Recovering / Agency

MAYCO NAING (b.1984)
Photography, Curation

Mayco Naing is a contemporary visual artist and photographer born and based in Myanmar. Her practice spans journalism, fine art, commercial and conceptual photography, shaped by a longstanding interest in social issues, identity, memory, and the stories that remain unseen.

May began her photographic career in a small photo studio in Yangon and has since exhibited her work internationally, including at the Lyon Biennale and Bangkok Biennale, as well as photography festivals in Lishui and Dali, China, Bangkok, India, and Colorado.

Alongside her artistic practice, May has worked with the Yangon Photo Festival since 2011, where she has spent more than a decade teaching and mentoring emerging photographers, particularly in communities with limited access to photographic education. Her commitment to education and cultural exchange has become an integral part of her practice.

Following an artist residency in Marseille, May has continued to develop her artistic voice while creating connections between Myanmar and international audiences. Her work explores Myanmar’s social and political realities through photography and an expanding interdisciplinary practice that includes poetry readings, contemporary dance, photo magazines, screenings, projections, and exhibitions.

Working in the context of Myanmar’s often overlooked presence in Europe, as well as the wider realities of war and conflict, May sees art as a way of making distant stories more visible and bringing audiences closer to experiences that might otherwise remain unseen. Her practice creates spaces for dialogue between personal experience, collective memory, and the complex realities of contemporary Myanmar.

NGE LAY (b.1979)
Multidisciplinary Artist

Nge Lay is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Paris. She received her DNSAP (Master’s Diploma) from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2025, following a BA in Fine Art Painting (2003) from the National University of Arts and Culture, Yangon and a BA in Economics (2004) Yangon East University. 

Working across performance, installation, sculpture, and photography, Lay’s practice explores Myanmar’s social and political realities, historical contexts, and personal narratives. A central concern of her work is rural education,  which she addresses through long-term art projects with schools in her husband’s village of Thuye’dan. Following her experience of exile, her work has increasingly focused on migration, displacement, belonging, and the complexities of living between places. 

Nge Lay’s work has been exhibited internationally across Europe, Australia, the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Selected exhibitions include Chaque vie est une histoire, Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris (2025); Dislocations, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); Autohistorias, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille (2024); Venice Meeting Point, Venice (2024); documenta fifteen (2022); and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT8 - 2016). She is also a co-organiser of the Thuye’dan Village Art Project and was a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2011 and 2020.

PINKY HTUT AUNG (b.1992)
Multidisciplinary Artist

Pinky Htut Aung is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Myanmar, started her career as a musician in 2013. Coming from a family of musicians, playing musical instruments was part of growing up for her. As a child, she had been pursing her dream to become a musician while painting and sculpting had been a kind of therapy to overcome her social anxiety. 

Pinky’s first group exhibition in 2018 ‘Clouds are Thoughts’ encouraged her to further explore digital art and art in a more transdisciplinary way; fusing sonic, music and visuals. Since 2020, she is also actively composing for films, documentaries, collaborating with choreographers and visual artists.

After the 2021 military coup, Pinky had to leave the country for security reasons and now resides in Paris to continue her artistic practices and research. She is currently a member of l’atelier des artistes en exil and winner of the European Creative program “In Ex(il)Lab.”

SOE YU NWE (b.1989)
Creamics, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing

Soe Yu Nwe draws inspiration from Burmese folklore, vernacular arts, and Buddhist and animistic practices. Her sculptures often feature fragmented female bodies transformed into visceral, semi-botanical forms.

Reflecting her own ethnic Chinese heritage in the context of her upbringing in Myanmar, Nwe’s practice embraces hybridity to explore the multiplicity and fluidity of identity. One of her recurring mythical motifs is the “Goddess of the Serpent”, a metaphor for the self, rebirth, and femininity – a symbolic challenge to the conservative gender roles traditionally upheld in Myanmar’s Buddhist doctrine. Another significant motif is the head of Guanyin (Goddess of Mercy). Inspired by her encounter with the Kannon (Guanyin) statues at Sanjūsangen-dō in Kyoto where the deity appears as male, unlike the typically female depictions in Myanmar, Nwe began exploring gender identity through this mythological figure, expanding the motif into a new body of work. In her “Inspiration from Shan State” series, she explored her family’s migration history from Yunnan to Myanmar. In her acquired work at the British Museum’s “Burma to Myanmar” exhibition, Soe narrated her identity and emotional conflict through the Burmese Python symbol.

Soe’s work has been exhibited internationally including institutions such as Leeum Museum of Art (Korea), Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (Australia), Humboldt Forum (Germany), Simose Art Museum (Japan), The New Taipei City Yingge Ceramic Museum (Taiwan), National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta (Indonesia) and ArtScience Museum (Singapore). Soe was named in 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30: Art & Style. Soe has been awarded the inaugural 2023 Advocacy for the Arts Fellowship from The Rockefeller Foundation and CARE USA.

Thynn Lei Nwe (b.1991)
Painting, Sculpture, Illustration

Thynn Lei Nwe is based in Yangon and studied Fine Arts (specializing in Painting) at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore from 2012 to 2014. 

Since 2009 to present, Nwe has participated in exhibitions in Yangon, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, and solo exhibitions in 2018 and 2024 in Yangon. Nwe’s series of works were also collected by the British Museum which was exhibited as a part of Burma To Myanmar exhibition in 2024. She was the former resident artist at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2010; Rimbun Dahan, Selangor, Malaysia in 2016; and Walden Art, Ménerbes, France in 2024.

Wunna Aung (b.1978)
Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking

Wunna Aung was born in Shwe Kyin (Bago Division) and has lived all his life in the capital city Yangon. Creativity for Wunna is an act of crossing aesthetic and cultural frontiers and genres. In other words, his multifaceted oeuvre has consistently shown his ability to trespass cultures, notably by crisscrossing the ancient culture of Myanmar with his iconic Pop paintings. An examination of such a concept leads fairly directly to the relationship between contemporary art and material culture. 

As much as Wunna is engrossed in popular culture, he is equally fascinated by personalities that have shaped Myanmar’s history – both by their symbolic nature and their vestiges of human existence. The dynamics of such representations lie in the paintings’ potential, where his working process is more like a painted collage. Instead of incorporating external elements into the picture, however, he creates layers for visual textures. A member of ROAR (Release of Artistic Rage) group, Wunna Aung is a regular participant in urban art activities in Yangon. Amongst notable exhibitions he has participated in recently are: Art + Plug Season One to Eight (2013-20) Exhibitions, Rendezvous II: South East Asia Urban Art Event (2013), and Unleashed (Myanm/art) (2017), R0c And Roll (Myanm/art)(2016), Myanmar New Wave Pop Art Revisited (Intersection Gallery, Singapore)(2017), Playing Time and Space (Intersection Gallery, Singapore)(2019), S.E.A. Focus 2019 (Singapore) and All Too Human (Myanm/art) (2022), Coordinates (D-nakana)(2024). From May to July, 2022, he participated and residenced on LIA (Leipzig International Art Programme) in Leipzig.

Aung Myat Htay (b.1978)
Artist, Independent Curator, Writer, Educator

ACC grantee artist, writer and independent curator and educator, Aung was practicing bronze sculpture, assisted his father since he was young. Started art education at the state-run Fine Art school in his hometown and graduated BFA at the University of Art & Culture in Yangon. International residencies in the US, Europe, and Asia have furthered his artistic learning. 

Working as an artist/educator, he explores the potential in freedom of expression found in contemporary art. He expresses social messages combining the contemporary senses. In 2015 he founded the alternative art learning project School of Contemporary Art Myanmar, and in 2024, he conducted research at the Tokyo University of Arts, with a fellowship grant from the Ishibashi Foundation/The Japan Foundation. Aung Myat Htay was born in Mandalay Upper Burma, and he lives and works in Yangon, Burma.

Sid Kaung Set Linn
Independent Curator, Gallerist

Kaung Sett Lin  (Sid) is an independent curator and reluctant romantic of the art world, known for conjuring spaces that dabble between the visible and the imagined. His practice focuses on the peripheries of artistic forms and spatial hauntings, often slipping between curatorial intent and emotional residue. Sid’s research unsettles the usual narratives—tracing how curatorial gestures, spatial mannerisms, and fragile documentation map, distort, or even mourn the trajectory of contemporary art in Myanmar. Sid curates like some people keep diaries—lingering in the soft underbelly of the everyday, where feelings wobble into theory, coffee meets crisis, and satire becomes survival. 

His work moves through cruel optimism, dislocation, and low-grade hope, exploring “territorial possibilities” as relational intensities. Each exhibition becomes an elegy; each site, a diagram of longing. He is also developing an abstract on the dystopian erudite orchestra—a conceptual ensemble of exhausted intellectuals and emotionally unavailable dreamers performing discordant fugues across fractured institutions. Somewhere between score and screed, the project asks whether erudition can be weaponized, mourned, or merely aestheticized in the ruins—playing not music, but memory, bureaucracy, and beautifully misfiled grief.