At Palais de Tokyo, Chan Aye (b. 1954 in Mandalay, lives and works in Yangon and Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar) creates his largest work to-date. Flanking the central staircase are four distinct yet connected scenes, in which Chan Aye evokes the shifting nature of humanity, its connectedness to the natural environment that morphs time and is morphed by time itself. Self-created and ancient symbols, perspectival and perceptual play of impossible spaces, and trompe l’oeil technique coupled with real objects, serve as projections towards some of the ancient concerns that still haunt our contemporary sentient life. Chan Aye studied traditional Myanmar painting between 1986 and 1989, developing an inventive pictorial language that combines the iconography of Myanmar cave painting and mural paintings, as found in the temples at Bagan, Sitkaing, and Po Win Taung in North Myanmar, with his interest in Western art, which he has studied in magazines and book reproductions through the years. Physicalizing the various states of life’s existence and spirituality, Chan Aye engages with the dualities of material and immaterial forms: color, time, and the dimensions of human emotions, of anger, love, hate, and greed, using diverse materials such as paint, wood, paper from Myanmar Shan State, silk, motor equipment, lighting, bronze, and steel.

Chan Aye is the first artist to realize an on-site installation in the context of a new partnership between Palais de Tokyo and Fondation d’entreprise Total. The novel program of Fondation d’entreprise Total, “Emerging Talent in Emerging Countries” aims to discover and bring to a wider audience lesser-known artists from Southeast Asia, and is being deployed over a four-year period, from 2014 to 2017.

Curator: Jo-ey Tang