My Body is My Canvas
Coming Soon…
“Creativity is very simple. You just need a courage to explore your vulnerability.” Through this line, the Burmese experimental artist Zoncy captures the essence of her life’s work. She has always insisted that art begins not with resources or privilege, but with the willingness to bare oneself and transform fragility into strength.
The roots of her vision can be traced to childhood, which carried its own fractures. Born into a household split between a Buddhist-animist father and a Muslim mother, she grew up with contradictions braided into her bones. From one side came ritual and love, from the other chaos and trauma. This collision of faiths left her with a certainty that truth was never singular, that every belief hid another form of the same struggle. It gave her eyes for complexity, a lens that later shaped how she approached her art— layered, fractured, unwilling to settle into one story.
Zoncy's first steps into art came not through bright studios or curated canvases, but in the chaos of disaster relief. After Cyclone Nargis in 2008, she joined volunteer efforts, and later met journalists and former political prisoners who carried the raw edge of truth in their stories. Their conviction lit something in her, and for two years she chased that fire through journalism. At the same time, she slipped into the orbit of New Zero Art Space in Yangon, a collective carved out by veterans of the 1990s modern art movement. They offered free classes, conversations with visiting artists, grainy bootleg recordings of international performances—fragments of a world otherwise sealed off. For a young woman with no formal training and no access to real art history, these scraps were fuel.
Her newsroom editors eventually forced her hand: choose one path. She chose art. In her first performance, she painted her nails, handed out her forgotten literary prizes, and wept openly on stage. It was half ritual, half breakdown. The act became a mirror she didn’t expect—showing her both her despair and the strange relief of being witnessed. That moment confirmed what she already sensed: art could heal, and it could wound.
Zoncy's time in journalism had widened her view. Listening to survivors of war, poverty, and repression trained her in ways no textbook could. When she shifted to performance, it was no longer just about her own pain but about the violence and injustice saturating Myanmar. She learned to embody collective grief, to hold anger and helplessness until it spilled from her onstage. Performance became her weapon, her plea, her way of refusing silence.
By 2012 she was traveling to the borderlands, holding art therapy workshops with displaced families. There she met women who carried their mothers on their backs through forests, who worked themselves to exhaustion while others waited for rations. Their courage and their stubbornness shifted her entirely. She began to see Myanmar’s endless war not just as politics, but as a cultural suffocation enforced by generals who manipulated Buddhism and nationalism to divide and control. Her answer was to build connections where none were allowed. The Diverze Youth Art Platform, which she co-founded in 2013, tried to decentralize art, bringing it to ethnic states and refusing Yangon’s monopoly.
Her performances grew darker. In 2015, she staged WHO?, a piece born out of the rape and murder of two Kachin volunteer teachers. She held up military belts and underwear, asked the audience one word—“Who?”—and cried. The villagers knew the answer. The country knew the answer. But no justice came. That night, her tears weren’t staged, weren’t technique—they were fury, helplessness, grief boiling over.
Feminism threaded through her later work, though she hesitated at first to claim the name. Senior artists back home dismissed the label. But after witnessing the scars of women across the country, she embraced it, even as her work shocked. In Austria, she performed Cowardly Feminist, pulling an electrical wire through the fly of men’s underwear. In other works, she forced audiences to confront unwanted pregnancies, gendered violence, and the crushing silence of shame. Her body became her stage, her protest, her battlefield. As she puts it, “I don't need to spend any money in buying materials. My body is my canvas, my stage, my script, my lighting. Everything.”
In 2018 she raised a htamein—the longyi skirt worn by women in Myanmar—on a pole, questioning whether women’s political presence would only be recognized when it was flaunted above the halls of power. At the time the gesture seemed small, even absurd, almost like a private dare to authority. Yet it carried a quiet charge. Three years later, after the coup in 2021, that very symbol burst into the streets: women all over Yangon strung htameins across alleys and main roads. Soldiers, terrified of losing their karmic power, refused to pass beneath them. What began as a lone act of performance became one of the most striking early tactics of mass resistance. For Zoncy, the resonance was unmistakable. She didn’t claim ownership, instead calling it collective authorship—a sign that art had seeded defiance long before the streets exploded, and that the people themselves had carried it forward as a shared voice against fear.
Zoncy explains that she sees Myanmar itself as a colonial legacy—what she called the leftover of the British Empire. That history, she argued, left the country with layers of identity crisis, patriarchy, and nationalism. Burmese Buddhist nationalism in particular, she stressed, has had a devastating impact on women and minorities, and this legacy continues to shape the nation’s cultural and political struggles. For her, the response is not only political but cultural: she dreams of rewriting cultural policy, of using exchange and art as a way to heal before negotiating peace. The wound, she insists, must be faced before it can close. For her, culture is not something ornamental or secondary, like decoration on top of politics or economics—it is the foundation of survival itself. It shapes identity, resilience, and the way people endure and resist oppression.
It is in this context that her most unconventional performances take shape. For Zoncy, the body itself becomes the sharpest instrument of critique. In one of her boldest works, she sang Myanmar's national anthem while masturbating— an act she described as a defiant rejection of laws and taboos that sought to control women’s choices and silence female sexuality. In another, more intimate setting, she led workshops where participants, fully clothed, touched their private parts and reflected on what gender meant to them. These explorations of vulnerability were meant not for mass consumption but for small, private spaces, where trust could allow shame to be challenged. In a country where such acts could invite arrest, the risk was immense. But for those present, the experience offered the shock of liberation and a glimpse of what it meant to reclaim the body as a site of power, resistance, and meaning.
When the coup came in 2021, she was working at the Goethe Institute and kept her head low, though her friends risked everything on the streets. A year later she left for Berlin with her child under the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellowship. It was a brutal choice, haunted by family obligations and guilt. Berlin overwhelmed her: lights never going out, supermarkets always full, freedom that felt both intoxicating and alien. She stood between two worlds, unable to leave Myanmar behind, unable to fully belong where she had landed.
Yet Berlin gave her new mirrors. She connected with Filipino activists, studied resistance movements in Venezuela, Somalia, Sudan. She saw how others turned scarcity into strategy: cassette tapes smuggled across borders, participatory sound installations that forced audiences to relive airstrikes. She wondered why Myanmar’s artists remained trapped in mistrust and propaganda, and she longed for a storytelling that revealed not only pain but also compassion, resilience, and dignity. She was especially struck by her Filipino artist friends in Berlin, who could frame their country’s struggle with striking simplicity—three issues they repeated again and again: land rights abuses, mismanagement, and the people’s tendency to give in too easily. Their diaspora was large, organized, and clear in its messaging. By contrast, Zoncy felt Myanmar’s story was tangled, often too complicated to explain. Watching her Filipino peers made her reflect on how her own community might find sharper, more focused ways of telling its struggle without flattening its complexity.
Now, in Berlin, her projects push forward in ways shaped by exile and memory. One piece rewrites the national anthem, striking out the call for sacrifice and replacing it with a call to protect oneself, a gesture that extends her earlier defiance of laws aimed at controlling women’s choices. She also works to honor the dead—women, queer activists, unknown fighters—folding their names into her pieces so they are not forgotten. In large canvases embedded with hidden sound modules, she invites audiences to touch a cloud and hear the echo of bombs, making violence tactile and immediate. Each of these works carries the through-line of her practice: insisting on empathy, on memory, and on connection, even from within displacement.
Through it all—student, journalist, activist, exile—Zoncy has clung to the belief that art can turn vulnerability into strength. She says everyone is an artist, that life itself is a canvas, that survival is creation. In Myanmar’s darkest years, she holds onto this truth: art is not only about exposing suffering. It is about refusing to surrender humanity, about demanding empathy, about carrying dignity through fire and into whatever future waits. “The lightest is closest to the darkest," she says. "So the lightest and the darkest is just right there together! When we are in the darkest time, we are enlightened the most.” With that paradox in mind, her art continues to live in the tension between despair and revelation.
“We don't need to promote military abuses anymore," she says in closing. "We have to promote our compassion, our good intentions for our people, our positive stories, because people always remember negative stories. So then we let people remember our positive stories.” With these words, Zoncy sums up the deeper purpose of her work: to keep memory alive not only through pain, but through compassion and resilience.