REAL ART • GLOBAL ISSUES • HUMAN VOICES

In a country unraveling under military rule, the artists who once dared to speak now whisper—or fall silent. Some paint in exile, struggling to summon inspiration while navigating survival jobs and cultural dislocation. Others, still in Myanmar, work behind closed doors, knowing that a single brushstroke deemed political can lead to prison. “I can afford the materials,” Emily Phyo, a feminist artist now living in Texas, told me. “But I can’t afford to feel.”

There are thousands like him; graphic designers, photographers, graffiti artists, poets, painters. They are producing underground work, smuggling symbols, building visual languages of resistance. They are documenting the authoritarian decay as it happens.

Dismissed but still fired up, the luminous Mr. Fish speaks with THROAT about self-censorship and state censorship. “As an artist, you want to take chances,” he says, “and be fearless enough to reveal the ache in your heart.”