Aung Myint's paintings, installation art and performance art have a broad range of unique styles. Although he is interested in the work of artists such as
Willem de Kooning and
Jackson Pollock, he refuses to categorize his work in terms of "isms". His work includes both representational and abstract images. In the mid-1960s his work was semi-abstract, with cubist elements. This evolved through a period in the 1970s and 1980s when he "fragmented" his images, and then into a highly emotional style in the 1990s with splashing, smearing and dripping of paint in strokes, which strongly evoked the works of Jackson Pollock's "action paintings" but also derived its inspiration from the circle and swirls of the Myanmar alphabet. Other painters of the American
New York School of the post-war period, such as de Kooning, have influenced his work where in harrowing portraits the features of faces are tortured and twisted. But Aung Myint also reaches back into Burmese painting history for inspiration. In an unusual and provocative piece done in 2001 entitled
Five Continents, he filled the bottom of the painting with images of Edvard Munch's "scream faces", in rows, as effigies of the Buddha might appear on the walls of
Bagan temples. The upper portion of the painting was divided into five panels dripping in violent red paint." His more recent monochromatic drawings of mother and child are well known in Southeast Asia. According to Steven Pettifor, "the works are skillfully made using a single flowing line that conveys the artist's emotions and mood. These drawings are rooted in feelings of loss and abandonment from the death of his mother when the artist was an infant. The works also evoke the fluid line and form of works by such modernist masters as
Henry Moore and
Pablo Picasso". The "flowing line" in such works derives from
one-line painting, a term which in Burma refers to a technique used in the mural works of
Bagan and on into the Traditional painting of the early 20th century. In
one-line painting an image is not painted in short strokes or dabs as is often the case in Western painting, but in a single flowing line from beginning to end. The "Mother and Child" series won the "Jurors' Choice Award" at the ASEAN Art Award in Bail. Aung Myint's work is held in the
Singapore Art Museum,
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum,
National Art Gallery (Malaysia) and in private collections in Singapore, Japan,
Thailand, Germany,
Netherlands, Hungary, Australia and the United States. ==Awards and honors==