UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how avant-garde artists in Socialist Burma (1962-1988) activated their canvases through practices based in realism to create a visual vocabulary of resistance to authoritarianism. In the European context, modernism is synonymous with freedom and radicality. My dissertation argues that in Socialist Burma modernism emerged within a different cultural context in which freedom was already constricted and was embraced by a socially and politically engaged avant-garde artistic community. This was in contrast to European avant-garde artists who broke from past forms, such as the artistic practice of realism, and took up conceptual practices, shunning political engagement. These Burmese artists acted as a subversive political force in a contest of national identity with the state censorship apparatus. A review of censored and non-censored avant-garde art provides an art historical record of artists’ challenges to the government’s preferred visual rhetoric. Furthermore, I trace how modes of resistance to state authoritarianism were transferred across national boundaries through artistic practices, such as writing, poetry, or painting.

Through my examination of individual avant-garde artist histories, I trace the shifting constraints that the state imposed on avant-garde artists in pursuing nation-building and the motivations driving the statist goals of censorship. In exploring the government’s preferred visual markers for nationhood, I engaged with current and former censors to better understand the bureaucratic mechanics of censorship. This dissertation discusses the ways in which avant-garde artists, often drawing on developments in poetry and literature, devised creative strategies of subversion, resistance, and subterfuge, both in the realm of representation and in terms of political participation. Furthermore, as Burmese art history is incorporated into global art histories, I hypothesise that Burma’s avant-garde art need not be slotted into Western contemporaneous “isms” or art movements. Instead, what appear to be disruptions and blips in history from the outside were also continuous periods of productivity and creation on the inside, operating within a historical sequence unique to Burma.