CNK (Chan Nyein Kyaw) (b. 1959)

Monywar, Myanmar

CNK (Chan Nyein Kyaw) was born in the year 1959 in Monywar, Myanmar. He has studied art under reknowned Myanmar artist’s Ko Ko Lay (MDY), U Khin Maung (Bank), and U Than Nyunt Win (Ye,U). He has participated in many group and solo shows to date. For years he worked as a staffer for the Department of Agriculture, visiting some of Burma’s most picturesque countryside. When he took up painting later on, CNK found that the images poured naturally out of his mind and onto the canvas. “These are the outcomes of what I see in my mind’s eye of the places I have been. The colors I use are different from reality, because I paint them the way I feel about those places.” While much of CNKs work is representational, he believed that abstraction is liberating for him as an artist. CNK often refers to his paintings as “dreamscapes,” because they picture a world that oscillates somewhere between reality and imagination, making them both strange and familiar at once.