev’s style in the 1970s: deliberately naïve drawing, smooth, rounded contours, and a remarkable economy of means. Some of his covers recall Picasso’s graphic works, while others reveal a more direct affinity with Sidorkin.

The exhibition is divided into two sections. The larger gallery remains unchanged throughout its run, while the smaller gallery is reinstalled every three weeks. Each temporary display is devoted to the work and archival materials of one of the artists featured in ‘The Book – The Medium’.

During the Khrushchev Thaw, progressive cultural figures in the Kazakh SSR developed a renewed interest in the country's history and cultural traditions, many of which had been marginalised, devalued or displaced under Bolshevik rule. This search for historical roots in the aftermath of Stalinism was felt across the Soviet Union. In the Central Asian republics, however, the revival of national identity also served as a response to the late Stalinist narrative that cast Russians as the “elder brothers” who had supposedly brought civilisation to the steppe. Within this worldview, the Bolsheviks generally regarded the nomadic cultures of the Turkic peoples with condescension. The artistic movement later described as “nomadic romanticism” brought together a commitment to formal experimentation, an openness to international modernism, and a determination to forge a distinctly Kazakh national art.

The influence of international modernism is clearly visible in Salikhitdin Aitbayev’s illustrations for Olzhas Suleimenov’s poetry collection ‘Atameken’ and in his sketches for ‘Forty Swallows’. In one illustration, the horse’s elongated neck and angular head recall Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. Elsewhere, the faces evoke Cubist portraits, while Cubist principles also inform the construction of volume. Some compositions even incorporate elements of montage. It is easy to imagine Aitbayev’s graphic works translated into monumental frescoes or mosaics.

His powerful, generalized figures evoke both the Mexican muralists - whose work Aitbayev greatly admired - and the portraits of Renato Guttuso (1911–1987), who visited Almaty and knew the artist personally. The deliberately primitive qualities of his style can be traced both to Picasso and to the ancient Turkic balbals, the anthropomorphic stone monuments of the Eurasian steppe. Yet Aitbayev employed this remarkably international visual vocabulary to depict profoundly national subjects.

Such artistic experimentation inevitably aroused suspicion among Soviet cultural officials. The generation of the Sixtiers experienced varying degrees of repression. In her book ‘The Art of Kazakhstan…’, Valeria Ibraeva notes that two artists represented in the exhibition - Aitbayev and Makum Kisamedinov - were harshly criticised at a congress of the Union of Artists and later summoned for “conversations” with KGB officers. Compared with painting, however, book illustration offered considerably greater artistic freedom. As the curator observes, it was within this medium that artists were able to continue their formal experiments under relatively favourable conditions. For many whose work did not conform to the demands of Socialist Realism, commissions from publishing houses also provided an important source of income.

Evgeny Sidorkin studied in Kazan and Riga before continuing his education at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad. It was there that he met his fellow student Gulfairus Ismailova (1929–2013), who would later become one of Kazakhstan’s most celebrated artists. Following their graduation in 1957, the couple settled in Almaty.

Sidorkin proved remarkably receptive to the traditional cultures of Central Asia, which attracted growing interest among both artists and scholars during the 1960s and 1970s. These decades witnessed major archaeological discoveries relating to the Scythian - Saka animal style, alongside important research into Kazakhstan’s ancient petroglyphs. Together with the ancient Turkic balbals and the region’s rich ornamental traditions, these discoveries profoundly shaped Sidorkin’s artistic language.

More accurately, however, Sidorkin transformed these sources into something entirely his own, reinterpreting rather than simply borrowing the visual languages of Saka and Turkic art. From the animal style, for example, he adopted its emphasis on silhouette and dynamic movement. From the petroglyphs and balbals he absorbed their laconic forms and monumental presence. He then fused ornament and image into a single, unified visual language.

The exhibition includes Sidorkin’s autolithographs illustrating Mukhtar Auezov’s ‘The Path of Abai’, displayed alongside their preparatory sketches. Yet it is equally rewarding to leaf through Maurice Simashko’s ‘Mazdak…’ and the epic ‘Alpamys Batyr’, both illustrated by Sidorkin. These books reveal the full breadth of his artistic innovations far more effectively than individual prints viewed in isolation.

A very different interpretation of the Turkic epic emerges in the work of Isatay Isabayev (1936–2007). The exhibition presents his colour autolithographs for ‘Koblandy Batyr’. Like Sidorkin, Isabayev sought to forge a distinctly national artistic language, but his point of departure was entirely different. Rather than drawing primarily on the visual heritage of the Eurasian steppe, he looked to the traditions of Persian and Central Asian medieval miniature painting.

This influence explains many of the defining characteristics of his illustrations: their flattened pictorial space, the coexistence of multiple viewpoints within a single composition, the merging of events separated in time into one visual field, the symbolic rather than naturalistic use of colour, and the frequent absence of a clearly defined compositional centre. As a result, the artist’s attention often shifts away from the heroic protagonist towards scenes of everyday life and the wider world that surrounds him. At the same time, the illustrations for ‘Koblandy Batyr’ also reveal traces of Japanese art. Isabayev appears to have adopted its emphatic diagonals, asymmetrical compositions and restrained palette, combining these qualities with the narrative principles of Persian miniature painting to create a highly original visual language.

Among the exhibition’s most remarkable works are Boris Pak’s lithographs for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’. In searching for an appropriate visual language for a poem inspired by Native American legends, Pak drew upon his own travels in Mexico as well as the work of the Mexican muralists, above all Diego Rivera (1886–1957). Organic, flowing lines and monumental figures coexist with fantastic imagery, a deliberately conventional pictorial space, and ornament seamlessly integrated into the composition. Despite their exceptional artistic quality, these illustrations were never included in the published edition of the book, making the exhibition a rare opportunity to see them.

Perhaps the key word for Alen Li’s exhibition is diversity. There are relatively few graphic works on the walls, but this is more than compensated for by the rotating displays and the wealth of books available for visitors to browse. Beyond the exhibits themselves, each visitor can create countless individual paths through the exhibition simply by leafing through different volumes. Although Kazakh art of the 1960s to the 1980s is generally associated with the search for a national artistic language, the artists represented here reveal strikingly different conceptions of what such a language might be. Each constructs it from sources that are often geographically and historically far removed from one another. More importantly, each presents national culture not as something fixed and immutable, but as an open, evolving tradition, capable of absorbing and transforming influences from a wide range of artistic worlds.