TIME
SUYIN HAYNES FEBRUARY 12, 2021
An image of three-finger salute is projected on a building during a night protest against the military coup and to demand the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in Yangon, Myanmar, Feb. 9 Reuters
K
hine, an artist based in Yangon, doesn’t think of himself as political. Right now, he says, he’d much rather be creating paintings of imagined scenes. But since Myanmar’s military coup on Feb. 1, he’s been making something different: “counter-propaganda”—posters and stickers meant to inspire civil disobedience and criticize the military junta. “What me and other artists are making right now is not art,” says Khine, who gave a pseudonym out of fear for his safety. “But it’s what the time calls for, and it’s what I’m feeling right now.”
Khine, who is in his mid-20s, is part of a community of artists based in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, that is creating striking, often satirical images and circulating them as part of the civil disobedience campaign on social media and out in the streets. The images feature ironic slogans, comical illustrations of military leaders and the three-fingered salute popularized during last year’s pro-democracy protests in Thailand. Khine says artists are responding to the coup with wit and an “abundance of energy.”
work by Khine and his fellow artists shows just how much the protest movement has changed from the street clashes of 2007 and 1988, when Myanmar was largely isolated from the rest of the world by decades of brutal military rule. Driven by young Burmese who came of age with internet access and the comparative freedoms of the last decade, the civil disobedience movement is being organized online, particularly on Facebook, which is hugely popular in the country. Protesters are sharing images across social media, and have looked to the tactics and slogans of movements in Hong Kong and Thailand for inspiration.
Read more: Myanmar’s Military Didn’t Just the Overthrow Government. It’s Cracking Down on All Forms of Dissent
The military junta has responded with internet blackouts and by introducing a new draconian cyber-security law that targets internet providers and social media. And military leaders are starting to show that they are willing to return to the kind of violent repression that marked earlier protests.
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On Tuesday, police shot a woman in the head—reportedly with live ammunition—during a demonstration in the capital Naypyidaw, and three people were wounded when police fired rubber bullets to disperse crowds in protests in the country’s southeast on Friday. The 19-year-old woman remains in a critical condition in hospital, according to Human Rights Watch. Khine says he and many of his friends fear a return to the oppressive control that has marked most of Myanmar’s modern history. “This year is the final battle,” he says. “Either we win, or we stay 20 more years under the military dictatorship.”
How artists are responding to the coup
That’s why the response to the coup from Myanmar’s thriving arts community has been unified, Khine says. Friends have printed out stickers with his illustrations urging disobedience and stuck them up around Yangon, and he has been writing and drawing signs for people to take to protests. As the artists’ work has spread on Burmese social media, young people have found the images online and reprinted them. Turnout in the streets has been sustained; according to Reuters, hundreds of thousands of people protested across the country Friday in the biggest day of mass demonstrations since the coup.
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