‘There’s Not Enough Bread, But There’s a Lot of Circus’: Despite Authoritarian Rule, Myanmar Art Grows

Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells, reports The New York Times.

Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people here are pushing the limits of what the military government, let alone their parents, considers acceptable art and entertainment.

Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular musical genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy pants to regularly held concerts here.

U Thxa Soe, a popular artist who mixes traditional “spirit dances” with something resembling techno music, said he believed that the government tolerated wild concerts in recent years partly because it suited its strategy of control. “You need to squeeze and release, squeeze and release,” he said.

“We live in fear,” he said. “We live under a dictatorship. People need fresh air. They release their anger, their energy.”
The success of artists like Mr. Thxa Soe undermines Myanmar’s often monochromatic image as a place of zero freedoms. This country, formerly known as Burma, is by many measures a brutally authoritarian place — human rights groups count 2,100 political prisoners.

But even if the generals willed it, people here say, the government would probably not be able to pull off North Korean-style totalitarianism. Society here is too unruly, disorganized and corrupt; people are too creative, the climate too hot for 24-hour repression.

The police are famously brutal, but they, too, suffer from tropical torpor: a common scene is a group of police officers napping in the back of a truck.

Over the past two years, entertainment options have rapidly expanded for residents of the country’s largest cities.

“The government is trying to distract people from politics,” said a Western-educated Burmese businessman who declined to be identified because he thought it might jeopardize his business. “There’s not enough bread, but there’s a lot of circus.”

The contrast between the military government’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and the surprisingly uninhibited entertainment scene can be jarring.

Early this month the leader of the ruling junta, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, observed Peasants Day, a national holiday honoring farmers, with a message addressed to the “Esteemed Peasantry.”

U Thu Myat Aung, 24, an artist who says he draws inspiration from the British street artist Banksy, hosted the country’s first graffiti show this month, on the eve of Peasants Day.

“We’ve been wanting to do this since 2003, but we weren’t allowed,” Mr. Thu Myat Aung said at the exposition, where women and men spray-painted pieces of plywood. U Nyein Chan Su, an artist whose work has often met with disapproval from the censors, said the government appeared to be particularly wary of abstract art.

“My opinion is that they only allow art they understand,” he said. “They are afraid that artists are doing political things by using contemporary art.”