Pictures at an exhibition By Aung San Suu Kyi

Written by Aung San Suu Kyi 

Mainichi Japan

Some of my favorite memories of Oxford are linked to museums. First of all, the Ashmolean. A swerve of the bike was all that was necessary to take me there on my way home from the center of town. The quiet that wrapped around me as I wandered through the almost deserted ground floor rooms seemed to enhance the luminescence of Chinese porcelain. I would stand in front of a single vase exquisite in its simplicity and gaze on it with nothing very much in my mind except the knowledge that I just wanted to go on gazing.

Then there was the University Museum with its Victorian ugliness that matched its displays of prehistoric bones and its pervasive medicinal smell. One was made wholly aware of the fact that this was a place that housed relics of the not always savory past. The Pitt Rivers Museum became particularly dear after I read Penelope Lively's The House at Norham Gardens to my sons, especially as a good friend who was stationed on a plantation in Papua New Guinea had told us hairy tales about feuding tribes whose arrows he had to dodge as he went about his daily work. I sometimes wondered whether it was the atmosphere or the contents or the concept that I found so attractive about museums.

Attending an exhibition of paintings is altogether different from going to a museum but when I went to one recently I found myself caught up in that old, familiar sensation: the simple desire to gaze and gaze and gaze. The exhibition was arranged in a large, hotel hall where refreshments for guests had also been laid out on white clothed tables so the only abstract notions of atmosphere or concept to be found were in the pictures themselves. The theme of the paintings was very simple: Shwedagon and Kyaik Htee Yoe, two of the most famous and revered pagodas in Burma. The works of five artists, four Burmese and one Singaporean, each with his own distinct style, were on display, every picture a different interpretation of scenes so familiar to Burmese that many of us already have our own personal versions tucked away in some recess of our mind.

As I went from one painting to another I realized that studying the pictures probably told me more about my own taste than about the intentions of the artists, however hard I might try to understand what message they might be trying to convey. Saya Sein Myint's works have always appealed to me because I am particularly fond of water colors. Even when he uses acrylic there is an inimitable sweep and grace to his strokes that bring out a play of translucent shades suggestive of aquarelle. Add to that the delicacy with which he applies gold leaf to enhance rather than to enrich and his pictures become glowing compositions of fluid lines and melting hues of smoke and amber. I gazed on the scenes of Shwedagon and Kyaik Htee Yoe that he had infused with light and movement on a flat piece of canvas and remembered the porcelain vases at the Ashmolean. The same elegance of line, the same unostentatious mastery of technique, the same skillfulness in creating light and movement out of the medium and material used. I began to understand that what made me gaze and gaze was the need to contemplate on sheer artistic talent, on pure genius, qualities that rivet and stir.

There was much at the exhibition that riveted and stirred. The two Plexiglas compositions of Saya Aung Min were invigorating in their originality of concept, the interplay of colors combining with metallic mirrored light to create a holistic impression of each pagoda as an integral part of its backdrop. Saya Zaw Zaw Aung's boldly imaginative representations of Kyaik Htee Yoe were arresting. In one painting, the mountain and rock and even the sky were molten flames barely relieved by splodges of brooding blue, the whole picture an antithesis of the common concept of pagodas as havens of peace. In another painting the golden rock stands in contrast to a frothing sea of foamy clouds in pale colors of sky and sea while a huge, greeny yellow moon glows almost menacingly in a dark blue space. The painting by Saya Zaw Zaw Aung that I could have gazed and gazed upon without consciousness of time was the one that made the rock and pagoda part of a galaxy of stony worlds floating in a claustrophobic cluster. I think the viewer is meant to feel uneasy.

Saya Min Wai Aung made me realize that I saw pagodas primarily as living places of worship for devotees rather than as religious symbols. His depictions of scenes on the platform of the Shwedagon pagoda absorbed me entirely, carrying me back to the times when I too could have been one of the little figures offering flowers, folding their hands in reverence, ringing the great black and red bell. Singaporean artist Ong Kim Seng's paintings also show scenes of worship at both Shwedagon and Kyaik Htee Yoe but as a lover of water colors it is his sensitive use of the medium that I found most attractive. His banana leaves simply have to be looked at again and again, ragged pieces of botany somehow transformed into specimens of beauty.

It delighted me that it was through the humble banana leaf I saw what so fascinated me so much in the pictures at the exhibition was the transformative power of art. 

(By Aung San Suu Kyi)

(Mainichi Japan) November 27, 2011