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Ralph Darbyshire is a writer for NY Arts.
Htein Lin, Self-Portrait. Courtesy of the artist.The Georgian splendor of Asia House in London’s West End recently played host to the work of the 40 year old Burmese artist, Htein Lin. Lin was an established comic, performance artist, and contemporary artist before his arrest in 1998 by the Orwellian sounding S.L.O.R.C. or State Law and Order Restoration Council, and given a seven-year sentence after his name was linked to political dissidents. Though he had been a local student leader, he was actually no longer a political activist having grown disillusioned with the pro-democracy movement. Fortunately, Lin was able to find ways to continue his practice, painting on cotton prison uniforms using a wide variety of improvised materials such as syringes, crockery, blocks of soap, and often using his own body as a printing block. It is this work, produced between 1998 and 2004, that is exhibited at Asia House under the title Burma Inside Out. This show, however, does not represent his entire output during his period of incarceration as none of the works on paper that he managed to have smuggled out exist, having been “recycled” by the ex Mrs. Lin.
What does exist has vitality and a rigor that is descriptive of a body and of a soul reaching far beyond the confines of reality. As well as the meta-physical, which is so often the retreat of the prisoner, there is color and movement, warmth, humor, and a kind of illustrative conformity that mixes a past, a present, and a longing for a future. The ingenuity is certainly part of the reason why the exhibition is so engaging. Detailed descriptions of working methods as well as conditions are scribed at length on the walls of the gallery. But there is a strong sense of self-consciousness that makes it something more than another handful of prison house pictures to be passed through Angola’s perimeter wire on sticky Louisiana October weekends. This work was always going to find an audience, its Western glances, and beautiful pathos gives works with titles such as Gloomy Room, Eclipse, and Biology of Art poetry of necessity as well as inclination. Lin’s use of metaphor and symbolism as well as the development of subtle allegories, a device most particular to contemporary Burmese literature, can be seen as a safety device but significantly one which Lin exploits hesitantly. It is this lack of candor and missing affirmation that steels not only his work, but the micro-circus that surrounds it, and sets it down in a difficult and shifting environment.
Htein Lin’s early release from prison in 2004 was apparently due to a reassessment of his case during which it was decided that the allegations made against him were unproven. On release he is said to have thanked his captors for providing him with the opportunity and inspiration to develop his art as well as the chance to give up drinking and smoking. Six months after his release he exhibited his prison paintings in Rangoon under the title 00235, which was his prison serial number. Worried that the popularity of Lin’s exhibition was placing him in renewed danger of arrest, the British ambassador, Victoria Bowman, offered to store his work in a safe place. In a Disneyesque twist, which saw one thing inevitably leading to another, whilst holidaying together in England, the ambassador accepted Lin’s proposal of marriage. In June 2006 they returned to Burma and got married. They now live in London.
Burma, it seems, is rather a benign, albeit kleptocratic, dictatorship where custodial sentences are regularly reviewed for any miscarriages of justice, and where one might quip with one’s jailors about the advantages of incarceration. Where according to text accompanying Burma Inside Out, political prisoners are offered preferential treatment over their criminal contemporaries. A place that enjoys freedom of movement and allows “subversive” art to be openly exhibited and even exported. Unfortunately, the reality is very different and is why the Htein Lin micro-circus should be propagating such an impression one can only surmise.
There is a sour serendipity surrounding the fact that Lin’s exhibition should have coincided with his country’s latest bloody and internationally unsupported grasp at democracy. Clearly, Asia House organizers did not know that events would so recontextualize the work. But they would have been aware that they were putting on a show of work by an artist whose country’s name is synonymous with what the U.N. Commission on Human Rights reports as, torture, summary, and arbitrary executions, forced labour, abuse of women, politically motivated arrests and detention, forced displacement, important restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association and oppression of ethnic and religious minorities. This is a country where the handing out of leaflets calling for democracy is punishable by five years’ hard labor. Singing a song the generals don’t like, seven years’ hard labor. Speaking to the BBC, 14 years’ hard labor, and sending a report to the U.N., 15 years’ hard labor. It is yet unknown how many were murdered this past October during the latest crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, but the number seems likely to be similar to the 10,000 killed in 1988.
That Htein Lin should not seek to inflame an already volatile and dangerous set of circumstances by any overt criticism or denunciation of the regime while in jail is entirely understandable. But Asia House, whose stated mandate is “to promote a deeper understanding of diverse Asian cultures and economies by hosting lively artistic and corporate events,” is clearly presenting Lin as a “Burmese” artist, and therefore as being in some way representative. They specifically state that they “hope Htein Lin’s exhibition will help raise awareness of what is really going on inside the country.” However, this exhibition goes no way toward offering any kind of awareness other than the fact that just as in every other country, people get locked up and they don’t like it. Nevertheless, this is a seductive and intimate body of work that fortifies the intricate levels of psychological and spiritual displacement that so squeezes the caged and the brutalized. But with a couple of rare exceptions, Peacock and Self-Portrait and an embroidery of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s democratically elected leader who has spent 12 of the last 18 years in detention, there is little to indicate that there is anything going on in Burma worth drawing one’s attention to. The key to this is the use by Asia House of the word “corporate.”
In 1996, Aung San Suu Kyi made a high-profile appeal to foreign governments not to do business with the S.L.O.R.C. The next day senior British Official Mike Cohen, the head of exports to Asia and the Pacific at Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry met with senior officials of the regime’s investment agency to “assess the market for U.K. companies.”
The Western scramble to exploit the latest Asian tiger cub economy began with the military Junta’s attempt to distract the international community from the 1988 massacre through means of a simple re-branding exercise. They renamed the country Myanmar and opened up their markets to foreign investment. The treasure came quickly with the oil company, Total, investing in a $1-billion pipeline to carry Burma’s natural gas from beneath the Andaman Sea into Thailand. It has been estimated that the deal will give the Junta’s Generals $400 million a year over 30 years. It is thought that as many as 5,000 troops guard the pipeline and protect Total personnel.
Clearly, it will take a lot of dead monks to make the kleptocrats walk away from this kind of booty, particularly when their legitimacy is endorsed by foreign businessmen who seek to justify what their embassies call “positive engagement” and “critical dialogue.”
Martin Morland was the British ambassador to Burma at the time of the 1988 massacre and claimed to be astonished by events. “There was a degree of repression in the Burmese system, which I thought the Burmese people took for granted and I discovered in 1988 that they did nothing of the kind. They wanted the same human rights, broadly speaking, that we want in the West. The lesson of 1988 was that, like everyone else, they wanted the government off their backs. They wanted freedom.”
Mrs. Lin can not have been laboring under any illusions as to how the Burmese people might take their repression for granted when she presided over what is in reality an over-inflated trade mission in her role as “Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Union of Myanmar.” Indeed, prior to taking up this role in 2002, Victoria Bowman had served as a junior diplomat in Rangoon between 1990 and 1993. During the uprising of 1988 the regime had momentarily teetered as the army ran out of bullets. Only a last-minute delivery of Chinese ammunition through Singapore saved the junta. In 1990, her first year at the Embassy, unrest hit the streets of Rangoon once again. This time, however, the ammunition was supplied through Singapore by a British company, BMARC, a subsidiary of the now bankrupt British multinational, Astra.Burma, or as Stefan Kosciuszko, chief executive of Asia House puts it, “Burma or Myanmar,” does have an image problem. But the West has a memory and a greed problem. Art shouldn’t be a patsy. Creaky-floored spot-lit art brothels such as that in Asia House should not divorce themselves from stubborn reality. The trickle-down effect of the euphemistic “positive engagement” that the Lin’s gilded love story has been used to promote is a fantasy that has been exposed time and time again. Asia House is not a venue that promotes the finest traditions of creative integrity and the major problem with Htein Lin’s exhibition is the fact that it is so engaging, when really everything coming out of Burma should be what Samuel Becket describes “as a stain on silence.”
