Seven Decades, Myanmar: Trauma Art Forever

Fall 2018

Abstract:

This exhibition isn’t about looking at old art from past years. It’s about creating new art to recall past decades. These decades and the artist’ experiences of them are not just stories. This is their artistic conceptualization of the keys to their and our survival of those times.

            -Htein Lin, Curator of Seven Decades.

The Seven Decades exhibition (7th– 31stJuly 2018), held at Pyinsa Rasa Art Space at the Secretariat Office in Yangon, Myanmar, is one of the most visible confirmations that Myanmar’s censorship laws have become more lenient over the past decade.

My argument here is that although the Seven Decades did manage to recap the obscured Burmese history over the decades, it failed to propose a form of reconciliation with the past. It has almost been a decade since the censorship laws were lifted but Myanmar’s contemporary art still seems to be stuck in the portrayal of a trauma-inclined past.

The artists’ need to archive and retell the tragic histories of Myanmar is understandable, but at the same time, it is also about time for Myanmar artists to look beyond the past. Due to the fact that Myanmar was closed off from the international community for generations, many people in Myanmar are not aware of the severity of events that had happened all around the world—even the similar tragic histories of neighboring Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Burmese people have lived quite oblivious to the world outside Myanmar—at times, even the world outside their towns and cities. And artists and their artworks still imply as if Myanmar had the worst blend of tragedies and trauma in the whole wide world. It is time for Myanmar artists to look beyond Myanmar instead of insisting to be traumatized forever.

For full-length dissertation and citations, please contact me through email: thtwe@artic.edu, thet2nh@gmail.com