Gallery Showcase

Many traditional artistic treasures of the East have been preserved as cultural heritage within the ancient cultural landscape of Bagan.

Likewise, many works by Gauguin and Van Gogh, key figures in the development of modern Western painting, have endured as part of the world’s artistic heritage.

The artist who combines these Eastern and Western legacies into contemporary creations is none other than M.P.P Yei Myint.

Born in Myingyan, educated in Mandalay, and having struggled to make a living in Yangon, M.P.P Yei Myint eventually discovered Bagan. To this day, he lives there with his family and continues to create paintings every day without fail. His discovery of Bagan was much like Gauguin’s discovery of Tahiti. In Bagan, he was able to produce a remarkable outpouring of new artistic works.

Even before settling in Bagan, Van Gogh and Gauguin had already exerted a profound influence on M.P.P Yei Myint’s life. While studying at art school in Mandalay, he learned about the lives of these two artists through books and films. He deeply admired and respected those who had sacrificed their lives for art. As a result, he paid tribute to Van Gogh and Gauguin by incorporating their influence into his own paintings, blending it with his personal style and ideas.

He began painting the first work in the “Van Gogh Visits Bagan” series in 1998. The series was exhibited once in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2009 and again in Yangon, Myanmar, in 2016. Among all of M.P.P Yei Myint’s creations, the Van Gogh Visits Bagan series is one of the most distinctive and most popular with audiences. It became known not only within Myanmar but also internationally.

The exhibition “Van Gogh and Gauguin Visit to Bagan” became the first exhibition in which he combined the artistic influences of both Van Gogh and Gauguin with his own distinctive style. This series, which took more than five years to prepare and create, includes monumental groups of paintings. Just as the exhibition title brings together the names of the two master painters and Bagan, many of the artworks themselves are displayed and conceived as interconnected compositions. Some of the paintings stretch over 30 feet in length.

The large scale of these painting ensembles feels entirely natural. After all, are not the history of Bagan and the artistic legacies of Van Gogh and Gauguin themselves immense in scale? Are they not, in a sense, limitless and enduring?