The Crisis of Buddhism

Credit Line: Gift of Ian Holliday 2023, Collection of SMU

This powerful painting is part of an eponymous series completed in 2014. Formally linked by a red, white and black chromatic schema and by broken and agitated brushwork that charge the imageries with urgent tension, the series cast monks as dark figures in variously combative and abject states.

The Crisis of Buddhism is provocative on many fronts. Although Aung Soe Min's position is clearly sympathetic, the narrative is also difficult in a Buddhist country where monks are revered and where artistic iterations of Buddhism conventionally centre on the supra mundane and on the clergy's beneficent role.

Whilst Buddhist cosmology imputes engagement with politics where ethics provide the ideals of the just ruler, the clergy's active participation in politics is also ethically decried. Even so, incidents of clerical uprising stretch into the British colonial era, demonstrating that Burmese monks have historically entered the secular and political arena to resist unjust rule.

Fissures within the clerical community on ethical issues aside, the conflation of Buddhism with nationalism— "to be Burmese is to be Buddhist" is often quoted in reference to Buddhism as the core element of the Burmese national identity—has also witnessed xenophobic violence perpetrated against Muslim Rohingyas.

The Crisis of Buddhism is a devastating portraiture of clerical activism, at once impassioned and tragic in Myanmar's splintered socio-political landscape.

A self-taught artist and the founder-owner of Pansodan Gallery in Yangon, Aung Soe Min (b. 1970, Mandalay Region) is a prominent figure in Myanmar's art scene.

The SMU Art Collection has over 70 paintings from Myanmar donated by Ian Holliday. A specialist in Burmese politics, Holliday assembled the Thukhuma Collection which comprises of Burmese paintings largely dating from the transitional decade of the 2010s, presenting multiple artistic perspectives on a society in reform. On display at School of Social Sciences and Li Ka Shing Library, the gifted paintings depict the people, culture and land, from the streets of Yangon and rural peripheries to political icons and indigenous deities.