Aung Ko - I am Ko Shwe

Primo Marella Gallery Lugano is pleased to present “Aung Ko - I am Ko Shwe” the new exhibition dedicated to the Southeast Asian artist AUNG KO.

 

Born in 1980 in Htone Bo, Myanmar, Aung Ko studied Fine Art Painting at the University of Culture, Yangon. In 2007, Aung Ko founded the Thu Ye Dan Village Art Project at his native village in northern Myanmar. He has participated in many international exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennale in 2008 and the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 2009 and Documenta Fifteen in Kassel in 2022. Considering the content as more important than the form, Aung Ko uses different languages according to the themes he deals with. From photography to video-art, from painting to sculpture, the artist is confronted with contemporary themes that influence his life and that of his compatriots. His artistic narratives relate to history, both contemporary and past, and to the passing of time.

 

- Aung Ko

Beyond the thematic role of the village in Aung Ko’s practice, his expression is fully community-centric, his performances and installations tied to the village and its people through production and participation. 

Ideas about geographies, histories, and customs emerge, pieces charting place and time through gesture and relic, an art recalling the transience, hope, and illusion of existence. Yet these creations are not pictorial replications of a pocket of rural Burma, but rather distillates of its imagery, rituals and rhythms, which combined, build an art telling idiosyncratic stories, while also obliquely questioning the system and values dominating the country today.

 

The themes of my paintings are based on the scenes of the water festival, but they also reflect the unstable situations of the global society today.

- Aung Ko

 

The golden sculptures “Ko Shwe” are portraits of Aung Ko himself, in different periods of his life: a naked body, hairless and coated of gold, in a relaxed or aggressive attitude. The naked body underlines the precariousness and vulnerability of the human condition, while gold refers, on one side to the identity of Burma, often called “golden land” for the gilding of the religious buildings, and on the other side to those Burmese living and working abroad, who call each other “Mister Gold”: men with golden dreams, who find themselves in conditions of anxiety, anguish, bitterness. 

The gold, however, symbolizes the sacred, invoke a divine transcendence, a needing of overcoming the human condition through a metaphysical experience.