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Biography
Soe Soe was born in 1967 in Myanmar, which he honours by placing it after his name. His father is a pianist while his mother is an instructor of traditional dance. His artistic talent was evident even as a young boy nurturing his hobby of painting.
He stepped into the profession of painting in 1985 when he turned 18. As of the year 2008, at the age of 41, he holds 23 years of experience as a full-time artist. Upon embarking on his career, he made a decision to devote his life to painting. He conducted numerous art exhibitions with various features in the media on his artworks. His unusual techniques reflect his pioneering spirit in pursuing innovation in each piece of art. In the 2003 Myanmar Contemporary Art Exhibition, Myint Soe’s work was chosen as the top 30 out of 296 artists, which were subsequently exhibited in the Myanmar Contemporary Art Exhibition 2004.
His works capture the vibrancy of sunlight dappling the beautiful rice fields of the Northern Shan State in Myanmar. The vibrant energy of the works combines with its rich jewel hues to attract viewers’ attention. rejuvenating and delighting the viewer. The three-dimensional quality of his pieces aptly captures the nature and reality of these plants, such that one feels as he is physically standing by the beautiful hills in Myanmar.
Throughout his illustrious career, Soe has held several joint and solo exhibitions around the world, including Hong Kong, Nepal, New York, Washington D.C., Singapore and Myanmar. He has emerged as a significant artist, well-received by international collectors and his paintings can be found in both private and public collections in countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, US and Europe.
For Soe, painting is not a tiresome job; rather, it is a companion that gives him eternal pleasure. Perhaps it is this joyous sincerity and honing of talent that attracts the heart of his collectors.
The Art of Myint Soe
Critique by Curator Mr Choy Weng Yang
Soe Soe was born in 1967 in Laputta, Myanmar. His artistic talent was evident as a young boy and his talented parents – father is a pianist and mother is an instructor of traditional dance – nurtured his gift for painting. At 18, he started painting professionally and by 2008, at the age of 41, his achievement in painting includes 23 years of experience as a full-time artist and several solo exhibitions. In 2003, Myint Soe’s entry was among the top 30 out of 296 at the prestigious Myanmar Contemporary Art Exhibition. The selected work was later featured at the 2004 Myanmar Contemporary Art Exhibition.
Soe’s forte is his ability to subject his art to the process of evolution and hence tracing the transitions of his overall painting development is revealing. Once he overcame the basic mechanism of painting – crucial to any aspiring art practitioner – he focused exclusively on the intricate art of composition in a painter to explore its unexplored potentials. And brilliant Italian painter Michelangelo Caraviaggio sprang to mind. For in 17th Century when the great Italian Renaissance masters already took the art of figure composition to the highest stunning peak, Caraviaggio broke new ground with his superlative-realistic paintings whose element of realism was so original, dramatic and gripping that they completely overwhelmed his Italian contemporaries with their hypnotizing power.
Soe’s own searching experiments in figure-compositions led him to evolve his own identity and style. Eager to keep up with the spirit of his time, his refreshing compositions are characterized by Soe’s ability to galvanize such deceptively common-place elements as colour, design, simplicity, clarity and austerity and put them into the best visual effects by liberating their potentials to create compositions which possess disarmingly entrancing visual power.
When it came to the exploration of the possibilities in the element of light in the painting process, Myint Soe was irresistibly fascinated by the French Impressionists’ credo emerging from their historic breakthrough in painting in the 19th Century. In their breathtakingly original innovation in the realm of visual perception, the French Impressionists declared, with utter courageous single-mindedness, that the elements of light and colour were one, that they were inextricably inseparable. They argued with forceful persuasion that without light and paradoxically, it was colour which gave light its explicit expression. Subsequently, Claude Monet’s heroic cluster of masterpieces in painting – the haystack series, the cathedral series and the waterlilies series vindicated the French Impressionists. What made treatment of light in his painting exceptional was that he side-tracked the popular practices of expressing light through the contrast of light and dark, the tonal spectrum or the intricate nuances of light sensations. Soe’s uncompromising striking colour hues effectively exude an invisible light. There is no indication of any attempt at structuring light. And there lies the mystery of his art.
Having concentrated exclusively on the art of composition and then that of light in the context of his painting, Soe turned logically to yet another crucial force in creative painting – colour. And in this respect he could not possibly have resisted the revolutionary new wave in the role of colour advanced by the influential French artist, Henri Matisse – a breakthrough of great consequence. Especially captivating was how Matisse engineered the regeneration of the boundless possibilities of colour – till then largely unexploited – how he led the experimental Fauvist Movement, how he created a member of brilliant works with their revolutionary visual concepts and how at the peak of his artistic maturity, in the 20th Century, he perpetually evolved the surprising series of his paper-cut artworks characterized by their simplicity, clarity, evocative resonance and, most impressive, of all, daring originality.
In his in-depth pursuit of colour, Soe was uncompromisingly determined to forge his own independent direction, convinced that there was ample room for originality. Through trials and errors he stringently reduced the complexity of his work to its utmost essentials. Ultimately, colour and design formed the crux of the painting with line and mass, rhythm and movement revolved around it. His painting is eventually endowed with resonance, stillness and precision. The outcome: a work with mysterious effect and a touch of the surreal.
