Bagyi Aung Soe

Born in Burma in 1923, when the country was still under British colonial rule, Bagyi Aung Soe came of age at a time of rising nationalism. He started out publishing cartoons in the local press and eventually worked as an illustrator for literary magazines in Rangoon, which became his main source of exhibition and livelihood. His work caught the attention of literary giants such as Zawgyi and Min Thu Wun, who sought to modernize traditional Burmese art and free the arts from the chains of colonialism.

In the early 20th century, prominent Burmese artists worked mostly within Western academic-style realist painting techniques. Aung Soe himself, early in his career, had revered Western art as the main model for artistic expression. Yet everything changed in 1951, only a few years after Burma’s independence in 1948, when the Indian government awarded Aung Soe a scholarship to study at the University of Viśva–Bharati in Śāntiniketan, India—a seminal school founded by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Tagore famously valued an “independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters,” and upheld humanist and universalist ideals that transcended national borders. Though Aung Soe’s one-year period at Śāntiniketan was brief, the historic institution and its philosophies profoundly affected the rest of his four-decade-long career, as Tagore’s liberated vision of modernism permeated his work.

After Aung Soe returned to Burma in 1952, he began deeply immersing himself in traditional Burmese art, crafts, and architecture, and experimenting with a rich mix of both Western and Eastern forms. In his art, he combined elements of Cubism and Surrealism, Buddhist iconography, and motifs and characters from traditional Burmese murals—all while injecting his own individual expression, which often bordered on risky and shocking considering what artists were allowed to depict during his time.

Aung Soe lived through radical transformations in Burma’s socio-political atmosphere—from World War II and the Japanese Occupation to the military coup in 1962, which launched a 26-year-long authoritarian rule that silenced dissenting voices. During that period, critical art, nudity, and the use of certain colors—such as red, and black and white together—were banned in art. Yet Aung Soe remained liberated in his practice. His paintings were eventually called “psychotic” for veering away from naturalistic forms. He defied the no-nudity rule and embraced sexual and political themes in the Burmese context.

Moreover, he sought to create art not for an elite art market but for the larger public, disseminating his work through mass publications like journals and newspapers. He employed cheap, affordable materials such as felt pen on paper and continued to work in illustration—the main platform for his avant-garde experimentations. Because of his unique choice of medium and interdisciplinary approach to art-making, he was consequently hailed as “truly singular among his contemporaries in Myanmar but also in the broader art of the 20th century,” according to Art Asia Pacific.

Amid his country’s tense socio-political context, Aung Soe carved a rich, expansive, and independent modernism in his art, and is now known as “the father of Burmese modern art.” In merging originality, tradition, and a dedication to his community, he continues to influence a younger generation of artists who are currently working within another turbulent period in Myanmar’s history. Over recent years, his work has attracted critical scholarly attention, culminating in a major solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021.