INTERVIEW WITH YIN KER
ART HISTORIAN AND ADJUNCT CURATOR AT CENTRE POMPIDOU
Available in French on ACA (Asian Contemporary Art) Project’s website here
Conducted for ACA Project in June 2023, by Amandine Vabre Chau
In 2021, Yin Ker co-curated Bagyi Aung Soe's solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Art historian and Adjunct curator for Southeast Asia at the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Yin Ker has written substantially on this multifaceted artist from Myanmar. ACA project thought it important to discuss this major figure in a broader context: considering his thinking, beliefs and philosophy. This might offer a glimpse of the artist’s significance to Burmese culture and to the ways we currently interpret contemporary art. Exploring his practice through a theoretical, curatorial and relational lens, this conversation hopefully testifies to the importance of pushing artistic boundaries.
INTERVIEW
plAy: Art from Myanmar Today, Osage Gallery, Singapore, 9 May–20 June 2010. Curated by Isabel Ching & Yin Ker. Image courtesy of Osage Gallery.
Amandine Vabre Chau : How did Bagyi Aung Soe's work become so significant in Myanmar, and to Burmese art? In your curatorial essay for the 2021 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Juggling paradoxes in the here and now, you specify that much of his production had been preserved. Yet, he wasn’t eminently displayed in prominent art institutions. How did his name live on without these spaces, while thriving within the art community?
Yin Ker : Aung Soe is currently only in the collection of National Gallery Singapore. The 2021 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is the only major solo exhibition to date. As to why he hasn’t caught the attention of other public institutions, perhaps it has less to do with his art and more to do with the absence of interest or expertise in artists from Myanmar and the region. Scholarly work has been one way of generating interest in his art—and interviews like this one too.
In Myanmar, Aung Soe is considered the poet’s artist as well as the artist’s artist par excellence. As early as the late 1940s when he was in his 20s, he was mentored by the country’s most esteemed literary figures like Min Thu Wun and Dagon Taya as well as artists like U Ba Yin Galay. He then went on to push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable as “art” in his country.
Today, his work lives on in the memory of amateurs of art and literature, who grew up seeing his works used as illustrations on and in books and periodicals on a monthly basis. Instead of limiting his activities to galleries and exhibitions which were scarce back then, he made it a point to make his art accessible to all levels of the highly literate Burmese society through illustration. Between 1952 and 1988 when he was blacklisted by the military government for an illustration on the 8888 Uprising*, not a single month passed without the publication of an average of a dozen new illustrations in at least one publication. Although most surviving original works date from the 1970s and 1980s, there are abundant printed illustrations going back to the late 1940s from the beginning of his career, of which more than 6,000 are documented and accessible on AungSoeillustrations.org. Many of these publications are sought after and collected nowadays. His fame as a movie star, in addition to his larger-than-life personality and outstanding appearance, fascinated his countrymen and only boosted his renown as a genius artist who excelled in multiple fields.
As such, although there is no work attributed to him in the national collection in Myanmar—Aung Soe shunned the establishment and the art market—he is still one of the most revered Burmese artists. It is noteworthy that plans for a national gallery in Myanmar never took off, and the national museum in Yangon did not and does not actively collect modern art; what is in the collection of modern paintings are mostly, if not all, donations by artists.
Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990), Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, 19 May–23 August 2021. Curated by Catherine David & Yin Ker. Image courtesy of Yin Ker.
In your essay “Felicitous ‘Misalignments’”, you expand on the dynamic between « modern », « modernity » and « contemporaneity » through the artist’s work; as well as their back-and-forth relation with tradition. More specifically, you mention that our definition of modernity is based on a Euro-americano-centric and linear interpretation. How does tradition offer us another, perhaps more sensible, access to modernity or contemporaneity?
By tradition, Aung Soe meant the spiritual, intellectual and artistic legacies closer to home in Asia, in addition to what he learnt from Western art. In fact, he spoke of “traditions of the world”: Egyptian sculpture, Italian Renaissance painting, Japanese ukiyo-e and Mughal miniatures, for example. It is less about placing tradition and modernity in a dialectical opposition than making these myriad “traditional” artistic expressions and thought systems the wellspring of modern art, in lieu of just Western modernism. It is about shifting the point of reference, expanding the spectrum of sources and possibilities, and relativising Western modernism which is widely assumed to be universal and the exclusive model for modern art. In other words, equipped with inherited spiritual, intellectual and artistic resources aka “tradition”, one creates new art by drawing on a wider range of tools of thought and expression in response to one’s society and for it.
Pursuing this analysis, is modernity (however defined) something we should strive for? Wouldn’t it be obsolete?
I would like to respond in two ways. First with Rabindranath Tagore’s argument that “those who have the true modern spirit need not modernise, just as those who are truly brave are not braggarts.” As such, there’s nothing to strive for or reject. Second, the so-called ”tradition” and “modernity” are not antithetical. They are like the old and the new, two wheels yoked to each other and moving in tandem. What’s new today will be old tomorrow; neither tradition nor modernity is permanently thus. The new doesn’t come from nothing; it arises or transforms from the old. In the words of Aung Soe’s teacher in Santiniketan, Nandalal Bose, “Tradition is the outer shell of the seed that holds the embryo of new growth; this shell protects the embryo from being destroyed by heat or rain or violence.” That new growth can’t be forced; it takes the time it takes.
*Series of pro-democracy protests in 1988, Myanmar