Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 31, 2024: Soe Yu Nwe, a Myanmar (Burma) ceramist, sculptor, teacher (#2090

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Artist of the Day, July 31, 2024: Soe Yu Nwe, a Myanmar (Burma) ceramist, sculptor, teacher (#2090

Myanmar artist, Soe Yu Nwe’s cross-cultural experience has inspired her to reflect upon identity through making. She creates hybridized beings that are fluid, fragile and fragmented. Through transfiguration of emotional landscape by poetically depicting nature and body in parts, she explores the idea of displacement, her family's migration history from Yunnan, China and the complexities of individual identity.

Soe Yu was named in Forbes 30 Under 30, Art & Style List of 2019. Her work has been acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia and the British Museum in the United Kingdom.

After working with clay for more than 10 years, she finally started a teaching space for the first time in downtown Yangon, the neighborhood she spent most of her life while growing up and going to school.

in 2013 , Soe Yu Nwe graduated BFA in Studio Art, Albion College, Albion, MI, USA, and in 2015, MFA in Ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI, USA

Her statement
In my work, I explore different ways of expressing my experience of alienation, confusion and pain as a cultural outsider by creating narrative spaces that explore the lines between insides and outsides.

Playing on the idea of the body being the house that shelters the spirit, I create work that is symbolic of the self. I instill the metaphorical sculptural self with a sense of organicity and intricacy by gesturing the body- the viscera and skeletal, morphing into the botanical to express the vitality, delicacy, and injury of the spirit inhabiting and animating the forms.

As a third generation Chinese immigrant in Myanmar, I seek inspirations from cultural practices of ethnic Chinese and the local Burmese. Local animistic beliefs, folklores and mythologies inspire the imagery in my work. I am particularly interested in the female figures in Buddhist mythologies. In my most recent body of work, I explored creating hybrid bodies using imagery of Naga Maedaw, a dragon queen in Myanmar folk beliefs and Buddha’s birth stories.

Art making, to me, is an ontological quest. I explore the nature of being by attempting to depict the ephemerality of the human condition. Condensation and displacement of desires, tender affections, spiritual hopes, sexual instincts and maternal conflicts are intimated with metaphors and symbols of nature's cyclical growth, decay and death.

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