Untitled Document

As a performance artist, writer, painter, and digital mixed photographer, Phyu Mon is one of Myanmar’s most versatile artists. Her work is highly informed by nuanced emotional expression and keen intelligence – traits which are evident across the variety of media in which she practices. She is also unique in a traditional culture in being a very gender-aware artist. Both her performance and photography address gender as one of its layers.

A general theme of restriction vs. freedom runs like a leitmotiv throughout most of her work. The most accessible place to see the play of this theme is in her most recent digitally mixed photography. Both the Human’s Hope of Traces series and the Born to Run series, explore these issues from a perspective that allows multiple interpretations.

In the dramatically composed photograph, Hope.1, a delicate woman’s hand emerges from a crack in a desolate, intractable landscape. Phyu Mon has said that this work expresses her feelings of being a woman in a very gender-traditional culture. For the knowledgeable viewer, knowing that this is an artist from Myanmar, one cannot escape the additional reading of political entrapment as well. Both of these readings indicate attempts to push against seemingly immovable objects, and the hope, clearly expressed in the work, that the object can be moved.

There is a further, more subtle layer of meaning. Most Myanmar artists are devout Buddhists, as are most of the population in the country. One of the tenets of Buddhism is that a person must accept one’s particular existence in a specific time and place. This cannot be changed. However, the full title of the series, Human’s Hopes of Traces, signals other opportunities for better existences in future lifetimes. In that sense, this specific lifetime is a limitation (with a not necessarily negative connotation) while the hope of future lifetimes elicit ‘freedom’ in an intricate dialectic of present acceptance and future hope. The delicate hand juxtaposed against something hard is echoed in Hope.2 and Hope.3.

Hope.4, with two enigmatic ‘windows’ in the universe opening onto small bleak landscapes, utilizes a concept from Marcel Duchamp’s mysterious and disturbing Etant donnés. As in Duchamp, in Hope.4 one may play a number of ways with the pairings of restriction/freedom, desire/accessibility, distant/near. Phyu Mon’s works do not effortlessly construct meaning for the spectator. As befitting an artist much concerned with general ideas of freedom, interpretation lies in an open, generous space between the artist and viewer.

Phyu Mon’s performance work pursues similar themes. The 2005 Nippon International Performance Art Festival in Myanmar entitled ‘Borders: withIn withOut’ allowed her to explore the familiar theme of ‘borders’ being simultaneously protective and restrictive.

Phyu Mon has also been an active short story writer for the past twenty years. Some of these stories speak so eloquently of a woman’s inner feelings contrasting with her outward behavior, especially with a man she loves. A most delightful story entitled, “The Bride, the Mirror, the Cloud, and the Bridegroom,” expresses a theme of wanting union with another, but unwilling to sacrifice one’s own identity and desires in the bargain. As one reads this story, the tension between wanting to please another and being true to oneself is quite palpable.

Knowing Phyu Mon’s familiarity with the Dada and Surrealists moverments, it is not a stretch to believe that some of the symbols in this story were influcenced by Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. The bride in her story is intimately connected with clouds as is the bride in Duchamp. The division of emotional capability between the man and the woman in Phyu Mon’s story constructs similarities with The Bride Stripped Bare… -- an exploration of male and female desire in a dance of opposition and complication as they try, but fail, to come together satisfactorily.

Phyu Mon largely addresses her themes through a Dada/Surrealist idiom. This is perhaps an ideal approach for a Myanmar artist who desires to be forthright, yet circumspect. The symbolism allows the knowledgeable viewer to read the layers of meaning, yet veils those same themes to a less astute, censorious eye. Borders withIn withOut: the perfect metaphor for an keenly aware, deeply sensitive woman artist – in the reality that is Myanmar today.