Weekly Southeast Asia Radar: Regional take on arty banana; arts centre on Fish Island

Sein Myauk Myauk, the affectionate nickname for “monkey” in Burmese, is often used to describe children playing. It’s a phrase that captures the mischievous nature of young minds.

In the 1990s illustrator Myay Zar helped popularise the phrase through his comic-book creation Shwe Thwe (Golden Blood). Myay Zar’s Sein Myauk Myauk was the main character in the state-own publication, which published bilingual stories about the monkey’s adventures.

Sein Myauk Myauk’s inquisitiveness gets the better of him in each story, making him vulnerable to mistakes and embarrassing mishaps. These “mishaps” aren’t disastrous, but rather provide the moral insight for each story.

Myay Zar’s house doubles as his office, where he has worked for the past 40 year. It is a house centered around his passion for illustrating, with new drawings and sketches sitting beside piles of old copies of the various magazines he’s worked for.

Saigon Independent Art Space San Art Launches Fundraising Exhibition This Month
Saigoneer

Founded in 2007 by four artists including Dinh Q. Le, Tiffany Chung, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Ha Thuc Phu Nam, the space is one of Saigon’s pioneer independent, non-profit and artist-initiated art platforms.

San Art recently announced its upcoming exhibition titled Opaque Signs, which features works donated by nine Vietnamese and international artists to raise funds for the organization. The organization will also introduce their newly renovated space after closing its gallery for one month in November.

Some of the artists featured in Opaque Signs include Ly Hoang Ly, a poet and a visual artist whose art has been exhibited inside and outside of Vietnam; Richard Streitmatter-Tran, a researcher, co-founder of art space Dia Project and an artist whose focus straddles different mediums including performance, new media, sculpture and painting; and Uu Dam Tran Nguyen, who juxtaposes urbanscapes and ancient Asian mythologies in one of his most recent exhibitions at Galerie Quynh.

“Though diverse in terms of forms, concepts and references, these gifts share a material element of luminosity. As store signs made of neon and LED lights proliferate across Vietnamese cities, light becomes a default symbol of pervasive commerce, of sleepless advertisement, of a permanent ‘on’ mode of being, perennially open to transaction,” reads the exhibition text written by Nguyen Hoang Quyen.

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Fish Island Arts Centre raised on rice fields
Khmer Times

Aside from its ancient architecture, stunning sunsets and balloon rides, Bagan is also a place where tourists like to buy traditional paintings – scenes of pagodas, village life, cosmology written large on an elephant’s foot. Though these are typically sold by children looking for a few thousand kyat, the paintings have their origins in a much longer history – stretching back to the Bagan dynasty itself, over a thousand years ago.

During the dynastic era artisans were commissioned by the king and monks to illustrate the walls of the temples with Buddha images, floral designs and scenes of village life. It was a tradition that spread throughout the country, to places like Pinya, Innwa and Taungoo, where murals were more or less the soap operas and newspapers of the day – conveying values about how to best to live a virtuous life.

In the early Yadanapon dynasty in Mandalay, Purapaik paintings became all the rage. Purapaik paintings were applied to folded manuscripts and, due to their portable nature, quickly became a more popular way to convey information about the Buddha’s teachings than the murals on immovable structures like walls and temples.

Royal events were often depicted in these paintings, with court artists capturing the details of important moments in the lives of the kings and queens. Purapaik paintings are essentially folded manuscripts, where the artist can depict a narrative on both sides of the canvas.

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