Win Pe

Win Pe (b. 1935)

Myanmar’s most revered living artist, Win Pe is a central pillar of the nation’s modern cultural history. He studied under Ba Thet and the pioneering modernist Kin Maung (Bank). Moving to Rangoon in the 1960s, he emerged as a leader of the second generation of modernists alongside Kin Maung Yin and Paw Oo Thett. He served as Dean of the Mandalay State School of Fine Arts and gained national renown as a novelist, a syndicated cartoonist for the Ludu newspaper chain, and a film director—winning the Burmese Academy Award for Best Director in 1981. When Paw Thame founded the Peacock Gallery, Myanmar’s first modern art space, Win Pe was the first to join him. Following the 1988 uprising, he turned back toward painting and literature, emigrating to the United States in 1994.

In the U.S., Win Pe studied writing in Iowa and film in Hollywood before settling in Washington, D.C., as an editor and writer for Radio Free Asia. He also hosted the weekly BBC Burmese Service broadcast Win Pe's Shoulder Bag,  a highly influential program covering politics, art, and daily life that maintained his direct connection to the public in Myanmar.

While his painting continued intermittently during his broadcasting career, his retirement sparked a vital partnership with BMA founder Chris Dodge, who supported the artist and acquired the majority of his output between 2008 and 2010. Watercolor remained central to Win Pe's practice, and during this focused U.S. period, he reached a technical and expressive peak in the medium. He returned to Myanmar in 2013 to begin a prolific new phase of large-scale acrylics, making the rare 2008–2010 U.S.-period watercolors preserved in the BMA Archive highly coveted by leading institutions and collectors today.

His legacy is further detailed in art historian Hlaing Bwa’s forthcoming monograph, Win Pe: Painting with Sound, Singing in Color (June 2026)