Burmese photographer and mixed media artist Shwe Wutt Hmon joins us in February 2023 for the first of several 1-month residencies.
About the Artist
Shwe Wutt Hmon (b. 1986) is a Burmese photographer and mixed media artist, living and working in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Shwe’s works focus on collective histories, familial ties, knots and threads of human relationship and exploring the inner psyche through intimate storytelling about people and places dear to her heart. She tells personal stories from which she connects and examines broader social aspects; vice versa, she works on social documentaries reflecting and drawing from her own position within the issue. Shwe uses photography as her main medium and incorporates archives, videos, texts, poems, paintings and drawings of her own or collaborating with others.
Shwe is the recipient of respected art and photography awards including the Objectifs Documentary Award 2020 (Open Category) and the inaugural Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize in 2021. Her works have been exhibited internationally in art festivals and spaces such as Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Aichi Triennale, Singapore International Photography Festival, Photo Australia International Festival of Photography, ArtScience Museum Singapore, Bangkok Art & Culture Centre and Photoforum Pasquart.
Website: https://www.shwewutthmon.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shwewutthmon/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShweWuttHmon
About the Residency
Over these two years, Shwe has been examining her inner feelings of agony and rage towards what is happening around her on the backdrop of contemporary Myanmar politics, and facets of personal stories on how psyche, body, environment and materials are intertwined.
During the first part of her artist residency in Rimbun Dahan, Shwe is expanding her self-portrait series “I Do Miss Hospital Visit” that asks questions and creates metaphor of how one’s body and health would fade away and how one might find outlets out of a confined situation. The images in the series were created from digitally scanning the scars on her body, along with CT scans from previous medical procedures, and juxtaposing these with dried and decaying flowers, as well as old family photographs, that serve as signifiers of mortality, and the inexorable passing of time.
Since Shwe moved to Chiang Mai in November 2022, she has become interested to experiment with printing these scanner-generated self-portrait images on Saa Paper, traditional handmade paper that is very common in Northern Thailand, which is also very similar to Shan Sakku (Shan Paper) in Myanmar. The surface of the Saa Paper with a skin-like feel plus dried flowers and leaves embedded functions as a contemplative material to exhibit a body in a tender way, alongside the popularity of the paper in Thailand and Myanmar as a layer of storytelling for Shwe’s movement through and connection with both countries.
“Eventually this experimental process led me to cut, put tape, sew and stitch as my body is treated in the operation room. At this point, I am mending myself.”
