Saya Saung
| Saya Saung | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1898 |
| Died | 1952 (aged 54) |
| Nationality | Burmese |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Mandalay School; Transparent Western-style Watercolor Painting |
Saya Saung (1898–1952) was an early Burmese watercolorist who adopted the Western style of painting and became famous in Burma for his landscape works. He is less known for his portraits, about seven of which have surfaced in recent years.
Saya Saung is the only early Western-style painter who has the honorific “Saya” (meaning master) automatically attached to his name, a title generally reserved for the painters of the Traditional School in Burma. In Saya Saung’s case, the honorific may have attached to him because he was from Mandalay, the capital of the fallen Konbaung Dynasty (1752–1885) and the heart of the Traditional arts, where artisans trained rigorously in apprenticeship systems working themselves up gradually to the status of master, or Saya. Saya Saung did not pass through such demanding and subservient rites of passage in his acquisition of talents in Western painting, but once he was recognized as possessing master-level skills, it would have been natural in the cloistered world of Mandalay for the title “Saya” to be applied to his name.
The painter who is invariably mentioned as Saya Saung’s teacher is Ba Zaw (1891–1942). However, Ludu Daw Amar in her book Modern Burmese Painting also mentions the painter Maung Maung Gyi (1890–1942) as an early instructor of Saung. As Amar was a writer, publisher, and member of an intimate Mandalay intelligentsia which included painters, she is probably right on this point.
Maung Maung Gyi ran away from home in 1906 at the age of 16, traveling as a sailor to England with the aim of studying painting there. He received painting instruction of some kind in England but from which academy or teachers is not known. When Maung Maung Gyi returned to Burma a year or two later, his adventures abroad earned him celebrity status and he began to pass on his skills as a plein air watercolorist in the Western style to other artists in Burma. Thus, it is possible, but not certain, that somewhere between 1909 and 1916 that Maung Maung Gyi served as Saya Saung’s first teacher. The art historian Nyan Shein (who studied painting under Saya Saung) says that Saya Saung became a professional painter by the age of 18, or by about 1916.
The art scholar and painter Min Naing, biographer of Ba Nyan, documents that after Ba Zaw returned to Burma in 1930 from three years of studies at the Royal College of Art in London that he began to teach watercolor “wash” painting to Saya Saung. However, since Ba Zaw and Saya Saung were both from Mandalay and painters in Mandalay shared a sense of regional kinship, it is almost certain that Saya Saung forged a relationship with Ba Zaw before he left for London in 1927 and that Ba Zaw’s influence on Saya Saung began earlier, but not, perhaps, as early as 1916.
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