Visiting photographers focused mainly on the tragedy of the dried-up sea and images of rusty ships in the sands while the people themselves hardly ever entered the frame. Several comic images of Karakalpaks in traditional chu-gurma hats made of sheepskin and karakul lambskin became an ironic sujet in his paintings “To the Wedding” (2014),

“Lunch” (2018), and “The Suitor”

(2018). Over time, this attribute on the characters' heads evolves from painting to painting, morphing into spiral lines, arrows, crowns, like some kind of electrified energy flow, growing into tree branches, tousled mops of hair and seeming to fly in different directions. Drawing on his observations of life as well as his own experiences, the artist creates his own narratives: the story of two strange characters portrayed through the prism of his own biography. Examples include the 2022 paintings “A Couple”, “Violet”, “Gray”, “Blue, Yellow”, “Two”, and “Let’s have a heart-to-heart” (2024). In works like these, Serekeev depicts two figures, either together or with one upside down, thereby emphasizing the interaction of opposites. For the artist, this is entirely justified, since he is more interested in portraying people in pairs or groups rather than alone. The presence of several figures on the canvas allows for a connection between them, enhancing the dynamism of the plot. In Karakalpak tradition, “pairing” underlies all understanding of the Tengrist universe because for Tengrism and past generations who pracitced it, this binary division of the world into equal opposites reflects harmony and balance. All this is still present in the worldview of every Karakalpak — each person retains the knowledge of his or her clan and its tamga (ensignia), observes the rituals and prohibitions of the clan and even swears by the sky. In one of his interviews, Serekeev said that from a philosophical point of view, he adheres to the principle of polarity, according to which everything in the world is dual, paired and has its opposite.

No matter how abandoned and lonely a person is, there will always be a heart ready to open up to them. We are social creatures and need someone nearby.

Like many artists with an expressive temperament, Serekeev paints intuitively, never knowing what the end result will be. As he said in one interview, “For me, it would be a disaster if someone looked at a painting of mine, said 'beautiful' and strolled on. Through my work, I try to evoke extremely contradictory emotions in viewers, positive or negative. What’s important is for these emotions to come out.” For him, then, the process of creating a picture takes precedence over the result, because this approach presupposes absolute creative free-dom, the manifestation of the creator’s unbridled energy. Incidentally, notions about the perfection of the world are far from the nomads common knowledge. There is a place for the elements, associated with the nomadic lifestyle and the nomad peoples' direct connection with nature informed by the recognition of nature’s power and strength.

Many overlook this, but if we want to understand this young artist’s innovation, we should recognise that by creating emotionally dramatic paintings featuring strange characters in the spirit of the “new wild ones”, Serekeev was the first to mark the end of the doomed utopia of the past which the Karakalpak people still lived in. Many works, such as “Stroll” (2024), “Couple” (2024) and others are clearly surreal; the characters are devoid of human features and tokens, yet thanks to heightened emotion, the viewer will feel something of their own in them.