In his recent exhibition XENO that took place at The Strand Mansion in Yangon (October 28-November 5, 2023), Pyae Phyo Thant Nyo presented a new body of work that looks at worldbuilding and animism in the face of uncertain futures. The Strand was the residence of a British colonial officer until Burmese Independence, and is now a privately owned space. Due to a lack of formal exhibition spaces in Yangon, alternate sites allow for experimentation and renewed interest in the cultural sphere.

Phyo's process of creating works is extensive, spending time with the material and imbuing narratives into his mixed media assemblages over the course of months. He introduces unconventional sculptural materials into his installations, melding varying media such as metal, wax, spray paint, plastic, acrylic and even trash. He refers to his works within the traditional medium-based frameworks of art history, such as painting and sculpture, while challenging the accepted limits of those categories.

The artist brings in Buddhist and tribal symbols, impressions of Gothic architecture and contemporary memorabilia that project a politically unstable future. Introducing decorative symbols visible in the architecture of Buddhist monasteries, he cast the metal motifs to create his own sculptural forms, morphing materiality across works, where three-dimensional sculptures are in conversation with a wide array of paintings on canvas. He refers to floral patterns seen across his works as the basic building blocks of creation, as they are one of the first drawings that one makes as a child. The works become portals into a world that Phyo invites the viewer into.

According to the artist, the paintings become a "storage unit of memory," where he excavates symbolic presences to create contemporary visuals in what he describes as "cyber tribal forms", envisioning a new language that borrows, and yet deviates, from the traditional. He stores the traditional symbols as raw material that he crafts into his own forms, describing his process as that of painting on a canvas, referring to a certain fluidity in the transformation of materials.

The works reveal the artist’s process as he creates multiple forms drawn from the same raw materials, depicting a cross-referentiality between artworks, alternating and morphing symbols. Notably, he uses dark and metallic colours in a turn towards the “cyber” gothic, where the artwork XENO (2023) appears to bleed, indicating a bloody future born from a violent present. Overarchingly, his works respond to the current political crisis and civil war in Myanmar that has been brewing for decades, and accelerated by the coup d'etat in 2021. Myanmar is in a state of political instability where the military junta are being ousted by ethnic rebel groups, known as Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs). Arriving at a contrast between the languages of the ideal and the real, Phyo critiques the current political state of Myanmar.

In a conversation with STIR, the artist says, "The reason that I named the exhibition XENO is because it refers to the ‘outer’ or the ‘alien’. It is from this unknown state that I am trying to spotlight the dark time that is coming ahead for this country.” WAR ON XENO (2023), a work made of acrylic and steel on canvas, depicts an abstract but fraught scene with the eerie black and green colours of the military engulfed by cyber tribal symbols, with darkness and blood equally looming. The symbols that we see, cut out of steel, are repeated across the artist’s oeuvre, creating a relationship between the past and the present. At the same time, these forms nearly resemble futuristic landscape paintings, where the horizon remains out of bounds.

The artwork WANTED (2023) deviates from the spectral presence of abstracted war and brings the viewer to the scene of a crime. We see a strip of yellow cordoned-off police tape, which informs us that we have been placed in a crime scene. In the midst of it lies unidentifiable debris and even trash, which surrounds us constantly. Between a disposed gun and eroding artefacts, we encounter the cyber tribal motifs once again, and one wonders if we have reached even further into the future. Like opening an investigation, the viewer can see the scene as a form of evidence that allows them to encounter the new present.

In Hetoimasia in Nephrite Realm (2023), the artist reflects on the contemporary politics of Myanmar. The emergent EOAs surround the central axis—a throne—where instead of a figure we see a burnt void, spilling into the background. As Phyo explains, the gesture implicates and obviates the revered and idealised Buddha as well as the ruler, understood at the same level of reverence in Burmese culture.

The 3D-printed artwork Untitled (2023) brings a demonic form to life that must be contained, evoking a transgressive quality to the artist’s worldbuilding. At the core of Phyo’s practice lies the impulse to transform the material, a will towards alchemy, where he considers the nature of surfaces, textures and compositional elements and melds them into seemingly impossible forms. The artist speaks to animism, an overarching (Western) term for the reverence of nature and lending power to objects, and the material and organisational power that can be attached to them. In bringing these forms to life, the artist presents his own philosophical intentions. Between making and living occurs a resonance that speaks deeply to the present state of precarity.