Famous artist collects life’s work
September 6 - 12, 2010
Artist Min Wae Aung poses on August 25 with his recently released book of paintings called Golden Heritage.
“I WAS brought up in monastery when I was young and lived with monks and novices for years,” said Min Wae Aung, whose book Golden Heritage, a collection of his paintings drawn between 1989 and 2010 went on sale in July.
“Before 1994 I drew portraits, landscapes, genre paintings and monks. In 2003, I visited the United State and then Fukuoka in Japan in 2004, I met artists who showed some consistency in a particular form of art. After returning from the trips I made up my mind to pursue a single subject,” he said.
Since then, the artist’s work has focused on monks, nuns and novices painted on austere backgrounds.
“I wanted to paint something different from the style of others; they put the subjects in the foreground and the background, but I keep the back of my paintings plain,” explained the artist.
The book also includes articles on the artist by photographer and artist U Sein Myo Myint, writer Dr Aung Min and Sidney Cowell, director of Asia Fine Art Gallery, which hosted an exhibition called “Golden Heritage”.
The book, which contains 100 reproductions, is publishing by Asia Fine Art, based in Hong Kong. It is available at local bookshops priced at US$32.
“In our country, hardly any artists publish their own works. The [quality of the] paper is good but the binding is not international standard. However, an artist ought to have a book that collects the artworks created during his life,” Min Wae Aung said.
