Maung Di´s Global Artist Village
7 August 2018

My mother was a broker, so I have many childhood memories of learning mathematics, though she died when I was very young. I remember so many things about my life but I don’t remember her. My father taught me how to use a balancing scale – the kind they use in the market, or as a symbol of justice.

I continue to look to these scales as the depiction of emptiness, zeroness, evenness and balance, because it is only when it is balanced is there perfection. I look to these concepts when creating my work. Minimal shapes, spaces of zeroes, emptiness, nothingness.

In 1975, I had a strange experience. I was in a meditation center on a 10-day course. I meditated in isolation, with the door closed. I was not permitted to open the door. It was only when someone else opened the door, they could see me crying. I do not know why exactly I cried, but I continued to ask myself why. Today I know that cried because I witnessed balance and equality, if only in my mind. After all, real equality is unseen.

Maung Di (b. 1941)

Born in Pokkoku district, Maung Di drew since he was young. He worked as a cartoonist at Bahosi Newspaper in Mandalay from 1959-1962. He travelled to Yangon and worked as an illustrator for various magazines under the name of Myo Nyunt from 1959-1995. He studied Art at the State School of Fine Art, Yangon from 1967 to 1970. He began showing objects d’art at Alliance Francaise in Yangon in 1969 and simultaneously began using the artist name of Maung Di. He joined in modern art group exhibitions, wrote poems, short stories and articles and continued to make art. He has had many solo shows in Yangon, at galleries including Beikthano, Lokanat, and Ahla Thit Art Gallery.