Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

He eventually escaped the jungle and finished law school. Then in 1998, his name appeared on a secret list of people planning a demonstration, and all of them were sent to jail. Htein Lin was sentenced to seven years. Compared with the jungle, prison was easy. He had learned to draw in India, and in prison he befriended one of his guards, a man who had never heard of paintings. Htein Lin volunteered to make one for him, so the guard returned with some house paint. Htein Lin extracted the wick from a cigarette lighter and used it as a brush. The prison had no toilet paper, and inmates used strips torn from discarded prison uniforms to clean themselves. Htein Lin saved half of his allotment, and on those banners of abraded white cotton, he painted some of the most haunting images ever to come out of war. Htein Lin used a bottle cap, a piece of glass, a carved bar of soap, and an old fishing net to create monotypes. A syringe from the prison hospital was adapted to draw fine lines.

One guard mistook Htein Lin’s abstract painting for a map of the prison, intended to facilitate escape, so all his art was destroyed; he began again. He would produce some three hundred paintings during his seven years of confinement. Over time, Htein Lin’s guard brought several other sentries into his confidence, explaining that their charge was a great artist. When all the insiders were on duty at the same time, the paintings were spirited away and smuggled to his family. A friend approached the British ambassador, Vicky Bowman, and asked her to look after the collection. She agreed to do so and fell in love with Htein Lin through his art; soon after his release, they were married. He exhibited his paintings in Yangon in 2005. He invited the guard who had obtained art supplies for him to view the work, and they drank a toast to their collaboration. Htein Lin talked to me about the role of art in formulating a new ideology. “In prison, I met many politicians and lawyers,” he said. “They all became poets and songwriters there.”

When I met Htein Lin, he was assembling an installation called A Show of Hand. He had tried to contact as many as possible of Myanmar’s three thousand former political prisoners (that official tally is believed by many to be too low) so he could make plaster casts of their hands. By the time I visited his studio, he had accumulated about two hundred. Plaster is used to fix what is broken as well as to constrain it, and that duality held great metaphoric strength for him. Ma Thanegi said he could cast her hand as long as she could choose the position in which she posed it—and held up her middle finger to the authorities who had put her behind bars. Htein Lin said, “No wonder you are not dead.”

Other artists relate to politics more circuitously. Wah Nu told me that her family used to produce handicrafts to sell to tourists. Among their most popular items were carved busts of Aung San. After 1988, they ceased to produce them and hid those they had already made. When Wah Nu and her husband, Tun Win Aung, started to exhibit after 2012, they set up a gallery in which Aung San’s last speech, which the socialist government had broadcast endlessly as propaganda, played on a loop in a room with dozens of the Aung San busts, no longer illegal. The installation was both nostalgic and ironic, at once reverent of Aung San and mocking of the cultish way his name is used to signify everything good about Myanmar—much as Chinese artists have played with the image of Mao. Of course, every reference to Aung San is also a reference to his daughter. “Aung San Suu Kyi cannot change us,” Tun Win Aung said. “I hope she will be elected, I will be very happy, but I don’t expect her to change me. We are corrupted by having lived under this government, and now we must learn how to be honest and innocent.”

When I met Maung Tin Thit in Mandalay, he seemed weary. Another of the 1988 activists, he had managed not to get arrested until 1998, when police searched his apartment, found a private notebook of poems, and were particularly incensed by this one:

The street in front of the house needs the illumination of the shining moon.

I don’t own the street.

But if I don’t go on this street or road, I cannot reach my home.

To purify my mind, I may need to clean up the street.

For those few lines, he served over seven years. He has been working on a book about the oil and gas pipeline that runs from Rakhine to China, just the sort of righteous-minded investigation that the regime still punishes. “Before I went to prison, I was given to excitement and anger, and my poems drew from those emotions,” he said. “But in prison, as I meditated, I came to understand that anger accomplishes nothing. This new work is not based in anger. And now I am not afraid to go back to the prison, because I learned how to live there.”