Kyi May Kaung's review of Dreaming Their Way: Australian Aboriginal Women Painters --

National Museum of Women in the Arts.

I caught this exhibition on its last day in Washington, DC in 2006

The paintings captured my imagination with their abstract symbols and the idea that only the owners of the Dreaming land are qualified/certified to depict images of it. Hence the furor over Prince William's "aboriginal paintings."

The women's role as keepers of the rituals and the images spoke to me.

I am a Burmese exile, exiled from my own Dreaming land by the military junta. Stories mean a lot to me. I am a painter as well as a poet and writer.

Who owns the stories? Our stories are not the junta's white-washed ones. Nor the colonialists' postcards.

The exhibition catalog provides a good introduction to the spirituality of Australian aboriginal art. It could also apply to other kinds of art which originally were spiritual and religious, before commercialization by colonization and westerners, such as the art of Bali, India and Burma.

The reproductions in the catalog are good, but of course don't totally capture the spirit and scale of the originals, which are literally breathtaking.

I notice the price of this catalog is going up and would sell mine except it is one of my treasured possessions.

Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.)