About the Cover

Front Cover.

Cover: Illustration of Monks on Alms Round by Khin Maung Oo, oil on canvas, dimensions 34.5 x 14 inch, Yangon, 2006, “School of Min Wae Aung”. Courtesy of Burma Art Collection, Center for Burma Studies, Northern Illinois University, IL, USA.

Cover design: Jeff Strohm, Northern Illinois University.

This representation of a file of monks making their morning alms rounds and vanishing into the misty Bagan landscape is obviously highly influenced by the internationally known Burmese painter, Min Wae Aung. Born in the Irrawaddy Delta in 1960 and certainly the country’s best known contemporary artist, Min Wae Aung was trained originally at the School of Fine Arts in Yangon, but his earlier style radically changed aft er his visiting the US and Japan in the early 1990s. Since then, he became particularly celebrated for his depictions of monks and nuns, usually viewed from the back.

Such artwork is thus deeply anchored in his lifelong experience of the quintessential monastic practice of leaving the monasteries daily soon after dawn, and silently walking single file to receive alms, and thereby enabling the donors to gain merit.The master loved simple images, nevertheless subtly capturing both movement and perspective. Yet the simplicity of Min Wae Aung’s childhood recollections evolves into more complex composition; the artist’s attachment to the finest detail is made evident with the monks’ robes varyingly illuminated, shaded, and elaborately folded as the procession merges into the void: typically against a vibrant golden or strikingly white field. Such a luminous but generally stark background is perfectly balanced by the sinuosity of the central form.

While both his style and his subject matter have been highly influential upon countless serious young artists, they have also been widely commercialized as tourist kitsch of lesser or greater painterly quality, with knockoffs available everywhere for just few dollars. One such example — and by no means contemptible in concept and execution — serves as the cover illustration of this volume of The Journal of Burma Studies. (The original was a gift to Catherine Raymond by her graduate students, Carolina Bodner and Stephanie Sposito, on concluding their 2006 summer field workin Myanmar.)