The figure of Alexander Kiryakhno from the first days of his career had the status of an outcast: he "did not fit in" with the Soviet art system and never tried to meet its criteria. The artist continues to keep himself apart even in the post-Soviet period: everyone knows him in Vladivostok, but exhibitions can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The image of Primorye created by Kiryakhno is devoid of regional and social portraitization, there is no urban landscape, no descriptions of seaside life and modernist architecture, no GULAG prisoners and no references to the Soviet. Instead, Kiryakhno creates his own world filled with cult relics that he took from home altars, "prayer rooms of Buddhists, animists, Orthodox, schismatics and whips. But also in the nooks of bedrooms, in children's "secrets", in ladies' dressing tables and nightstands," fascinated not by the content of cults, but by the "aesthetics of an intimate reliquary", shadows cast in the port city by adherents of different religions and cultures.
