User:Bonita Ellen/sandbox/Chuu Wai Nyein

Chuu Wai Nyein,a feminist artist from Myanmar(Burma) Chuu Wai Nyein is a Mandalay artist who has been active since 2008 when she began studying at the National University of Art and Culture, Mandalay and Technological University, Mandalay. She has had seven solo exhibitions, once in Mandalay in 2014, four times in Yangon in 2017, 2018,2019 and twice in Paris,France in 2018. Three international exhibitions are planned for 2019, one in New York in July, one in Paris in August and one in Thailand in September. She already had almost 30 local and international exhibitions including in London(England), Warsaw(Poland), New York (USA) and Canberra(Australia).

Chuu had been working on paintings which reflect her interest in the female identity when her artistic impulse found a new outlet after the sexual harassment of a guy on the street. She was driving the motorbike with her sister on the back when a guy on another bike reached over and groped her sister’s breasts. Enraged, She chased him on her bike, crashed into him causing a big accident, called the police and eventually suing him. This experience made her focus on gender issues and the condition of women in Myanmar today. Essential to the State’s vision of Myanmar people is the place of women. Women are cast as the bearers of tradition, but also seen as dangerous, should they become corrupted. According to the State, Myanmar women should be shy and quiet, wear traditional outfits, be virgins before marriage, and should not even think about mixing together men and women’s clothes in the washing machine, in case the man loses his manliness. These traditional roles have been forced upon women. Their ability to define themselves has been taken away. In Myanmar art it is common to see women depicted according to the traditional stereotypes. Chuu felt strongly that she wanted to present an alternative vision, to show that women can be so many other things. So she decided to create a series of paintings which portray Burmese women in a way which challenges traditional stereotypes. The works are multi-layered which both conceal and reveal. The strong, confident, sexy women depicted with traditional (male) accessories challenge the many ways society controls and judges women; the paintings show the ways that women resist and rebel, and the way culture is evolving. Like her peers today, the women in the paintings are sexy, playful, confident, and thoughtful – no longer prepared to accept the traditional role Myanmar society has thrust upon them for too long.

A quick squeeze of a breast and the motorbike-riding groper was already vanishing into the Mandalay traffic.

Ma Chuu Wai Nyein barely saw it happen. It would have been easy to forget and not make a scene, as usual, and perhaps that’s what she would have done if she were the victim. But the groper had targeted her teenaged sister, who was riding pillion.

“Close your eyes and hold me tight,” Chuu Wai Nyein told her sister, and then she sped off after the man, caught him at a traffic light and rammed him at speed.

Her bike was trashed, but the man was arrested and eventually charged. Yet Chuu Wai Nyein remained angry: angry at men who think they can do what they want to women and angry at the society that tells women to ignore it.

That anger would eventually become the inspiration for her aggressively lascivious portraits designed to beat the male gaze at its own game.

“Maybe if it just happened to me, and maybe if it just happened once, maybe I would forget about it,” Chuu Wai Nyein said. “But [afterwards] I found out most of my friends had a really similar story … I thought, ‘What can I do? I can paint.’ ”

Chuu Wai Nyein is preparing for her sixth exhibition, which will be held in late October in Paris. She usually paints women, often nude or semi-nude, legs apart, chest out, staring directly at the viewer. Her angles are sharp, the colours violent and garish. Her figures are often splayed across canvasses made from men’s longyis. ...