Imagine a country where there are no longer any universities to speak of (though you can buy a degree at a price), where education (or the lack thereof) has been utilised as a means of control and oppression, where expressing your views can get you imprisoned at best and killed at worst, where most people are so exhausted by the struggle for daily survival that they have lost their will to fight or in some cases think. Imagine a country of breathtaking beauty twinned with heart-stopping cruelty. Welcome to Burma.

The artist Htein Lin would be a prodigious talent in any country but is more so, not just because he is Burmese, but because his genius was exercised under the extreme conditions of the Burmese penal system. Imprisoned after being falsely charged with planning opposition protests in 1998, Htein Lin, one of Burma’s leading performance artists, began painting as, in his words, “a means of being free’’. Without materials, he began to improvise after an encounter with a fellow activist in jungle exile – a painter from Mandalay – inspired him to pursue his childhood passion. “We spent a lot of time talking about art. I knew nothing. He told me about Picasso, about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I could only imagine. I had never even seen a picture of these paintings.”

Htein Lin began painting on plastic bags his family brought in bearing food. He moved on to longyis (the cotton wrap-around Burmese dress) sold to him for cigarettes by departing inmates. His materials ranged from enamel paint smuggled from a warder’s desk to syringes and a lighter he secreted about his person with rubber bands during body searches. He still grimaces at the memory.

His paintings tell the story of the incredible resourcefulness in the face of hardship of life on death row, of the mundanity of prison life, of the hope inspired by NLD leader and Nobel prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi and of the fragmentation of his family unit. On more than one occasion to prevent his paintings from being destroyed (though many were), he sewed his work into his bedding roll and asked for it to be given to his family on their next visit.

When Htein Lin emerged from jail in 2004 he was homeless – having lost his house to his wife after their divorce. “I spent a long time living with friends and I was worried. Mostly about losing the paintings.” Help was at hand in the form of the British Ambassador in Rangoon, Victoria Bowman, who took the paintings and ensured they would be preserved by loaning them to the Burma Archives Project at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. You can see a selection of these inspiring paintings at Asia House in London from July 27 to October 13. If you are lucky you might also meet Htein Lin and his delightful new wife – a certain Ms Bowman. For reader, in a heartwarming end to this unbelievable story, he married her.

www.asiahouse.org

coolhunter@thetimes.co.uk

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