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Artists pay scant attention to regime restrictions by tackling a taboo genre

ENCOURAGED and emboldened by an increasing interest in their work among Western art enthusiasts and collectors, some Burmese artists are venturing into a genre that breaks with the past and bravely flouts official disapproval.

It’s literally naked defiance. These artists are tackling an aesthetic subject that has been treated openly in the West for centuries—the nude.

“Fat is beautiful”—sandar Khaing’s nudes are truly heavyweight art. (Artist: Sandar Khaing)

Traditional reticence combines with regime censorship in barring the public display of nude paintings in Burma. One young exponent of the genre, Sandar Khaing, can’t even show her work at home—“My mother doesn’t accept my work as paintings,” she told The Irrawaddy.

The young artist has exhibited her work once in Rangoon, at the French embassy, beyond the reach of regime censorship. She sold six paintings to foreign buyers, who paid up to US $4,000 for her large canvases.

Sandar Khaing’s canvases are large in every sense—she paints exclusively corpulent models. “I want to say [in my work] that not only slim people but also those who are fat are beautiful,” she said. “Fat women exhibit many more lines, and we can see beauty in these lines.”

Her vast, fleshy nudes strongly resemble the celebrated work of the British artist Lucien Freud, although he is totally unknown to Sandar Khaing. She says her inspiration comes from observation of the people she encounters on the streets of Rangoon—and even her own family members. Her sister, for instance, is her favorite model.

The young women who model for another groundbreaking Rangoon artist, Kyee Myintt Saw, are, by contrast, slim and beautifully proportioned. The 70-year-old painter is best known for his impressionistic oils, vivid representations of everyday Burmese scenes, but he has also ventured into the less conventional area of nude studies.

The naked young women who grace his canvases convey a vulnerable innocence and disarming lack of awareness of the allure of their bodies. Erotic suggestion is delivered by influences beyond their control—the caressing touch of light and shadow, for instance, which in one arresting scene paints what was interpreted by one gallery visitor as a suggestive black stocking across the lithe leg of a reclining nude.

Kyee Myintt Saw has exhibited throughout Southeast and East Asia, most recently in Chiang Mai, where Sandar Khaing’s work can also be seen.