Bagyi Aung Soe (Burmese, 1924-1990)

Abstract Landscape

Footnotes

Provenance:
Formerly in the collection of the artist's family
Private collection of Jasdeep Sandhu, Singapore

巴伊昂梭　抽象風景　彩色筆紙本　鏡框　一九八〇年作

簽名：AUNG SOE 9.XII.80

來源：
原自藝術家家屬收藏
新加坡Jasdeep Sandhu私人收藏

One of the most individualistic and underappreciated modern Southeast Asian artists of his era, Burmese Bagyi Aung Soe espoused a truly syncretic approach to art-making. He was one of a handful of Southeast Asian artists who studied at Santiniketan, the ashram in West Bengal, India that received many noted pilgrims and students and which expanded into a full-fledged university in 1951. Aung Soe went to Santiniketan in 1951 for only a brief one year period before returning to Burma, but in that short time, he had imbibed the ethos of knowing and being able to draw from various pictorial traditions in his own art: what he called 'manaw maheikdi dat painting', an idiom that stands for an individualised and particular approach to synthesising existing pictorial traditions of the world into a new and modern 'tradition' of its own.

Abstract Landscape, painted and dedicated to his student, Sunny Nyein, is the first ever work of the artist to be offered at auction, and one that synthesises multiple spiritual and intellectual traditions, signs and symbols. With an almost instinctual automatism in its execution, Aung Soe visualises what is seemingly a landscape, under the twin guiding signs of a crescent and a star, but in its contours and folds, the form takes on an unmistakable anthropomorphic guise too.