Aung Aung Taik

Born in Rangoon, Burma in 1948, the Burmese artist Aung Aung Taik, received the traditional boarding school education of his class, after which he decided not to follow his father's footsteps and enter medical school, but to study painting. He attended the State Academy of Art in Rangoon and took private lessons from two of Burma's leading artists, U Ba Kyi and U Ngwe Gaing. Afterwards, he accompanied his mentors, the writers Ludu U Hla and Daw Ahmar on a number of anthropological expeditions into the remote regions of Burma. Aung Aung Taik illustrated a series of books published by Ludu U Hla. Successful exhibitions of his work in Burma and Japan followed. Dissatisfied with stagnation in the fine arts and seeking greater artistic autonomy, Aung Aung Taik left Burma and came to the United States in 1972 and continued his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. A series of exhibitions led to his first one-man show at the Mission Cultural Center in 1981, where Tom Albright commented in the San Francisco Chronicle that Aung Aung's paintings "...suggest some of the strange stage sets of Francis Bacon carried to a greater degree of abstraction...

Intense engagement with the diversity of cultural life in the San Francisco of...