Mia Boe
Cage
Cage (2023) is a large painting of a dream-like surrealist landscape situated in a vast, barren plain. The sinister light of sundown alludes to the foreboding feeling of surveillance and the unfaltering melancholy of the disassociation from home. In the foreground, a figure in Longyi (Burmese garment) stands enclosed within a red net with five arms tugging on the wire in different directions. Each sleeve bears the flag of the global superpowers.
This work builds upon Boe’s ongoing engagement with carceral systems in Myanmar and their imbrication with Empire, illustrating a burdened humanity through trauma invoked by decades of colonial rule and subjugation aided and in collusion with global superpowers. Boe’s recent body of work interrogates life under the military junta of present-day Myanmar through the lenses of the architecture of the country’s notorious Insein Prison, located in the former capital of Yangon. The colonial British authorities built Insein Prison in 1887 to relieve overcrowding at Rangoon Central Gaol, located on Commissioner’s Road near Downtown Yangon.
Mia Boe is a painter based in Melbourne, Australia, from Brisbane with Butchulla and Burmese ancestry. The inheritance and disinheritance of both cultures are the focus of her practice. Boe’s paintings respond, sometimes implicitly, to historical and contemporary acts of violence perpetrated on the people and lands of Burma and Australia. Other themes in her practice include the impossibility of homecoming when one's ties to home are severed by colonization, and systems of incarceration through the First Nations’ experience.