The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

185 ARTISTS The Myanmar Peace Industrial Complex, Map III (detail, top, and installation view) 2018 Oil on linen / 300 x 660cm / Courtesy: The artist / Photographs: Vincenzo Floramo Sawangwongse YawnghWe Born 1971, Shan State, Myanmar, Lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand; and Zuphen, the Netherlands Art and politics are inseparable for Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. Myanmar (formerly Burma), the country of his birth, has a past and present fraught by military repression and domination, which, in turn, has caused political and economic stagnation and ongoing abuses against the country’s ethnic and religious minorities. Yawnghwe’s paintings visualise devastating chapters drawn from Myanmar’s recent history. Documentary and family photographs form the basis of his unique pictorial language through which he explores events in the country's history. Certain images invoke Myanmar’s unrecorded political moments, and suggest that existing archives cannot reveal a nation’s entire truth. The artist's expression of his country’s past is inextricably linked to his own biography. His grandfather, Sao Shwe Thaik, was Myanmar’s first president following independence from Britain in 1948, and a hereditary ruler of the principality of Yawnghwe. When soldiers came to the family home to arrest Sao Shwe Thaik following General Ne Win's military coup in 1962, they shot and killed one of his sons. 1 His widow and another son, Chao Tzang (Yawnghwe’s father) helped form a resistance movement — the Shan State Army (SSA) — to oppose Burmese military and cultural subjugation. It was in an SSA forest camp that Yawnghwe forged a life as a nomadic exile. 2 Yawnghwe’s research combines existing published information — including works written by his late father — with his own personal insights so he may understand today’s Myanmar through lenses of the past. His expressionist style of painting is characterised by areas of abstraction that indicate unclear, lost or deliberately suppressed details. The Myanmar Peace Industrial Complex, Map III 2018 is a major work that addresses the contemporary condition of the state by mapping the political and financial flows between governments, corporations, organisations and institutions. The work highlights the significant role of the military, state agencies, political figures, cronies and international actors in what has been perceived as a failed, but heavily funded, peace process. The graphic network outlined in the painting underlines the entanglement of the country’s major players with power and authority, commerce and religion, and the impossibility of understanding this complex situation. Exhibited alongside the painting is a collection of small, handmade clay figurines, or amulets, entitled People’s Desire 2017–18. The assembly of figures evokes a sense of movement and exodus, and suggests the many protective amulets carried by refugees seeking asylum throughout the world. The accompanying plaque indicates that the talismans correlate with multiple episodes of conflict in Myanmar over the last six decades, and act as reminders that the arms used by the state to displace vulnerable groups can be linked to the weapons industry. Yawnghwe’s mix of aesthetic languages is strategic, as he states: My position allows me to move from one to the other. As I have no ‘voice’, any voice of others will be my tool. I do not really look at my work piece by piece; for me, the individual parts represent part of the oeuvre. If knowing myself as a minority within Burma complicates the aesthetic cultural framing of the work, it is a reminder of the need to know who is speaking, who is asking the question. 3 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s highly critical works actively complicate the exploration of his birthplace’s act of nation-building, as well as the ethics of the ethnocratic and coercive actions that it has enacted on its people. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 The former president would later die in prison under circumstances that were never fully explained. 2 The artist has spent time living in northern Thailand, Canada and Italy. 3 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, email to the author, 18 April 2018.