On the Threshold

Episode #510: “I'm not an activist,” says Bart Was Not Here, a Burmese artist whose politically oriented work reflects a life shaped by dictatorship and displacement. He argues that art creates a space where memory, humor, fear, and imagination can coexist, allowing both artist and viewer to navigate political realities in ways that ordinary language cannot.

Bart sees current global politics as part of a wider shift toward more extreme forms of power. Myanmar’s experience, he explains, no longer feels unique but echoes developments now taking place elsewhere. This awareness shapes both his personal outlook and his artistic practice. As an individual he worries about the state of the world, yet as an artist he values the act of creation as a protected interior space from which to observe, reflect, and transform experience into form.

Satire plays a central role in his work, as Bart argues that humor can deflate authoritarian power by exposing its absurdity; a practice that Burmese have long been trained in doing. In a society familiar with repression, he notes how humor becomes a subtle form of resistance. For Bart, absurdity reveals how power, while often appearing grand, can be exposed as brittle and theatrical.

These ideas shape his recent exhibition, Threshold. The project emerged after he moved to the United States and received an immigration identification number for non-citizens. The label struck him as a strange science-fiction scenario—a “Third World alien” entering the first world. From this experience he developed the idea of a threshold: a suspended, liminal space between departure and arrival where identities shift and renegotiate themselves. It is an interconnected world rather than a series of isolated paintings, and populated by both mythic characters and archetypes from his own internal landscape. Through his layered environments, Bart explores systems of control, waiting, and escape.

Ultimately, however, he insists that art should remain playful and exploratory. As he puts it, “Nothing is really that deep… it’s all spectacle and entertainment.”