art from myanmar today
For most of the time the mere mention of Burma (or Myanmar, as it is now called) will conjure up the images of military dictatorship, censorship, loss of civil liberties and of course, Aung San Suu Kyi, who in her bearing embodies the suffering of all these conditions. This may be the present political plight of the country but like all states that have passed through illiberality, the restrictive atmosphere has not completely stultified Burma’s cultural production and artistic voices. Totalitarian oppression is also a common spur to art, as is well known. The junta has provided Burmese artists with a suitable antagonist, one which they detest and yet one which inexorably powers their expression. It is in the realm of contemporary art that one perhaps finds this relationship at its most vivid and complex.
Whilst the world is busy raging against the Burmese regime, another kind of transformation is taking place as the country is slowly attempting to reach out to its (albeit select) international counterparts and admit capitalistic forces. Its contemporary artists are, equally, moving outwards into the global art circuit and showing the rest of us what can actually go on behind the ostensible iron curtain. Apropos of this subtle shift in the country’s economic and cultural climate, though this does not diminish the reality of the junta’s political stranglehold, the curators of the Burmese art exhibition at Osage Singapore, Isabel Ching and Yin Ker, decided to title the show simply ‘Play’. Injecting levity into the perception of a country that has often been associated with tragedy and gravitas, the curators usefully turned the conventional image of Burma on its head and try to engage the viewer’s