Htein Lin

When Htein Lin was a small boy, he would watch sideboard makers on the Shwebontha Street cutting out words and letters from sheets of plywood with tiny saws. Nowadays, many of these craftsmen became brokers collecting orders from customers and taking them to laser cutting shops where a designer enters words in the computer. The laser cutters try to pack as many words as possible onto a single acrylic sheet, and a good designer is one who can avoid wasting even one square inch of space. As a result, words and phrases are deconstructed and jumbled up; the next step after the cutting is to break the jigsaw and reconstruct the words and phrases that the customer ordered.

Htein Lin found the discarded acrylic sheets from which letters had been cut intriguing, and he took them to his studio. He felt there was something poignant in their cast-off status and aesthetically pleasing in the not-so-random combinations of letters, words and phrases. Artfully applying imagination and paint to clear acrylic sheets, he turned them into the strikingly original series titled "Signs of the Times."