May 2008
Print element of multimedia package.
YANGON, MYANMAR – Sunlight streams into an art studio on the first floor of a retail complex in Yangon, Myanmar on a Saturday afternoon. Five artists sit on a blue and yellow bamboo mat, smoking cigarettes, chewing betel nut and drinking beer. The artists laugh and speak in Burmese, surrounded by contemporary and abstract paintings in their shared studio.
The space is stacked with paints, brushes, stretched canvases, and paintings in progress. It exudes productivity, even as the artists take a break from the late-March tropical heat.
Nyein Chan Su, who founded the Studio Square and gallery of the same name next door with three other artists in 2003, said he often produces up to fifteen paintings in one week. In one of his large paintings, he covers photographs taken at a “Nat,” a Burmese word meaning spirit, festival with abstract brush strokes of bold colors.
In a city of six million where the average salary is $100 per month, the cost of the large canvases that Nyein Chan Su uses, it may be surprising that there is also a flourishing art scene here. But with over 30 galleries in Yangon to show and promote their work, links to galleries in Thailand, and a San Francisco Bay Area artist organizing a show of 22 Burmese paintings in San Francisco slated for this fall, Yangon painters like Nyein Chan Su are beginning to make a name for themselves in the international art scene.
In the 1950s, fine art schools opened in Yangon and Mandalay and a National Art Association was formed in Yangon, but after 1962, when a military regime instituted a socialist economy, there was greater scrutiny of artists and it was more difficult to get supplies. In the 1980s, illustrators contributed to a few private journals, and galleries in Yangon’s most expensive residential area, the Golden Valley, held exhibits. The Irrawaddy news magazine, a daily online and monthly print magazine that covers Myanmar from Thailand, reported that 1993 was a turning point when several well-known painters exhibited their work in Singapore. When the military regime promoted the year of the tourist in 1996, gallery owners anticipated new buyers.
There are still problems for the artists today, including censorship and the threat of imprisonment if artists paint political subjects, such as portraits of Nobel Prize winning opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Private art shows may be delayed or cancelled without an explanation from the government, as occurred most recently in December 2007 with an exhibit called “New Zero,” featuring 21 artworks.
Nay Myo Say, another Yangon artist, said there are at least 25 internationally known artists in the city, but outsiders are mostly unaware of that fact.
“We have a very long history but no one knows about us,” said 41-year-old Nay Myo Say, who started painting in 1994 and now runs three galleries in the city. “There are a lot of artists here.”
Nay Myo Say recently opened the Anawmar Gallery of Art in the Golden Valley neighborhood, holding the city’s largest collection of paintings that date back to the early 20th century. He hopes the new gallery will attract wealthy art collectors inside Myanmar as well as tourists from throughout South East Asia, Europe and the United States.
Most galleries in Yangon sell more recent works that reflect abstract, impressionistic, realist and cubist influences.
Gill Pattison sells the work of over 30 artists at her River Gallery. A New Zealander who has lived in Yangon for five years, Pattison opened the River Gallery in the five-star Strand Hotel in 2005. One of her current goals is to promote the work of Myanmar artists abroad.
“Shows abroad are really what boosts their opportunities,” said Pattison.
Pattison organized the second Myanmar Contemporary Art Awards competition held in March, which had 486 artist entrants, including Nyein Chan Su, who won second prize in the first competition that she organized in 2004.
Pattison said the top 30 entries from this year’s awards, including its $6,500 prize-winner, will be entered in the Sovereign Asian Art Awards in Hong Kong to be announced in June.
One of three judges of the Myanmar Contemporary Art Awards was Joanna McLean, a New Zealander who runs the La Luna Gallery in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The gallery sells the work of about 15 Myanmar artists, including Nyein Chan Su and other Studio Square artists.
McLean, who carries paintings for the La Luna gallery from Yangon to Thailand in her suitcase when she visits the city, said the gallery’s buyers are mostly from Europe, Singapore and the United States, almost all tourists.
Nyen Chan Su’s paintings at La Luna sell for $900 to nearly $2,000.
When La Luna opened in 2004, it was the only art gallery on Charoenraj Road, now the road boasts 10 galleries and two sell art from Myanmar. The other gallery, Suvannabhumi, sells almost entirely Myanmar art.
Mar Mar, a 47-year-old Burmese woman, opened Suvannabhumi in May 2004. She has provided a key link among Myanmar artists and the international art community since 1985, when she began supporting painters in Mandalay with art supplies from Thailand. She currently trades art supplies for paintings with 60 Myanmar artists.
With nearly 100 paintings for sale in her gallery ranging in price from $50 to $10,000, Mar Mar has established a strong trust with the artists, a concept she said “is hard to explain in Burmese culture,” where friends are made instantly and visitors from abroad are treated like family.
When Pamela Blotner, a Berkeley artist and University of San Francisco Professor, first visited Myanmar in July 2006, she wanted to interview and write about the artists, but realized she could do more for them than just tell their stories.
One year later, Blotner organized a show of about 25 Myanmar artists at the American Center in Yangon, including Nay Myo Say and Studio Square artists, running for two weeks with nearly 70 visitors each day.
When she returned from her most recent trip to Yangon, Blotner carried back the paintings from the show. She is now fundraising for a San Francisco debut of the paintings this fall.
Blotner’s show will be the first for artist Nyein Chan Su in the United States. In that way she will have helped him achieve his goal in founding Studio Square to have “more freedom,” to show his work.
“I asked them what I could do for them,” said Blotner, of the Yangon artists. “They said exposure and communication with other artists outside.”
