Chuu Wai

Chuu Wai likes women who are attached to their culture but who draws their own path, the ones who dare, the ones who choose freedom. Her work is originated from a primary ambivalence: on one side, a feminist and anti-patriarchal claim pushes her to show a female model of power and liberation. On the other one, she proposes a fresh perspective on the history and the beauty of her culture which she supports and respects.

For Chuu Wai, Burmese women are prisoners of the tradition and are systematically put behind. She works to revert this order. This is why in the core of the paintings, she represents determined women with a powerful position on traditional longyi, which are clothes traditionally designed for men. In a second series, she provides them with emblematic signs of masculine gods, which brings them power. The aim is to demonstrate that women are able to take up the role that they deserve in the society if they get rid of the patriarchy by seizing, if need be, what is reserved for men.

Witnessing daily the desperation of the crowd in the street, Chuu Wai decided one day to bring a blank canvas to a protest down her building. Spontaneously, dozens of people from all backgrounds picked pens to write down their anger at the soldiers facing them but also their fears, their support to the imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi or their poetic ambition for their country. The result is a priceless testimony of the democratic aspirations of her society.

From these pieces of evidence from the ground and the posters that she designed for the demonstrators, she is now reflecting upon a new art series.

Chuu Wai shows that sense of suffocation we all feel in her paintings where the ka-note (the flowery, traditional Burmese patterns) are stretched over the women’s faces, obscuring their identity and containing the memory of being written over by traditional expectations of women. We cannot recognize them as if they had lost their identity. In the paintings they remain locked and limited as they have forgotten their individuality, or perhaps it is easier not to remember.

Information, undergoing multiple translations and interpretations, may lose its veracity. Chuu Wai’s work raises questions about the true meaning of information and stories that travel between cultures. Her artistic approach emerged from several months spent in New York and Paris. Looking at foreign newspapers talking about Burma, she realised that some of the transcribed information lost its meaning to the point of becoming false. The young artist imagines several pieces composed of contemporary French newspapers and Burmese archive images to compare the two cultures and denounce the patriarchal immobility of her country. In her eyes, the use of this medium constitutes a representation of language and symoolizes the perpetual movement of information in the world.

Chuu Wai shows that sense of suffocation we all feel in her paintings where the ka-note (the flowery, traditional Burmese patterns) are stretched over the women’s faces, obscuring their identity and containing the memory of being written over by traditional expectations of women. We cannot recognize them as if they had lost their identity. In the paintings they remain locked and limited as they have forgotten their individuality, or perhaps it is easier not to remember.

Chuu Wai shows that sense of suffocation we all feel in her paintings where the ka-note (the flowery, traditional Burmese patterns) are stretched over the women’s faces, obscuring their identity and containing the memory of being written over by traditional expectations of women. We cannot recognize them as if they had lost their identity. In the paintings they remain locked and limited as they have forgotten their individuality, or perhaps it is easier not to remember.

A 1960s poem from a famous Burmese poet , Zaw-Gyi is echoing the resistance and resilience with the metaphor of a delicate yet indestructible Hyacinth/ Bay-Dar flower on top of the gold color background.

Like a series poem, these two girls are suffering repeatedly from the surrounding repressions but at the end still standing straight with empowerment around them, as if to express nonchalant behaviour and highlight their unflappable characters with crises that are presented upon them. These sort of characters are comparable to the Poem’s title which poetically depicts the victory through these past crises with the flowers on their heads, that are worn nonchalantly as if to say they can pass through any catastrophes.

Chuu Wai shows that sense of suffocation we all feel in her paintings where the ka-note (the flowery, traditional Burmese patterns) are stretched over the women’s faces, obscuring their identity and containing the memory of being written over by traditional expectations of women. We cannot recognize them as if they had lost their identity. In the paintings they remain locked and limited as they have forgotten their individuality, or perhaps it is easier not to remember.