Artwork: Bart Was Not Here, Dancing on your Grave 2022, inkjet print on matte poster paper, 67.5 x 108 cm

Bart Was Not Here (aka Kyaw Moe Khine) was born in 1996. He was born as a Burmese-Muslim into military dictatorship in Burma and was raised as an inner-city youth in Yangon. He now lives, works and is an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. Bart graduated as a Fine Art major from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore. As a graffiti artist, Bart Was Not Here works in large scale with acrylic and enamels on canvas. His works comment on the socio-political history of Myanmar by using Burmese and global pop culture imagery.  The culture of his adolescence has informed his art practice; sculpted by video rentals, book shops and access to American pop culture found in bootleg markets which provided Bart with a lens to the alternative outside world to the authoritarian country he experienced day-to-day. His graffiti style mixes text and images from Burmese and global pop culture in large scale canvases using acrylics and enamels. His works reveal a humour that is appreciated alongside a riddled punchline commentary about his past as an outsider in his home country, an outsider in the western world, but connecting with people everywhere through the love of various cultures and subcultures that have taken over the world in the 21st century. Bart’s earlier works used iconic characters from pop culture to serve as a representation for various personalities and narrations of Burmese culture. More recently, works explore the romanticised hunger for power and dominance, influencing the audience’s participation and conflict to make judgement, question their moral compass and create conclusions with only half the information.

Cherubim (singular: Cherub)

Derived from Middle Eastern Mythology, the presence of cherubim has been documented through Jewish, Christian, Islamic art and literature. Mention of cherubim is made in the Bible’s New Testament, the Book of Ezekiel and the Kabbala. Within these early histories, the cherubim’s role is to serve as throne bearer to their deity and they are depicted through a range of child, adult, animal or birdlike characteristics.

In time, the many versions of cherubim mythology were associated with the Greek Eros of the ‘Putti’ (Italian: small boy with wings). The saturation of imagery throughout art history has now made these two mythologies interdependent. Marble and bronze sculptures of these creatures can be dated to the 1st and 2nd Century BC, for example, The Bronze Eros Dormiente (2nd century BC). Through the lens of the Western art canon, the cherubim rose to peak popularity in the Renaissance period (1400-1600) and continued as a religious symbol into the Baroque period (1600-1750). The iconic depiction of a cherub as a chubby baby or infant with wings (Putti) is linked to Donatello’s Quattrocento sculpture and paintings. They are most distinctively known by their appearance in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1513-1514).

Significant to the South Asian area is the imposed mythology of cherubim in the Mughal Empire; an early-modern Muslim dynasty that controlled South Asia (the Indian region) from the 16th to 19th Century. British painters living in Bombay at the time of the Mughal Empire began to paint cherubim iconography into replicas of Mughal religious motifs to sell to a Western audience once they returned to Europe. An example of this cultural appropriation and invasion into the Mughal aesthetic can be seen in Timur handing the crown to Babur in the presence of Humayun by Govardhan (1628).

Think About/Discuss:

How can knowing the historical context of the cherubim inform our understanding of Dancing on your Grave (2022) by Bart Was Not Here?

Renaissance and Baroque art were heavily measured by religious and political authority. Is contemporary art still as influenced by the same factors?