ART-PRESENTATION: Silent for A While
After decades of silence, Myanmar’s artists have a chance to speak. In April 2012, national elections were held in the country for the first time since 1962, ending 50-plus years of military dictatorship. Some of the older generation, bearing physical and psychic scars from undergoing arrest, imprisonment, and exile, emerged in October 2014 to participate in “Banned in Burma”, the first exhibition in Hong Kong to showcase formerly censored art from Myanmar.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Silent for A While: Contemporary Art from Myanmar”, at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in Hong Kong, presents the work of 7 artists from the newer generation of Myanmar’s artists.Tun Win Aung & Wahnu’s acrylic and paper works deal with erasure, language, and reinterpretation, there are layers of meaning in their pieces not immediately apparent to those unfamiliar with Myanmar’s political strife. They tackle how news was continually manipulated and rewritten to serve the interests of the ruling military party. Writing in unique Burmese script, they layer white pigment over news images. These pieces employ calligraphy to hauntingly evoke the use and misuse of words of propaganda. Htein Lin, took part in the 1988 uprising against military dictatorship and then spent 4 years in exile in India, studying Modernist art. He started making early Performances in 1996. In 1998 he was jailed on trumped-up charges and spent almost 7 years behind bars. After his release in 2004, he left Myanmar and moved to London, but he repatriated himself, along with his family, in 2013. Each of bronze sculptures in Aung Myat Htay’s has the face of either a god or an ogre cut into it, the two psychological controllers of the mind that drive our innermost actions. Zun Ei Phyu works with traditional paper-cutting techniques but puts a nontraditional spin on the form, through both her use of nuanced layering and her choice of topics. In “Hidden Face 1” the image suggests unspoken tensions that haunt their lives, with subtle, darker tones of red and blue lurking beneath the main surface. Moe Satt, in his performance is dressed in a traditional lemon-ecru formal dress, asked audience members to draw smiley faces on sticky plastic balls and place them all over his body and face. “Everything is concerned with the president. And everything isn’t concerned with the president”. These lines are from a poem by Maung Day. Prisoners who were granted amnesty by the president have become the government’s stooges. These young and old thugs wore red armbands and staged violent crackdowns on protests and demonstrations. Maung Day’s drawing “The Thug Nation” condemns this.
Info: Curator: Moe Satt, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, G/F, 10 Chancery Lane, SoHo, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 3/2-13/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.10chancerylanegallery.com
