Hong Kong exhibition reflects on Myanmar’s dark past and its path towards the light

A map of Myanmar made with carved bars of soap dominates the floor of 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in Central. The pale yellow blocks depict an abstract figure with his knees pulled up to his chin. Titled Soap Block, this work by artist Htein Lin maps his country’s often painful path towards democracy.

The gallery’s latest exhibition features works by seven artists from Myanmar and it gives a taste of how the seemingly irreversible transformations in the former dictatorship are affecting the arts.

As Htein Lin explains the idea behind Soap Block, it is clear that the military’s rule of fear is still too fresh, too raw to be treated as mere history. Artistic freedom may have been introduced since 2010, the year Aung San Suu Kyi was released from years of house arrest, but the country is still a long way from developing the kind of fond nostalgia for the old way of life that sometimes overcomes the new affluent class in mainland China and Vietnam.

“When I finally went home in 2013 after nearly seven years in exile, I thought about reproducing the soap carvings that I used to make in prison. I looked for the same kind of soap, but they were difficult to find. Now, people can choose from many different brands, bar soaps or liquid soaps, and not just Shwe Wah soaps. That was the only brand available for decades under the junta. The entire country, in their mind, only knew one kind of soap. It was a kind of brainwashing, the way we lived in the dark,” he says.