Remark

The ‘Skirting the Issue’ series began in 2018,when Htein Lin was inspired by preparations for his (British) wife’s TedXTalk. She asked other western women married to Burmese men what the main challenges they had faced were, and several had raised the importance their in-laws attached to how they did the laundry and whether this ‘hpone nyein-deh’ – lowered or harmed the ‘hpone,’ or masculine glory, of their male partners.

Htein Lin was also saddened by a Myanmar woman in the UK for whom this issue, and her in-law’s attitude, had contributed to her divorce from her husband. He decided to explore societal attitudes to this issue, and find out the experience of a variety of Myanmar women. Some of them are friends and relatives, some of them well-known women, some of them ordinary women from the neighbourhood around his studio.

Htein Lin invited these women to bring him an old htamein (the word for a woman’s longyi), and pose for him, and when Htein Lin had painted their portrait, to come back and share their own thoughts on the subject on the painting. Htein Lin would then give them a new htamein. As soon as he posted the request on Facebook, Htein Lin received many offers to participate from Myanmar’s feminist community, some of whom had to be turned down as the artist was concerned that the series would fail to represent the more traditional views of the majority of Myanmar women.