On the first floor of a dilapidated building in downtown Rangoon, a narrow staircase leads up to a small space that probably houses more contemporary art per square meter than anywhere else in the city: the Pansodan Gallery. Unlike other galleries, such as those at Bogyoke Aung San market that only sell paintings with “exotic” themes to satisfy the wildt Orientalist fantasies of tourists, Pansodan reveals an art scene far richer than one would expect in a country like Burma/ Myanmar—mired in poverty, isolated for years from the rest of the world, and tightly controlled by one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world.

In its three years, the gallery, open every day of the week until six in the evening, has become a meeting place for artists and art enthusiasts. Burmese and foreigners all visit the gallery, not only to buy or sell pieces of art, but to have a tea, exchange ideas, attend a poetry reading, or simply to relax for a while. The gallery’s owner, Aung Soe Min, is a gentle and kind man that welcomes visitors with Burmese hospitality, and is always relaxed and happy to answer any questions.

Aung Soe Min was born 41 years ago in a small town in central Burma. Testifying to the country’s isolation, he says he never met a foreigner until he was 25 years old. After studying engineering, he spent several years in the publishing business and began collecting books. Today he owns one of the largest libraries of Burma, which is visited by scholars from around the world.

In the late 1980s, after the collapse of the regime of Gen. Ne Win and his “Burmese Way to Socialism,” there was a slight cultural opening when the military junta that succeeded tried to attract foreign investment. “The country was changing and I tried to take advantage of this to study everything I could,” says Aung Soe Min. He also tried to make films, but he couldn’t always get the necessary permits, which, combined with a lack of official support or distribution, made it a nearly impossible undertaking.

During those years, Aung Soe Min met numerous writers and artists, and seeing that the country lacked the “infrastructure and market necessary for artists to distribute their works,” he decided to open his own gallery in 2005. It took him three years, but in 2008, after overcoming many obstacles and using the profits he made from selling “three especially valuable paintings” he was able to buy a property located in downtown Pansodan Street, close to the old colonial neighbourhood at the heart of the city, and open his gallery.

“At that time there were several galleries in Rangoon, but the majority catered exclusively to foreign clients. Burmese people did not even visit many of these galleries, or if they did it was only when accompanying a foreigner. What I’m trying to do here is create a space that’s open to evrybody,” says Aung Soe Min. His purpose is not only to “sell paintings, but also awaken Burmese people’s interest in the arts. When people say that I promote artists, I say no, I’m promoting a public.”

According to Aung Soe Min, works from some 200 artists are for sale at the Pansodan Gallery, which is not hard to believe since every day new paintings appear on the walls or scattered around the floor. “Artists will often come in and tell me they need money urgently. They bring me a painting, and if I like it I buy it myself and then try to resell it. Most other galleries, on the other hand, usually don’t pay artists until they sell their works,” he explains.

It’s not easy being an artist in Burma. The poverty, the lack of opportunities, and the scarce knowledge or interest in contemporary art make developing an artistic career far more difficult than it is the case of other countries. One of the young artists that displays his work at the Pansodan Gallery, Ein Aye Kyaw, manages to make a hard living painting by commission, especially traditional landscapes. After studying zoology and fine arts at the University of Rangoon, he decided to devote himself professionally to art five years ago when he saw a man painting on his street, he thought that “he’s the only person that really looks tranquil and happy” and that man became his first mentor.

Ein Aye Kyaw’s paintings, in a simple, impressionist style that he polishes in each painting, depict ordinary scenes or images that, as he explains, compel him to paint without really knowing why—an old taxi in the rain, a child playing in a park, or the strange structure of the Arakanese Kingdom, a half-pagoda, half-military fort palace that came to his mind after seeing an official building in Naypyidaw, Burma’s new capital that the military junta built in the middle of the jungle six years ago.

The gallery also exhibits portraits of the Burmese democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, which would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier. In any case, government control over the visual arts is not as strict as with literature or the press. “The government simply is not interested and doesn’t care about art. They don’t help us, but they don’t cause problems either. They just ignore us,” comments Aung Soe Min.

But artistic freedom can sometimes constrained by prejudice and bias. Burmese society is deeply conservative and does not tolerate, for example, the exhibition of nudes (http://www2.irrawaddy.com/article.php?art_id=15783), nor is it legal.

At the same time, the art world is imbued with a sense of tradition and hierarchy which makes it a closed shop where innovation is not always well received. The rejection of modern styles in Burmese art dates back to the colonial era, when for many years “Western” influence was considered a threat to the cultural purity of the nation.

Painters like Bagyi Aung Soe (1924—90), considered by many to be the father of modern Burmese art, fought a long and hard cultural battle for the acceptance of artistic ideas that were looked down upon as “foreign” by the purists. From this arose the expression “crazy art” to describe modern and abstract art.

This battle has not yet come to an end, but the pieces on exhibit at the Pansodan Gallery attest to the growing presence of contemporary artistic styles, and that realist art lives side by side with the abstract, the expressionist, or pop. The Burmese artistic scene is very eclectic, and has witnessed a slight boom (http://www2.irrawaddy.com/article.php?art_id=3301&page=1) in recent years, as well as a surge in interest overseas. Several artists now exhibit their works in neighbouring countries, as well as places like the United States or the United Kingdom.

Nonetheless, very few Burmese people can buy paintings or sculptures, even though nearly half of the buyers at Pansodan are from Burma. With an art market so underdeveloped, people rarely buy works as an investment, a trait that differentiates them from collectors in other countries.

According to Aung Soe Min, for a Burmese person “buying a painting is a personal decision.” Another peculiarity in Burma is that people like to collect, almost obsessively, the largest possible number of works from a single artist. “They don’t care if they have 100 paintings from only one painter. Often, they store the paintings and alternate them on the walls of their homes.”

Driven by his love of collecting, Aung Soe Min has embarked on a parallel project, a history of Burmese graphic art since the colonial era. He is working with Kirt Mausert, a young American anthropologist living in Rangoon who also collaborates in the management of the gallery. Mausert explains that the goal is to publish a book that “explores, through publicity and propaganda, the changes in social relations that the country has experienced in recent history,” an unprecedented approach in Burmese historiography. For this project, they have created an archive of old photographs, newspapers, postcards and propaganda advertisement that they have acquired at innumerable places around the streets of central Rangoon. In many cases, the vendors themselves go to the gallery to offer the materials they have acquired.

Mausert is convinced that the project will help to shed light on the recent history of Burmese art, especially considering that the vast majority of painters combine their personal artistic careers with other commercial work like advertising or comics, a very popular genre in the country. However “the artistic value of these commercial works is not demeaned when they do more serious art. There is no stigma against painters doing commercial work, and both activities influence each other.”

“The historiography of Burma has suffered many distortions in recent years,” explains Soe Min. “In any case, it is based on the texts, not the images produced by this society, which are not given any importance when it comes the time to reconstruct history. Hardly anybody values this kind of things, and I think they should be preserved in a museum.” Faced with the neglect of the government, the conservation of the visual legacy of the country, as well as the promotion of the Burmese cultural and artistic life, depends almost exclusively on the enthusiastic work of people like Aung Soe Min.

Originally published in Spanish in the website FronteraD under the title “El galerista de Rangún”.