Forked Tongue

Po Po: Primeval Codes
Yavuz Gallery, Singapore
24.07.20 – 09.09.20

In the beginning was the word – or should that be the image? This question hangs in the air in Burmese artist Po Po’s slow burn of an exhibition, Primeval Codes, at Yavuz Gallery in Singapore. Comprising a body of paintings sketched in 1986 – 8 but realised only in 2020, the works depict simple geometric forms in austere compositions and a red and black palette. The works are, so we are told by the wall text, inspired by third-century to thirteenth-century scripts from Pyu, Bagan, Inwa and Pinya that influenced the Burmese alphabet, as well as contemporary traffic signs. This unexpected combination of influences has been distilled to a recurrent vocabulary of squares, rectangles and triangles, whose meanings remain open. That is, until you get to the titles.

Two right-facing triangles stacked one over the other: Fertility. A black square divided into four by red lines: Partnership. At first the titles sounded completely arbitrary, but after some time with the works a weird thing happened: I started to agree with them. Not through any logical deductive process; more through cumulative exposure. For example, a red bar bisecting a black square vertically is titled Freeze. Makes sense: verticals are decisive. Solid. Unmoving. When a red bar bisects a black square diagonally, the title is Wholeness. This is unexpected, but again, perfectly reasonable. This diagonal, or slash, represents divisions or fractions. Here, there is no numerator and denominator, just a division sign with nothing to divide – an elegant way to imply an empty sort of wholeness.

How are these meanings generated? It could be that the images echo other signs, and the titles pinpoint one of these associations. But it could equally be that these paintings are inherently neutral, and that the titles call their meanings into existence. Or there could be a third way: the series creates meaning in both directions – image influencing title influencing image – in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.

These works, which explore semiotics in such a playful and confident manner, were conceptualised when Myanmar was ruled by a military junta and largely isolated from the rest of the world. Since the late 1970s, Po Po has been creating a diverse body of work including paintings, sculptures, installations and performances, whose subject matter is a hard-to-summarise mix of Buddhist philosophy, socio-political commentary and whatever he happened to be into ( such as the ancient languages in Primeval Codes ). Because of the state’s strict isolationist policy, it was not until the late 1990s, when the borders began to loosen and Burmese artists started exhibiting abroad, that he became more widely known.

A lot has been made of how Po Po developed his art in an isolated culture. But he didn’t exactly operate in a vacuum from the outside world. He allegedly studied Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art ( 1912 ) over and over again, and ingested whatever scraps of Western philosophy he came across in information-starved Myanmar. This knowledge gets regurgitated in his art in weird and wonderful ways. In his first solo show, for example, his representations of Greek gods ( a response to what he read in a stray text on Greek mythology ) as undifferentiated tubes of cloth stuffed with cotton, seem gleefully opposed to the hardness, realism and idealism of classical marble sculptures. Narcissus ( 1987 ), inspired by the myth of a beautiful young man in love with himself, is a silk bolster tied by criss-crossing rope, lying on top of a mirror laid on the ground. Evoking both a tied sausage and a limp phallus, the work oozes a defeated, blocked sexuality: self-obsession, as bondage and impotence.

A common refrain about Po Po’s work, especially by viewers outside of Myanmar, is to say how remarkable it is that it feels familiarly contemporary ( at least in the ‘global’, i.e. Euro-American, sense ), although a large part of it was made in almost complete obliviousness of such trends or art vocabularies. This judgement is inadvertently patronising, because it assumes that the adoption of a recognisably ‘conceptual’ practice signifies an arrival of sorts for an artist. Still, there is a seductively legible quality to Po Po’s creations, a deceptive familiarity to international audiences, as if they are encountering a regional dialect to an official language. But even the most well-intentioned attempts to connect Po Po to an international context have resulted in awkward moments, such as the inclusion of Red Cube ( 1986 ) in the National Gallery of Singapore’s blockbuster exhibition Minimalism: Space. Light. Object in 2018. Featuring a rectangular canvas tilted at an angle, below which is a pile of rocks, Red Cube could, in formal terms, pass as one of the geometric works that dominated the rest of the survey show. But Po Po had never heard of Minimalism when he made his piece. Instead, according to press interviews, he had been experimenting with different shapes for canvases and ways of hanging them. At the same time, he also had some granite stones in his studio that he had been stacking into a pile, a practice informed by that of Buddhist monks meditating in the jungle, who would use such techniques to focus the mind. One day, he noticed he had positioned the mound of rocks right under the slanted painting, and Red Cube was born.

Calling Po Po a Minimalist, then, might be construed as a heroic embracing of the ‘intentional fallacy’. But it is also a wilful erasure of the circumstances and thought processes behind the work, which are far from the common reference points of a more homogeneous and globalised art world. Knowing the contexts in which Po Po worked may impede his easy insertion into well-trodden art-historical narratives, but it can open up other vistas. For one thing, it illuminates his interest in codes, as communicating in secret signs and systems might be a necessary condition of artmaking in Myanmar, where speaking truth to power could get you tortured or thrown into jail under the regime. Both the colour scheme and form of Primeval Codes are politically loaded. The censorship board under the junta frowned upon white and black for the contrasting images of goodness and evil they represented; as well as red for its association with revolution and, after 1988, its link with Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. Abstraction was also viewed with suspicion, because it could smuggle in political criticism or foreign influence. In this respect, it can be argued that the works in Primeval Codes have an element of resistance.

However, ‘decoding’ the exhibition in this way – not just with political reading but any other kind of interpretative axe-grinding – goes against the spirit in which they were made. Po Po created these paintings through an idiosyncratic process of distillation and combination of various languages. They have a ‘meta’ quality: you could argue that they are meta-pictures or meta-codes ( i.e. reflecting on the nature of both ), and more about codification than creating an internally consistent code. Of course, you could try to crack a pseudo-cipher about other ciphers, but it would be missing the point. Indeed, by preserving the mystery of signification instead of unveiling it, and by flirting with the pattern-finding part of the brain, Primeval Codes keeps viewers looking. Under close attention, certain motifs seem to emerge, and yet when I try to pin them down they recede. Left-facing triangles tend to be aggressive ( Provocative; Warrior ) and tall rectangles imply some form of blockage or stoppage ( Constraint; Defence; Encounter of Death ) – but these are vague tendencies, not hard and fast rules, suggestive of a system without fossilising into one. ( If Po Po had an unreleased painting from this series in the storeroom and the title were hidden from me, I wouldn’t be able to guess it. )

As such, meaning flickers in and out of focus in the show, and the viewer is poised between knowing and unknowing. It dramatises the fact that encountering an artist of any consequence, from anywhere, requires learning a new language that may never be mastered. Driven by a fiercely personal logic, shaped by his environment but irreducible to it, absorbing outside influences and then mutating them, passing through Minimalist, Conceptual or contemporary art without having heard of them at the moment of creating, Po Po’s language is communicative without being completely legible.

But are there ways to get him? Po Po’s exhibition title, Primeval Codes, suggests that he is trying to tap into something ancient and primitive about communication – a part that is more instinctive and unreasoning, perhaps even fundamental to life. Take the powerful, even talismanic image, Unknowable, which depicts the outline of a circle within the outline of a square, their sides touching. It is mathematical, almost fated: a mandala; Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man without the man. Against the solid black background, the circle glows thinly, the Sun’s corona during a solar eclipse. Moon over Sun. Day, night, unknowable. Yes.