LIFESTYLE | CULTURE
Night Vision An artist’s search for the light leads him to rediscover Yangon after dark By KYAW PHYO THA / YANGON
K
yee Myintt Saw can still remember the moment his eyes first opened to the beauty of the night. It was a late December evening 16 years ago, and as he was walking down the busy streets of Yangon’s Chinatown, he was bewitched by the lights illuminating the area, especially from the roadside shops and neon signs. That’s when he realized: The night can be painted.
“I instantly fell in love with those lights with the dark background and felt inspired to make this my subject. How strange it is that I hadn’t been aware of it for 59 years,” said the now 75-year-old artist. As a result of that experience, he soon started putting the night on canvas. In 1999, after 26 years of painting, he held his first solo show, “Yangon Nights,” which was wellreceived by both the gallery-going public and fellow painters. Ever since,
his name has been virtually synonymous with night scenes. “So far, I have painted nearly 200 canvases on the night, but I’m still not tired of it,” he said recently at his studio in Yangon. On an easel nearby, his latest night painting had just received its final touches. Also famous for his paintings of marketplaces and nudes, Kyee Myintt Saw is admired by art lovers both at home and abroad for the sensitivity of his style and his mastery of the painting knife, which he uses to produce distinctive impasto artworks.
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TheIrrawaddy
April 2014