The great art escape

Htein Lin was confined to a Burmese prison cell for six and a half years, falsely accused of planning opposition protests.

Using whatever materials he could lay his hands on to continue painting in secret, he then smuggled his work out to the outside world, with a little bribery. Of about 1000 works, some 200 survive.

Instead of brushes, he painted with syringes, bottle tops and razor blades and used sheets and his cellmates' longis or sarongs as his canvases.

Lin was suddenly released in 2004 after which he married the former British ambassador to Burma. They now live in London and are expecting their first child.

He is now celebrating his first British exhibition of his smuggled art at Asia House in London. The show is called Burma Inside Out.

Against the odds

One painting is an arresting self-portait of bright swirling colours, multi-eyed, and red lipped - and more fascinating considering the artist had no brushes or ready materials, using a syringe to paint his lines.

The self-portrait was painted in secret in a prison cell, in a country where any free-thinking person lives in fear and paranoia of the military junta and its spies - Burma.

Artistic survival

His prison art is unlike anything else from Burma. It is vibrant, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, sometimes haunting.

Comic actor, performance artist and painter, the 41-year-old has spent a quarter of his life either hiding in the Burmese jungle or in prison. His story has moved on surprisingly too.

Since coming to London, Htein Lin has been exhilarated to see Francis Bacon's work at Tate Britain and Damien Hirst's diamond skull at the White Cube. He has also written about Hirst for some Burmese magazines.

Share this article

Send this article to a friend »

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Reddit
• Facebook
• StumbleUpon

What are these?