Chuu Wai is a Mandalay artist who has been active since 2008 when she began studying at the National University of Art and Culture (Mandalay) and Technological University (Mandalay). She has had ten solo exhibitions and already had more than 30 local and international exhibitions including London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Canberra. She was invited as a speaker for international and local art talks and events such as Women’s Forum (Singapore), Global Entrepreneurship Week, British Embassy class, etc. She is a founder of ‘Young Dream’ under the Jefferson Center (Mandalay) which is a group organizing workshops and exhibitions for young artists. In Myanmar, she is also well known as a young influencer artist and was for example selected to be part of the Myanmar Influencer Award. Chuu shared her inspiration and motivation on many TV channels, medias and press articles, including BBC News, VOA Burmese News, Polskie Radio, Trebuchet Magazine, Frontier, The Myanmar Time, MNTV, MRTV 4 and many more.
Since 2015, Chuu has been working on paintings which reflect her interest in the female identity when her artistic impulse found a new outlet after the sexual harassment of a guy on the street. This experience made her focus on gender issues and the condition of women in Myanmar today. The artist, who is an engineer as well as a painter, has created a series of works with many layers which conceal and reveal. The paintings are created against the many ways society controls and scrutinizes women more than men, the ways that women resist and the way that culture is evolving. She sees her paintings as part of that evolution.
Chuu Wai is interested in discovering and working with handcrafted materials which showcased artwork made in part with traditional hta-meins and longgyis (traditional long, wrap skirt) fabrics as canvases. The strong, confident, sexy women depicted with traditional (male) accessories challenge the control of society over women. Like her peers today, the women in the paintings are sexy, playful, confident, and thoughtful – no longer prepared to accept the traditional role Myanmar society has thrust upon them for too long.
