An unusual and fascinating encounter with one of Myanmar’s leading contemporary artists, better known today outside of his country than in his own – Borbála Kálmán meets conceptual artist Po Po.
A thick sketchbook opens up with drawings of wild, colourful, and monumental “landscape installations”. Some pages could easily be taken from a scene of a 1970s sci-fi novel. They are part of the several projects that actually exist, but only in the mind of Yangon-based artist Po Po. Artworks locked for decades inside the paper-sheets, impossible to realize when he was a young artist. Fortunately, the sketches survived and some could even come to life. One of them, created for outdoors and life-size, Road to Nirvana, was displayed on the occasion of the Singapore Biennale in 2013. The string installation uses the simplest material but truly awakens the viewer’s senses and stimulates the air around – especially as the work glows in the dark, and small bells accompany the visual journey that can follow a wind’s hectic mood. The Singapore Biennale wasn’t Po Po’s first artistic appearance outside Myanmar. Since 1999 he has participated in various events and group shows throughout the world. Road to Nirvana was an idea that Po Po first conceived in 1993. Exactly twenty years have passed until the moment its final physical realisation, and with it has come a whole new strength.
A Personal Understanding Unfolds
Timeless wisdom emanates from Po Po’s words as he talks about the path that has led him to where he stands today in the art world. His artistic achievement is the result of his self-taught past, says Po Po. But technically speaking, he’s not a “common self-taught” artist. Born in 1957, he did study art for five consecutive years at the summer courses of his Pathein high-school, three months a year. He learnt about perspective, lines, big and small-scale compositions, colours. His teachers introduced him to the notion of nature and its connection with art. Even as a teenager, Po Po was fascinated by the mechanics of his environment, building sculptures out of elements found in the repairing atelier of his friend’s father. He then continued his studies at the Pathein University’s Botany Department through which he gained a quite unique understanding of life’s circle. The veritable aspect of Po Po’s self-taught artistic approach is the intellectual, an advanced conceptual knowledge from which he completed his technical skills. He read intensively everything about philosophy, Western included. Plato, Socrates and Albert Camus were on the list. Words and ideas opened his mind and lead him to explore wherever he wanted. All this living in a small town in the 1970s’ Myanmar, isolated even from what was happening in the closest region.
Po Po eventually tried his luck in Yangon around 1980; becoming a graphic designer. Parallel to this work, his artistic endeavours developed dynamically. It required endurance though: sometimes artists need months or years, and substantial money, to create even one work. “There was neither bourgeoisie nor a market, so the artist was against neither. He lived in an emotional condition and stood for ideas alone,” writes curator Nathalie Johnston in Po Po’s 2015 Singapore solo exhibition catalogue. In the early 1980s, Po Po took part in the annual Gangaw Village exhibitions, displaying an unusual group of artists. His works didn’t really fit the general aspect of the shows. Moreover, some of his fellow artists deeply misunderstood him, thinking that his art was only different because he aimed to become popular.
In actuality Po Po was driven by a unique conceptual thinking that was not being well-received. He had always wanted to create something unrelated to traditional art. Repeating everyday actions and depicting the surrounding environment on the canvas didn’t differ much, he thought, from the cave-paintings of thousands of years ago, hence following an already known path would only been preserving the pictorial traditions already existing. Po Po believed that the genuine resided in the new – he had to choose another way.
His first solo show opened in February 1987, in a painting shop at Bogyoke Market. Not quite the type of environment that was fitting his works – but the challenge was within reach. The results of Po Po’s experimental process conveyed his own perception and understanding of “concepts” such as Buddhism – his paintings were abstract not because of the geometrical elements they contained, but because the painter’s approach was philosophically founded. In the case of his paintings Pathavi, Apo, Tejo, Vayo, Akasa, he reinterpreted the fundamental nature of Buddhism through art. These works are today in the Mori Art Museum of Tokyo, one of the most recognised contemporary art museums of Asia. Another series dealt with the time-frame of one single day through twelve paintings; there was also the ultimate “immaterial” work: Painting for the Blind, not ironic at all. Revered artist Ba Kyi sincerely congratulated the young Po Po’s visual research after the show, a big endorsement for an unusual artist of this kind.
Immaterially Rational
Around the time of the 1988 uprising, Po Po’s career reached a crossroad – the complex situation which surrounded him, resulted in a sort of “tabula rasa” in his art. He felt excessively limited, and had to step out of his own frame. He had thoroughly read a number of books, among them Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning The Spiritual In Art (1912), which gave him a positive élan; Po Po made a definite break from the genre of painting and set his mind to discovering further dimensions. For a few years, he created art only using material found in nature, and acted “unconsciously” while creating art. These “autokinetic drawings” became a new chapter in his life.
Po Po is one of the few artists of the independent Myanmar contemporary art scene who, despite the isolated nature of the country during the dictatorship, could still manage to build his own concepts that transgressed temporal and spatial borders, elevating him to an outstanding figure in the region’s scene. His first appearance abroad (Japan) happened thanks to his second solo show at the Judson Church Centre in 1997, titled Solid Concepts: it reflected a new period in his life, characterised by works – mostly installations – that held a distorted mirror to different sociological phenomena, including his own memories. Since this time his works have constantly expanded and embraced larger and larger and bigger aspects of his environment, such as the “land art” intervention he generated in Singapore, by planting paddy seeds in 3000 lunch boxes, and disseminating them throughout the town, while at the same covering an entire roof with them (Terrace, 2010). Po Po was analysing the relationship between the living and its environment, trying to find a usable “spiritual space” that could be implemented anywhere, anytime.
His two solo shows in Myanmar, in 1987 and 1997, were not censored – however it wasn’t a cup of tea for the officials, the board delegates couldn’t connect to what they saw. Po Po never tried to explain his theoretical approach in these cases, he preferred only to say that his art embodied what Beauty meant for him – hence he wasn’t much bothered. The boxes of his “Peep Show” installation (#1 / 1995–97) could have been actually very easily banned. Not because of its sexual content but because of the deeply personal and reflective – “dangerous” – aspect of the works. His third solo show – Out Of Myth, Onto_Logical – came eighteen years after the second, this time in Singapore. In collaboration with the artist, curator Nathalie Johnston, “revisited” the works created twenty to thirty years beforehand, to discover that they were still absolutely relevant in today’s artistic milieu – the concepts they conveyed were solid enough to be able to speak decades later.
Po Po is an artist who observes, contemplates, relates, and only then creates. His works are meticulous realisations of long intellectual processes – the element that makes a contemporary artwork different from the traditional, that which generates the new. Questioning the most basic aspects of life can lead to unexpected new visions.
Po Po’s art is able to work as a revelation for the Myanmar art scene, through a deep approach that doesn’t fear to step beyond the visible.
