Chaw Ei Thein:
WANTED

form & concept | July 2023

Chaw Ei Thein last set foot in her home country of Myanmar in 2007. She was organizing an art exhibition in London when she learned that the military regime of her home country had issued a warrant for her arrest. An article on Thein’s plight appeared in the New York Times, thrusting the artist into a global conversation about the nature of artistic expression and political speech under fascism. Now living in Santa Fe as an asylee, Thein presents WANTED, her first solo exhibition in New Mexico. The show features sculptures, textiles, installation works and a performance piece that ruminate on Myanmar’s past, present and imagined futures amid renewed political turmoil.

“We would have been home right now, but instead I’m making this show,” Thein said during a studio visit earlier this year. “You know, I speak out loud. I can’t stop.” She planned to return to Myanmar with her husband and young daughter in early 2021 after a democratic election seemingly signaled a calmer political climate.

Soon after the election, however, Myanmar’s military deposed the ruling political party and took power, echoing myriad military coups that have rocked the country since it gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1948. Once again, Thein abandoned hope of returning home, hoping to shield family members from further political fallout. “If they can’t find me, they’ll go to my family members,” she says.

Born in 1969, Thein developed an unusually lucid political consciousness in early childhood. Everything in her homeland’s material world – from the dirty, rationed rice Thein spent hours sifting; to the ornate lunchboxes and rich food of classmates whose parents were military leaders; to the market baskets that hid bribe money beneath heavily inflated goods – revealed stark truths about Myanmar. The Southeast Asian nation is home to more than 135 indigenous ethnic groups, many of which represented autonomous nations before British colonization.

Thein’s understanding of the racial, economic and political strata that emerged from Britain’s colonization have informed her work as an artist and activist. WANTED, which appears in the gallery’s ground-floor corner and front windows, synthesizes Thein’s personal narrative and Myanmar’s tumultuous history with ferocity and humor.

Thein harnesses quotidian objects, religious symbolism and military paraphernalia to reveal the extreme politicization of public space and material culture during the globalization of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The show features Buddha figurines hand-painted with Burmese camouflage patterns, bullet casings loaded with lipstick, and a protest poster obscured by charred camouflage fabric and mosquito nets.

The exhibition’s most elaborate and hopeful work is a five-foot swath of Burmese camouflage fabric, adorned with a patchwork of intricate embroideries that honors each of Burma’s 135 ethnic groups. “Even if there wasn’t a junta running the country, they’ve already made their mark by creating so much division and bigotry between ethnic groups. They control us by dividing us,” Thein says. “But I have so much hope because I can see a new country. It’s not just about making a new government, it’s about forming a new ideal of what we are. This revolution is led by Generation Z, and they understand this.”

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