Humanism comes in different forms to aid the victims of these natural disasters, in terms of words of sympathy, lending helping hands, and striving to contribute to the re-building process. That, in whatever limited capacity it can muster, is the purpose of Robin Wahengbam to host an art exhibition of paintings from Mandalay to raise funds in aiding to Myanmar’s re-building process.
By Salam Rajesh
The illuminating colors radiating from the petals and leaves of flowers and trees adorning the several oil and acrylic paintings displayed at the Imphal Art Gallery underplayed a bigger message of hope and humanism in the aftermath of the terrible disaster that struck Myanmar recently.
Manipur’s neighboring country was rocked by a powerful earthquake on 29 March earlier this year, measuring a massive 7.7 magnitude on the Richter scale, enough to destroy homes, cause deaths and create havoc of an unimagined dimension. More than a thousand people died in that disaster.
The pains are still there and people are slowly recovering from the nightmare of nature’s fury, an experienced shared by communities in Turkiye and Nepal not very long back, where powerful earthquakes tore through the land destroying homes, schools, monasteries, roads, and causing dams to collapse.
Humanism comes in different forms to aid the victims of these natural disasters, in terms of words of sympathy, lending helping hands, and striving to contribute to the re-building process. That, in whatever limited capacity it can muster, is the purpose of Robin Wahengbam to host an art exhibition of paintings from Mandalay to raise funds in aiding to Myanmar’s re-building process.
A well-known artist in his own rights and based at Kwakeithel in downtown Imphal, Robin’s sole purpose of hosting the art exhibition is to send out the message of solidarity from Manipur in a time of sorrow and recovery from a major disaster, unprecedented by the scale of the devastation caused by the major earthquake.
The posh Imphal Art Gallery is Robin’s dream of contributing a state-of-the-art gallery worthy of national and international-level attention, something which has been missing all this while. An auditorium for screening visual art and motion pictures would soon be coming up here, Robin confided, hoping this would serve to contribute better learning experience for youths interested in visual art and motion pictures.
Imphal Art Gallery’s latest art exhibition, captioned as ‘Mandalay in Imphal’, with 46 paintings currently and hoped to raise to a hundred, exhibits the skill of painters from Mandalay, displaying illuminating colors of nature and life in Myanmar.
The money raised from the sale of paintings from this exhibition will go straight to Mandalay, Robin says, as a show of solidarity and humanism from one neighbor to another in the time of crisis.
Some of the worst earthquakes in recent history are still remembered for their devastating impacts. The 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile with a magnitude of 9.5 remains the strongest ever recorded, devastating large parts of southern Chile. It triggered massive tsunamis that affected coastal regions as far away as Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines. The earthquake caused significant destruction, leading to thousands of deaths and widespread damage. Chile was again struck by a powerful and damaging 8.8 scale earthquake in 2010.
In 1964, the Great Alaskan Earthquake with a magnitude of 9.2 struck on 27 March that year, and it remains the most powerful earthquake to have ever hit North America. The 2004 Sumatra earthquake with a 9.1 magnitude is still recalled as one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded human history.
The Tohoku earthquake with a 9.1 magnitude which struck off the coast of Japan on 11 March in 2011 unleashed a deadly tsunami that severely impacted Japan’s northeastern coast. It caused widespread destruction and triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, one of the worst nuclear accidents in human history. The Russian Far East was rocked by the impactful Kamchatka earthquake registering a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale way back in 1952.
To speak of other powerful earthquakes, in 1950 Assam was hit by a massive 8.6 Richter scale earthquake, similarly as Sumatra which was also hit by a 8.6 Richter scale earthquake in 2005. That same year, the Aleutian Islands in Alaska were rocked by a massive earthquake with a magnitude of 8.7.
The story behind these furies of nature is the tale of human woe and misery left in the trail of unimagined scale of nature’s fury. Human life, and properties, becomes insignificant when nature racks up in devastating fury, sometimes in its own course and at times induced by anthropogenic influences when humans interfere too much in nature’s ways.
Robin Wahengbam as an artist has taken the human woe and misery to his heart, and in his own modest way of thinking, has come up with this idea of hosting an art exhibition to extend the much needed helping hand to those thousands of displaced individuals ravaged by the 7.7 magnitude earthquake in March earlier this year which shook Myanmar and Thailand dramatically, and critically.
Nepal, too, is still recovering from the massive earthquake that hit the Himalayan country in 2015. The scars are still there, with half fallen walls and homes yet to recover fully, and the temples at Patan Durbar Square with the iron scaffolds indicating work in progress, a bitter reminder of tragedies that can strike anywhere, anytime without the least warning.
Yet, human folly is reflected in the way how humans strive to interfere within fragile, critical nature reserves, such as communist China’s vision of constructing the world’s largest ever dam over the Tsangpo Yarlung River in the Tibet region, in the midst of the Himalayas. The Indian Himalayan Region is already in a critical stage with glacial melts and imminent dangers from glacial lake outbursts (GLOBs) that can cause massive deaths and destruction.
The Mandalay paintings on exhibit currently at the Imphal Art Gallery (at Kwakeithel) depict the beauty of nature and human life in its natural flow. The vibrant colors of nature instill the hope of serenity and peaceful life devoid of conflicts and natural disasters. The exhibition in itself is a picture of a world free from hatred, conflicts and disasters – a distant picture of that fabulous fable of the Garden of Eden.