Love and War: Myanmar An effectively destructive tool, the process of using a shotgun speaks to the violence inherent in war. The penetration of the shot through a surface holds a highly sexual quality as well. In the past, I’ve painted flowers on shot up surfaces to convey a feminine delicacy that has been aggressively torn up by a very masculine tool.
Similarly contrasting these violent grounds to delicate subjects, I feel that children, especially young girls, are a poignant subject. When I was in Myanmar (Burma), I found the people to be incredibly gentle and compassionate. Strong influence from their Theravada Buddhist tradition results in passive acceptance; perfect breeding grounds for mass exploitation and extermination. Beyond the mass rape practiced by the military junta there, “Burma is a country of origin for trafficked persons, primarily women and girls seeking labor in Thailand as factory workers or household servants who are sold to brothels for sexual exploitation.”
Myanmar exists under one of the most severe regimes today. Attention from the world is brought there now by the monks who are, for the moment, allowed to demonstrate on a large scale. It’s an interesting contrast to the student demonstrations just prior, which were immediately ousted. In fact there seems to be little respect for youth by the junta. “Burma has more child soldiers than any other country in the world,” states Human Rights Watch, “accounting for approximately one-fourth of the 300,000 children…participating in armed conflicts across the globe.” Further abuses outside of the military persist: Burmese law allows capital punishment of minors and encourages sentenced juveniles to serve their punishment in work camps, where many are literally worked to death.
Instead of manipulating images of children to induce sympathetic feelings in the viewer, I aspire to create an honest reflection of the full range of emotion that defines these kids as individuals. I also think it important not to convey these children as victims as it denies respect of their strengths. In reality, some will die, some will be tortured, some will profit, some will survive, and some will do horrible things to others in order to survive.
While in Myanmar, I photographed a classroom of children to reflect this range of possible roles they will take in their lives. Traditionally they wear a light colored soil on their faces which gives them a very ghostly appearance. I’ve started a series of oil portraits painted on shotgunned mahogany plywood which breaks apart in very delicate lacy fragments. The figures are defined as much by erasure and aggressive scratching as by building paint through delicate brushwork, the process as a whole reflecting the traumatic existence of this community.
*Itallics are quoted from the Genocide Watch website: http://www.genocidewatch.org/alerts/burma.htm
