Excavating narratives: an open database of an illustrated oeuvre from Myanmar (Burma)

• Main Authors: Ker, Yin, Sum,, Hedren Wai Yuan
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::General; Bagyi Aung Soe; Burmese Art; Data Visualisation; Generous Interfaces; Digital Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155751; https://iassistdata.org/conferences/archive/2018-montreal/
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

What narratives might illustration as a medium and body of works carry, in addition to those divulged by individual illustrations? In Myanmar (Burma), as in many third-world economies, illustration was the principal site of avant-garde artistic experimentation in a heavily censored society into which the art market had yet to penetrate. Yet, it has been thus far omitted in the prevailing art historical narrative. Through the illustrations of Myanmar's most prolific illustrator and acclaimed trailblazer of modern art, Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990), AungSoeillustrations.org (ASi) recounts the emergence of a novel artistic consciousness between 1948, the year the country gained political independence, and 1990 when Myanmar began to open up after almost three decades of isolation under a purportedly socialist regime. In addition, data visualisations of the illustrations created over four decades uncover narratives of a country, a people and an artist's aspirations and travails. This paper proposes to address the process and significance of uncovering and reinterpreting the (hi)story of a country’s modern art through the digitisation, visual analysis, ontology creation, data curation, database design and data visualisation of 6000 illustrations and 60 texts sourced from private and public libraries in Paris and Yangon since 2000.