Postcards, Movie Posters and Paintings, Now UNceNsored

Pansodan Art Gallery in downtown Yangon is much more than a showroom for paintings. The gallery’s owner, 42-year-old arts patron Aung Soe Min, says he and his partner Nance Cunningham opened the gallery in 2008 to showcase the work of local artists, but he has been amassing his impressive collection of cultural artifacts—from book covers and postcards to movie posters and propaganda art—for so long that he now has enough to fill four more houses. During a recent tour of the gallery, he spoke to Irrawaddy reporter Samantha Michaels about his treasures, how censorship affected his business during the era of military rule, and why he wants to create a visual account of Myanmar’s long-shrouded past.

What are some of the most interesting or surprising items you’ve collected over the years?

I have propaganda art, ads, artwork from book covers—much of the collection is extremely rare. Let me show you some of them. here are movie posters from before the Second World War, before TV was around. I have rare photos, including some historical ones, like this one of the prime minister from the independence era, or a group photo here with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother. These book covers are from before World War II. They show the beginnings of modern fashion here, local fashion in Yangon. You can see some are in the style of Western pin-up magazines. here you can see a photo of the 1947 Panglong Conference, the most famous conference, and here’s the first president of Myanmar. I also have historical documents.

Where do you find these things?

We just started collecting. People come and sell what they have, and I sort through them slowly. Sometimes if famous artists or politicians pass away and their families can’t keep all their things, I’ll go out and see if they want to sell. I always encourage them to keep it, but if they don’t want it, I collect. People keep these things in their homes for a time but have no system to organize them, like me. It’s very difficult to maintain them, in fact.

In the beginning I just started collecting for my private interest, but later I started thinking more for future history and research. I want to get an alternative history. everything we’re learning is just the standard history from the government, and nobody is doing research properly yet in many fields—history, literature, the media. We can do a history of newspapers properly, or even a history of comic books—I collect comic books, too.

Do you sell these cultural artifacts?

Some of these things are very rare, and if it’s one of a kind, it’s important for history and we don’t sell. These things are mostly for researchers. But if we have extra, then we sell.

The government’s censorship board was disbanded this year, but it was still around when you opened the gallery in 2008. How did that affect business?

We had to invite the censorship board before exhibit openings. They would come and decide which paintings we couldn’t show. Censorship limited what artists could create, so that was always a problem. But for us, really, the censors didn’t pay that much attention to the art. They thought of art as something that just hangs on a wall in your home, rather than being public, so they didn’t pay much attention. Artists were a little less oppressed than writers, filmmakers or musicians, whose works were more publicized.

Do you have a favorite artist or writer?

Many. I really like [Yasunari] Kawabata, a japanese writer who won a Nobel Prize, and also rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali writer and poet. As for contemporary writers, I also like Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s rainbow.” I have several favorite artists, like Paul Klee, [Wassily] Kandinsky and [joan] Miro.