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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

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award-winning short animated film about the life of a Myanmar girl

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award-winning short animated film about the life of a Myanmar girl

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My Life I Dont Want [2016] _ Official HD _ Animated Short Film

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Article about Peace & Art

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Artists also have their own favourite artworks, paintings or sculptures that other people may not be so familiar with.

Artist Aye Ko's favourite art work dates back to 2010, when he was a political prisoner in Myanmar. For him, this work captures the everyday and universal struggle for freedom in an unfree country.

His work is called "What is Peace?"

"It was very risky back then, to even talk about politics. No one else dared to comment on the government. I created this work, because I wanted to make a statement about my country," Aye Ko said.

"In the years after I created that work, Myanmar started becoming more democratic. I stopped creating political artworks," he added.

His "What is Peace?" series includes a total of 15 pieces, created in France, Germany, China, Vietnam, Hungary and his native Myanmar. The series is composed of performance art and paintings.

The concept of peace can be conveyed in so many different ways, from performances where he wears all white to using doves (the symbol of peace) to touch the hearts of audiences. Each artwork tries to capture the way citizens feel when they are deprived of their basic freedoms under military governments.

"When I first started my political performances many people were critical of me, because the performances were so different to what they expected as 'art'. I even performed naked, as I wanted to be free from cultural constraints - in my natural state," Aye Ko said.

When talking about his work, he compares art to food.

"I never created art without first thinking about the concept first. It's not perfect like a curry without salt"

Not only has Aye Ko had a profound influence on Yangon's art scene after leaving his home town of Pathein in the late 1980, he has also paved the way for younger generations of artists over the years. In 2008 he created the New Zero Art Space - a place where young artists can meet and exhibit their work.

He turned his attention to modernist art in the early 1990s, before being arrested for his political activism. He was imprisoned for three years between 1990 and 1993.

Aye Ko has been participating in many art festivals around the world, sharing his ideas about peace with art lovers in other countries.

He won the Joseph Balestier Award for Freedom of Expression in Art in 2017. A three-time nominee, Aye Ko has been a finalist for the award since its inaugural year in 2015. The award recognises artists and curators from South East Asia, who are committed to the ideals of liberty and freedom of expression in their work.

The artist has also performed and participated in residences throughout South East Asia, Europe and America.

After the success of his New Zero Art Space, Aye Ko established the New Zero Village Art School in 2013. The school helps train local artists.

"When I started creating art work I never forgot the value of the message. I always found freedom in my art, because it was a freedom I could not find in my own country until now," Aye Ko said.

The artist will continue to explore the concept of peace in future works, as he believes that the peace process and struggle for freedom in Myanmar is not complete.

When Myanmar holds the next general election in November 2020, Ko Aye said he will not vote.

"I will never vote in the election, with the rules favouring the military government," he said.

The question of "What is Peace?" is one that every successive government around the world can ask, of itself and its citizens. How to achieve peace, however, is another matter altogether.

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Artists also have their own favourite artworks, paintings or sculptures that other people may not be so familiar with. Artist Aye Ko's favourite art work dates back to 2010, when he was a political prisoner in Myanmar. For him, this work captures the everyday and universal struggle for freedom in an unfree country.

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For artist Khit Bhone Mo, death could be beautifully gift wrapped to give as a wedding present. Or it could be commanded to greet everyone with grace as they enter the office of a CEO in a bookstore. Sometimes, no matter how tight its schedule, death just had to sit all day long by the cobwebbed window of his tiny gallery when the artist summoned it to be there.

"This painting is inauspicious to be in an office," remarked a monk when he saw Khit Bhone Mo's conventional Buddhist painting-complete with an unnerving twist-in San Mon Aung's office one day.

In the image adorning the wall of the CEO's office in the Yangon Book Plaza, a young novice carrying a large food container follows a monk in a neat robe who is putting up a ragged and frayed umbrella. Both are striding so fast they could disappear out of view in a blink. They are also tilting their heads back, looking up to the gold-soaked firmament.

This spectacular serenity has long been identified with Buddhist art in Myanmar. But once the familiar flesh of the figures is stripped away, and their skeletal beauty is embraced, the painting can be reduced to a downright disgrace, even in the eyes of a monk. As San Mon Aung puts it, Khit Bhone Mo's skeleton paintings can be "distasteful" to Burmese, who tend to seek utopia in art.

Maybe the fact that an art connoisseur like San Mon Aung has consistently collected only the artworks of late master Bagyi Aung Soe suggests that boundary pushers are a rare find in contemporary art in Myanmar. But when Khit Bhone Mo held his first solo exhibition, Deadly Rhyme, in 2017, San Mon Aung discovered that the artist had this "unusual" element. It seems that sometimes fate makes the great short-lived to punish mediocrities. On his 48th birthday on Oct. 20, Khit Bhone Mo departed this life on the same day he arrived.

That was exactly 13 days before his second solo exhibition, Saffron, which is organized by Yangon Book Plaza's We Collection. All 16 paintings, evocative of the Saffron Revolution in Myanmar in 2007, feature skeleton monks. A gasping monk with many bullet holes in his skull puts up a ragged and frayed umbrella on which two pigeons are resting. A monk runs in a panic, spreading his battered robe like a wing. A boggle-eyed monk presses the left side of his skull with an umbrella clutched under his armpit.

Most relate Khit Bhone Mo's morbid panache for mortality in his paintings with his deteriorating health over the last few years. He suffered from chronic heart problems and had a severe stroke, and had to visit the ICU several times for these and other illnesses, and have many surgeries. But, years before all of these commenced, his close friend L Minpyae Mon said, Khit Bhone Mo had often talked about his inspiration for painting skeleton monks.

Far from being morbid, the artist was well known for being annoyingly optimistic, prone to sudden bursts of laughter, and possessing a wicked sense of humor. As a wedding present, he once gave a friend a painting of skeleton musicians performing in a traditional Myanmar drum ensemble. If someone told him anything negative, he would say with a grin his signature line: "There is nothing to feel sad about in life-not even death."

It seems that what Khin Bhone Mo truly captures in his paintings is a sense of time passing-whether fast or slowly. Be it a man in a battered cloak-in one painting in his Deadly Rhyme series-playing a wavy piano on a seemingly flowing bed of dry leaves; or the delicate yet frigid movement of a woman's hands as she combs the hair of another skeleton woman. Sometimes, even when the figure is still, like that of a translucent skeleton monk sitting on a bench, unaffected by a bunch of ghoulish crows hovering around him, there is an urgent sense of action within him.

The anatomy of the skeleton seems to have ultimately enabled him to conjure this true living element of time, rather than death. Yet, Khin Bhone Mo had to go through fire and water to get to this artistic enlightenment. There were times things got so despondent for the artist that he had to take off the frames of his paintings and sell them to earn money-however little-when not a single piece sold. But even when he was so penniless he could not afford to buy paints and canvases, he alienated customers, who tended to bargain for his art-while the true art he fought for was not marketable.

According to his friends, there were only two things in his life-art and alcohol-and both seemed to take his life in the end. For such a maverick artist, there can be few places on Earth to take refuge. But the Deadly Rhymes and Saffron series put Khit Bhone Mo's art in the company of the medieval French Danse Macabre paintings and the Spanish master Francisco de Goya's Two Old Men Eating Soup.

In fact, San Mon Aung said, Khit Bhone Mo's hopes for the Saffron exhibition are what kept him going as his illness advanced day after day. But death seemed to have a different script, in which Khit Bhone Mo would not live to see Saffron open. Despite this, his bodily sickness could never deter his hyperactive imagination.

In Deadly Rhyme, the musical notes the skeleton is playing are a mixture of three famous Myanmar traditional songs. Aye Myat Mon, the partner of Khit Bhone Mon, said they are Hmone Shwe Yi (Gorgeous Lady) and Hsaung Ami (In Time for Winter)-but she can't remember the name of the last one.

In Saffron, Khit Bhone Mo hid his scarred identity somewhere. An observant viewer will see that the inner left legs of the monks in most paintings bear a long vertical rough stitch, running from right above the ankle almost up to the knee. To anyone who would think of this as a tragic episode, Khit Bhone Mo would probably say, "There is nothing to feel sad about in life-not even death."
The "Saffron" exhibition is held at Yangon Book Plaza, Lamdaw, from Nov. 2-4. Myint Myat Thu is a freelance journalist and cultural researcher, focused on the development of art economy and the Myanmar film industry. You may also like these stories: Myanmar Hosts First Major Art Auction High-Definition da Vinci: Exhibition to Display Digital Versions of Leonardo Masterpieces

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Arts | Myanmar Artist Khit Bhone Mo's Deft Touch With Death

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For artist Khit Bhone Mo, death could be beautifully gift wrapped to give as a wedding present. Or it could be commanded to greet everyone with grace as they enter the office of a CEO in a bookstore.

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The Storytellers ရဲ့ ကော်ဖီဆိုင်လမ်းခွဲ single ကို JOOX ကနေ နားထောင်နိုင်ပါပြီ။

Starring: Nang Su Pearl Htet_ နန်းဆုပုလဲထက်

ဒီ video အားခွင့်ပြုချက်မရှိဘဲ မိမိ page တွင် ပြန်လည် upload လုပ်ခြင်းမပြုလုပ်ရ။ တွေ့ရှိပါက တရာဥပဒေအရ အရေးယူဆောင်ရွက်မည်။

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The Storytellers ရဲ့ ကော်ဖီဆိုင်လမ်းခွဲ single ကို JOOX ကနေ နားထောင်နိုင်ပါပြီ။ Starring: Nang Su Pearl Htet_ နန်းဆုပုလဲထက် ဒီ video အားခွင့်ပြုချက်မရှိဘဲ မိမိ page တွင် ပြန်လည် upload လုပ်ခြင်းမပြုလုပ်ရ။ တွေ့ရှိပါက တရာဥပဒေအရ အရေးယူဆောင်ရွက်မည်။

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WOMYN NOW. 534 likes · 1 talking about this. ❀ Making Performance Art accessible ❀ Women are taking charge of their artistic development by solidarity building and supporting each other.

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ဆရာေအာင္မင္းရဲ႕ ျမန္မာေခတ္ျပိဳင္အနုပညာ-၁ အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာျပန္စာအုပ္ကို Myanm/art gallery အမွတ္၉၇/ပထမထပ္၊၃လႊာ မွာဝယ္ယူ႐ွိနိုင္ပါျပီ။ေစ်းႏႈန္းကေတာ့ ေဒၚလာ ၃၀ / ျမန္မာေငြက်ပ္ ၄၀၀၀၀ ပါ။ ဘယ္Artist (ပန္းခ်ီ၊ စာေရးဆရာ၊musican၊ filmmaker၊ ကဗ်ာဆရာ၊) အနုပညာနယ္ပယ္ကလူမဆိုဇူလိုင္လ ကေန ေအာက္တိုဘာလ အထိ ၃၀% ထိ ေလ်ာ့ေစ်းျဖင့္ဝယ္ယူအားေပးနိုင္ပါျပီ။ ျပည္ပကေနမွာယူခ်င္တယ္ဆိုရင္လည္း ပို႔ေပးပါတယ္။

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Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive - MARCA

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Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive - MARCA, Yangon, Myanmar. 4,654 likes · 6 talking about this · 43 were here. An art educational institution supporting reference collections of books and...

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A television drama that extols the role of the Tatmadaw in Myanmar's modern history is a failure of art and propaganda but provides insights into the psychology of the armed forces.

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"Altarpiece"
By Bart Was Not Here
(English Below)
ဒီဇာတ်ကောင်ဟာ ဖန်တီးသူရဲ့ နတ်ဘုရားအသွင် ကိုယ်စားပြုမှုတစ်ခုဖြစ်ပြီး ဖန်တီးခြင်းရဲ့ သိမ်မွေ့အနုစိတ်သော အနှစ်သာရတစ်ခုလည်း ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။ အနုပညာဆိုတာဟာ တကိုယ်ကောင်းဆန်ခြင်း၊ လက်စားချေခြင်း၊ မိမိကိုယ်ကိုဖျက်ဆီးခြင်း၊ လှိုက်လဲပျူငှာခြင်း၊ နားလည်နိုင်ခြင်း၊ စိတ်ကူးယဉ်ဆန်ခြင်း နှင့် သစ္စာစောင့်သိခြင်းတို့ဖြင့် တပြိုင်နက်တည်းမှာ ဖြစ်တည်နေပါတယ်။ ဒီဇာတ်ကောင်ကို ပန်းချီကားထဲမှာ မြင်ရတဲ့ အချိန်တိုင်း အနုပညာဖြင့် ဖွဲတည်ထားတဲ့ နတ်ဘုရားကို ကိုယ... ်စားပြုတယ်။ နှစ်သိမ့်မှုတစ်ခုနဲ့အတူ သူဟာ သိပ်ကို ခေါင်းမာပြီး ဆိုးတယ်။ ဒါပေမဲ့လည်း သူဟာ အမှန်နဲ့ အမှားကို အပြည့်ဝဆုံးဖြတ်နိုင်စွမ်းရှိပါတယ်။ အဲဒီစွမ်းရည်ဟာ တီထွင်ဖန်တီးနိုင်တယ်။ လွတ်လပ်တယ်။ လူတွေအတွက်တော့ ဒါဟာ သူတို့ရဲ့ဘဝထဲမှာ ကိုယ်တိုင်ကို ပြန်ရှာတွေ့နိုင်မယ့် တံခါးတစ်ခုလည်းဖြစ်ပါတယ်။

This character is an anthropomorphic representation of Creator and the delicate essence of Creation. Art is selfish, vengeful, self-destructive, welcoming, understanding, romantic, and loyal at the same time. Every time you see this character in a painting, it is representing a deity that shapes art. He is pretty hard headed and bad with comforting you but it serves its moral compass to the fullest. And the moral compass is creativity, freedom, and the doorway for people to find themselves in life.

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YANGON-In Myanmar, where nudity is still largely taboo, painting nudes is difficult for native artists, as is publicly exhibiting those paintings-and even more difficult is finding nude models to sit for drawings.

Modernist Zaw Mong, however, has found and painted the models, and is now showcasing them through Friday at Yangon Gallery.

"I had largely drawn [nudes] with figures from my imagination, hardly ever with models sitting for me," he said. "Now I have tried it. In this exhibition, I have drawn what I've seen."

Zaw Mong made his name with cityscapes, urban scenes and modernist paintings focused on Myanmar traditions; his first show featuring nude figures is also his tenth solo art exhibition.

But, because of the taboo, most of the models posed via photograph.

"There is difference. A photo is two-dimensional, but with a [live] model you draw in three dimensions. You draw the figure that you see right in front of you. From the lighting and environment to the feelings, there is much difference," he said.

The exhibition features 59 acrylic paintings, available for purchase at prices ranging from US$1,000 (1.5 million kyats) to $5,000.

Zaw Mong was born in Tada-U Township in Mandalay Region in 1960. The mechanical engineering degree holder began learning his craft through English-language art books before becoming a well-known illustrator, cartoonist and modernist.

"If I had drawn these anatomical figures much earlier, these paintings would be better and more accurate," he told The Irrawaddy.
You may also like these stories: Healing Images: Exhibition Showcases Works by Art Therapy Patients Art Exhibit Builds Bridges and Distorts Experience New Exhibition by Artist Kyar Pauk Fascinates the Eyes and the Ears

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Arts | Modernist Painter Defies Myanmar Taboos in New Exhibit

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YANGON-In Myanmar, where nudity is still largely taboo, painting nudes is difficult for native artists, as is publicly exhibiting those paintings-and even more difficult is finding nude models to sit for drawings. Modernist Zaw Mong, however, has found and painted the models, and is now showcasing them through Friday at Yangon Gallery.

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The result was 12 acrylic paintings that are being displayed in the Tay Bon Mar or "The Three Main Realms" exhibition at Myanm/art in downtown Yangon until August 16.

The exhibition takes its name from the dhamma songwhich reflects on existence, cause and effect. The etymological origins of the word can be traced to the Sanskrit word trailokya; the word was slowly formed into ti bon mar and then to tay bon mar.

Of the three spheres, kama-loka (desire place) is a semi-material world where hell and our living realm coincide. Rupa-loka (form, shape, figure place) is a higher plane of forms that have a more meditative than physical existence, and arupaloka (formlessness place) is the highest of the three, an immaterial world where existence depends on the level of concentration attained. Think of it as the Buddhist version of Dante's Divine Comedy.

His art of a cow calving are placed next to depictions of geckos painted by Lwin Oo Maung, 36, who said his time alone made him "connect spiritually" with the little lizards crawling around his house.

When? Until August 16. The gallery opens everyday from 11am to 6pm.

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Myanmar painters showcase lockdown art inspired by Buddhist cycle of rebirth

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The result was 12 acrylic paintings that are being displayed in the Tay Bon Mar or "The Three Main Realms" exhibition at Myanm/art in downtown Yangon until August 16. The exhibition takes its name from the dhamma songwhich reflects on existence, cause and effect.