Artwork: Kaung Su, Red Paint 3 2022
inkjet print of Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl photo paper, 42 x 53 cm
Kaung Su is an established Burmese artist currently living in Yangon, Myanmar. Since 1995, Su has exhibited works on a national and international platform. His material use includes wood, animal bones, synthetic hair, neon lights and a wide variety of other materials to participate in contemporary installation, performance, video and photography practices. Su’s works respond to the question of universality, exploring notions of cosmos, origins, birth and death of civilisations and the decay of environment. He uses his works to communicate his ideas on the fragility of reality. More recently, his works, including his photographs in It Goes Without Saying, respond to a post-normal life as the aftermath of the 2021 coup.
Su has a successful career as an educator and lectures in curatorial studies, abstract art and art history at spaces in Yangon. From 2009-2011 Su coordinated three art exchange programs for Ongoing Echoes, an international art exchange project. He has shown at international art biennales, was featured at the 2014 Saatchi Gallery START art fair in London and in 2015 was a resident of the Apexart Foundation in New York. In 2022 the British Museum collected his linocut Head of Protest No 4.
Think About/Discuss:
Kuang Su’s work Red Paint 3 (2022) grounds his art practice and themes in the context of contemporary life in post-Coup Myanmar society. Still living and working in Yangon, Su’s artworks tip toe delicately around issues of censorship, risk and safety. In this work, Su presents a coded way of showing the aftermath of a horrific, life changing event by using the colour red as a bold and symbolic form of communication.
Su has also captured the colour being washed away in the rain. Discuss what message he is communicating to the audience.
The colour red has been used across history to represent strength, pride, war, pain, fear and anger. The colour red also has a historical alliance with far-right political systems. Artists across history have used the colour red to symbolically depict social and political critique, for example, John Singlton Copley’s The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January (1781) and Bros Kustodiev’s The Bolshevik (1920). Ai Wei Wei’s Papercut Portfolio (1957) documents his dangerous experience of living as an artistic activist under an authoritarian Chinese government. Any Warhol’s appropriation of historical figures in Mao 94 (1972) and Red Lenin (1987) communicated the artist’s personal view on the parallel between propaganda and capitalist advertising.
Colour Theory and colour’s symbolic meaning are present in art, photography and film. Investigate the meaning being the colours depicted in these famous artworks:
Michelangelo, The Musician or Concert Youths (1595)
Sassoferrato, The Virgin in Prayer (1640)
Jean Honoré Fragonard, La Naussance de Vénus (1753-1755)
J.M.W. Turner, Approach to Venice (1844)
Vincent Van Gogh, The Night Café (1888)
Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Blurred Sun (1903)
Yves Klein, IKB 49 (1960)
To support your investigation into the symbolic use of colour, read A Guide to Color Symbolism in Visual Arts: Warm Colours by German artist Anna Sokolova (2021).