Saffron Uprising

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

Zwe Mon's painting invokes the clerical march that gave the 2007 Saffron Revolution its name. Through the devices of compositional symmetry and pictorial uniformity, she presents the imagery of a united front and a force of reckoning. The Saffron Revolution's immediate trigger was the military junta's overnight withdrawal of fuel subsidies, which added to the economic distress of a country ranked amount the poorest nations in the world. The junta's response was brutal: many were killed, monasteries were raided, monks beaten up and disrobed in public, jailed and sent to labour camps. Images of the crackdown circulated through international broadcast media and were seen by many Burmese through satellite television, further undermining the military's legitimacy in the Buddhist country. It has been suggested that the Saffron Revolution sped up the much delayed process for the 2008 constitution, first promised following the junta's refusal to honour the results of the 1990 general elections in which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy convincingly won.

Zwe Mon (b. 1990, Yangon) has been practicing art both full- and part-time since graduating from Yangon's State School of Fine Arts in 2009. Her paintings are characterised by an experimentation with textures. She contrasts or harmonises the treatment of the paint with the subject of her paintings which often touches on social and political issues, including the theme of education, protest, or the lives of the hard-working poor.

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.