Myanmar artist Sai reveals junta’s horrors
A new exhibition in London by artist Sai reveals the horrors of an overlooked conflict
A bold new exhibition by a young Myanmar artist challenges people not to turn away from dead babies and brutalised women in conflict zones overlooked by the world’s media.
The London show, ‘Please Enjoy Our Tragedies’, is by Sai, a multimedia artist who blocks out his last name for security reasons. Some of Sai’s work will be shown at the Venice Biennale from 23 April, as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Personal Structures exhibition.
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine currently dominates global attention, Sai draws links between that conflict and domestic repression in Myanmar. “The same stakeholders are involved in Myanmar as in Ukraine,” he told openDemocracy. “Russia arms Myanmar’s generals and China supports them. It’s not a Ukraine problem; it’s a global problem.”
The reference is to a report by the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, Thomas Andrews, published one year after Myanmar’s military junta seized power on 1 February 2021. The report said the military had shown flagrant disregard for human life and deliberately targeted civilians using weapons provided by “UN Security Council members China and Russia”. Serbia and India also continue to sell weapons to Myanmar. Sai added that Ukraine had stopped arms sales to Myanmar after the coup.
On 21 March, the UN rapporteur summed up the human toll of the coup. The junta, said Andrews, had murdered more than 1,600 civilians, detained more than 10,000, displaced more than half a million and destroyed more than 4,500 homes, all while spreading armed conflict to regions previously at peace. International action on Ukraine, he added, is the standard by which the world’s response to the crisis in Myanmar should henceforth be measured.
Sai opened Facebook on his mobile phone, scrolling down rapidly. “See, we have the same problems as Ukraine. A little baby shot in the head, villages burnt down. Our newsfeeds are a very visual documentation of Myanmar’s suffering.”
The exhibition also works like a newsfeed in different mediums — fabric, images, videos — documenting the political turmoil that has engulfed Myanmar as well as the personal tragedies of its people.
That includes Sai’s own family. His father, Linn Htut, was chief minister of Shan state in the east of the country when the coup took place in 2021. Appointed to this post by the now-deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, Sai’s father had already been elected to the regional assembly in Myanmar’s landmark 2015 polls, which ended nearly 50 years of military rule.
“There was just one month left to go in his term,” Sai said. But his father was accused of corruption, thrown into prison and sentenced to 16 years hard labour. His wife, a former judge, was placed under house arrest, and Sai, their only child, went on the run along with daughter-in-law, ‘K’, a human rights activist.
Sai decided to use his art to show the world Myanmar’s painful reality. “Doing art is about using evidence,” he explained — to show the truth and serve as a fact-checker for the junta’s narrative.
Read on at https://www.opendemocracy.net.
