Just A Memory

MIN ZAW – Abstracted Reflection 2
(122 x 92 cm x 2 panels)

“What could be more poetic than a magnificent magenta mountain raggedly, yet delicately contoured against the pinkish evening? Demure and tranquil, it is gracefully attending to its own solitude, in which everything is negated except the placid spirit of an artist who is conjuring up a magnificent magenta mountain.”

In his first Abstracted Reflection series, Min Zaw uses colour papers, the material employed by ancient Japanese craftsmen and incorporated traditional Myanmar visuals, motives and colours
in making his collage works. The creased plane and the nature-like texture of the mountain ranges, clouds, forests, rivers and pagodas were not just visual enlightenment from nature, or the ever-changing conditions created by climates or people but also echoed Myanmar’s socio-political traumas, changes and transitions from the 1960s to the 1980s. The failed socialism of the military regime stifled the economy, social, culture and education; many considered it the “Dark Age” of Myanmar after independence, which Min Zaw and his contemporaries witness and went through, always in fear and darkness. It also seems like some of these collage works of Min Zaw re-examine the relation between painting and sculpture. In work, “Entrance of the Pagoda”, the used of paper as a medium in the painting almost mirrored the painting-like vision to a sculpture-like object.

In Abstracted Reflection 2, Min Zaw further emphasises and amplifies the creased plane in his works but apply acrylic on canvases instead. It was in 2007 that Min Zaw unexpectedly noticed the crumpled paper on his studio floor, a creased texture that arose contortions liked the struggling of the canvas. To him, these textures are significant; it’s contrary of forms and flatness, calmness and shaking, clearness and complexity, and at the same time, it is visually very simple and attractive, and it stirs emotions as well. Min Zaw change of medium is more than just the change of method here; he also gives a change of view and a new aesthetic. The minimalised introduction of light and shadow create the sensory perceptions of seeing colours and light or of hearing sounds and voices. Through the abstracted creased textures and the reflected layers, he takes us to the world of exciting landscapes. Sometimes it might be a world of solitude and restfulness, or doubts of suspension and contradiction, or spectacular perception of the supernatural. Min Zaw’s landscapes can be seen not only as artworks but as settings which break the boundaries of art. What’s more, they can be viewed as a naturistic landscape, beautiful and tranquil, or viewed as the living world into which you can enter and wants to go beyond reality.