Aung Khin

(1921-1996)

Backstage at a Pwe

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection of Professor Josef Silverstein (1922-2021) and Marilyn Cooper Silverstein (1930-2021)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Aung Khin
街戲後臺
1961年作

簽名（右下）
油彩畫布

來源
Josef Silverstein教授和Marilyn Cooper Silverstein私人收藏
現藏家繼承自上述來源

Professor Josef Silverstein (1922-2021) and his wife Mrs Marilyn Cooper Silverstein (1930-2021) began collecting works of art on their first visit to Burma¹ as a young academic couple in 1955. They went on to become good friends and supporters of three leading artists in Myanmar's modern art movement in the 1960s: Paw Oo Thet (1936-1993), Win Pe (b. 1935), and Aung Khin (1921-1996). The Silverstein Collection contains these artists' early works, which are rarely seen at auction.

A renowned Myanmar expert, Professor Silverstein devoted his career as a scholar to Myanmar before retiring as a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. He authored and edited several influential books on Myanmar, including The Political Legacy of Aung San; Burmese Politics: The Dilemma of National Unity; and Burma: Military Rule on the Politics of Stagnation. The Josef Silverstein Papers (1944-2002), his professional papers and research collection, are now housed in Cornell University's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in Ithaca, New York.

Between 1970 and 1972, Professor Silverstein served as the third director of Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, now known as ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. He laid the foundations for the Institute and worked closely with Dr Goh Keng Swee and David Marshall to establish the Institute as one of the first Southeast Asian research centres dedicated to the study of the region. 

Lot 14

Aung Khin is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern art in Myanmar. In 1937, at the young age of sixteen, he studied art under the London-trained Ba Nyan, an influential artist who had brought Western painting techniques to Myanmar in the first half of the 20th century. In the late 1940s, Aung Khin moved to Mandalay and fully dedicated himself to art, supported by the wealth of his wife's family. After he won first prize for oil painting at the 1952 "All Burma Competition" sponsored by the United States Information Centre (USIS), he began exhibiting works in both Mandalay and Yangon throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Aung Khin was also befriended by the Silversteins when Professor Silverstein taught at the University of Mandalay. From 1961 to 1962, the Silversteins had lived on the edge of a rice paddy near the University. During the summer, the villagers would erect a bamboo platform—as seen in Backstage at a Pwe—for popular outdoor opera performances (pwe). Accompanied by a live percussion and gong ensemble, the pwe singers and actors would perform from the Jataka tales, as well as others from a stock of locally popular love stories and humorous parodies all through the night, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning.

Aung Khin had been searching for a Myanmar identity through his artistic practice. His oeuvre often depicts local people and scenes from everyday life. In Backstage at a Pwe, Aung Khin used broken brush strokes with unique colours to paint light and shadow in an impressionist style, creating a sense of three-dimensionality. With its brightly lit actress applying makeup, old lady smoking a cheroot and musicians pounding on their gongs, Backstage at a Pwe vividly captures the hurly-burly energy of the theatre and conveys the essence of Myanmar's rich culture observed by the artist.