Khin Zaw Latt

Khin Zaw Latt is at this moment one of Myanmar’s most talented and successful contemporary artist.

Khin Zaw Latt was born in Myanmar in 1980 in the delta village Laputta. He is the youngest of six children and comes from an artistic family; his mother was a dancer, his father a musician. His older brother by fifteen years, Soe Soe, is also an established artist in Yangon. After he graduated from the National University of Art and Culture in Yangon in 1998, he supported himself by teaching art to children, what he is still doing today.  KZL started looking at wooden stamps, and decided to experiment with stamping as the basis for what became the first paintings in his Buddha series. He won the Myanmar Contemporary Art Award in 2008, and in 2011 he won the first Myanmar National Portrait Award with a painting of his daughter. The second painting in the 2011 National Portrait competition was a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Artists in Myanmar are beginning to express not only the beauty but also the complexities of life, much as they do in New York, Berlin, Paris or Tokyo. It is in this climate that Khin Zaw Latt is painting his new series “Street people”. All is not tranquil or harmonious, but the unflinching nature of these paintings gives them a beauty of their own. The “Street People” series is an objective but emotional view of these children’s experiences.

The inspiration for KZL’s next series of paintings, “Moving Forward” comes from life in Yangon. Each day many thousands of people travel from their villages for as long as two hours in each direction to catch a ferry across the river to the center of Yangon. They seek daily, seasonal or long term employment and most will travel to Yangon merely to receive one or two dollars a day more than they would if they worked closer to home. Although many hope to find a job with a greater financial reward in the future, most will accept very modest gains in the present to have the possibility to move forward. This struggle is shared by many in Mexico City, Calcutta, Cairo and Lagos, to name a few other cities. What is so striking about the “Moving Forward” paintings is their universality, yet they also capture something uniquely Burmese and provide a subtle visual commentary that is the work of a master painter. 

He participated at solo and group shows locally and oversea. He has extensive exposure abroad with exhibitions in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Thailand, Singapore, the US, Canada, France and Belgium.