We Are Moving

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

One of the roles of an artist is to bear witness to events and experiences. In this painting, Myanmar artist Aung Ko captured the tussle and stampede that followed three separate fatal bombings on 15 April 2010 at Yangon's Thingyan water festival. The blasts killed 10 and injured 170 people, and photographs of the scene were censored by the state. The work belongs to an eponymous series of photorealistic paintings made between 2012 and 2013 in response to the arrest of a photojournalist for taking bomb scene pictures.

Aung Ko's tightly cropped photorealistic rendering serves as an emphatic record that captures the claustrophobia, panic and confusion that must have gripped the crowd. It conveys a human jam with hands on another's shoulder as if collectively propelling itself forward in a slow shuffle. Though titled 'We Are Moving', both the viewer and the huddled masses in the painting cannot see beyond the frame of the canvas to where the pressing crowd is moving.

When considered apart from the immediate events that birthed the series, the irony between the title and the image is one that leads to an allegory of post-reformation Myanmar. Great expectations at the end of military rule in 2011 has given way to reservations on the pace and evenness of change.

Aung Ko (b. 1980, Bago Region) is one of Myanmar's leading contemporary artists. A graduate of the University of Culture, Yangon in 2002, he is the founder of the artists-community Thuye'dan Village Art Project which was established in 2007. He has shown at major international art events including the Singapore Biennale 2008, and Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2009.

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.