Untitled (Yellow)

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

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. She is the only female artist in the Thukhuma Collection at Singapore Management University. 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.

Although women practitioners are gaining prominence in Myanmar's contemporary art scene, art making remains a male-dominated field. Her two Untitled paintings in the display collection belong to a signature series of portraitures in which the female figure representing both herself and Burmese women is consistently repeated in pose, gesture and traditional attire. To the series motif, Zwe Mon introduces symbolic elements to project psychological states and social commentaries.

In this painting, the artist reclaimed traditional symbols, sending an empowering message of women in Myanmar. Zwe Mon has painted the woman a halo, challenging prevailing beliefs that women cannot achieve enlightenment. Similarly, she painted a mole under the eye, commonly believed to bring bad luck, to represent a woman in control of her fate.

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.