Dancers

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

Aung Khaing's is the story of an artistic career interrupted by decades of repression. Emerging in the late 1960s with modernist aspirations, the artist's attempt for a solo exhibition was thwarted by censorship authorities in 1984. Thirty years later in 2013, his first solo exhibition debuted the Burmese Dancers and Puppets series, for Aung Khaing a bitterly symbolic theme.

Aung Khaing (b. 1945, Yangon) is a self-taught artist whose early lessons came via books on Western Modernism and Burmese pioneer modernists Aung Soe (1924-1990) and Maung Ngwe Tun (1935-1992).

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.