In Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora, Emily L. Hue focuses on the moment when Myanmar artists leave a relatively enclosed domestic art community, by choice or force, and are ejected into a world where they must brace against forces that she terms “the humanitarian industry” (3) and “the art market” (8). Hue writes that freedom of expression “can be fleeting” in these new environments “yet artists still work in the spirit of manifesting more,” countering assumptions that freedom awaits in Global South to Global North migrations (186). She frames her impressive project through the term “elastic vulnerability,” which she uses to demonstrate how diasporic artists, uprooted from their home countries, use performance art to convey pasts informed by state censorship while navigating unfamiliar environments with unexpected obstacles to freedom of expression. Here, Hue exposes the misalignment of intentions within these forces that manifests in a dilemma, or trauma loop, for diasporic artists—the need to perform suffering to access grants, employment, or asylum claims.

Hue is interested in the “afterlife of humanitarian projects” when artists are granted access to residencies or asylum and produce artwork in these spaces—an understudied aspect of Myanmar art history (19). Drawing on refugee studies, including from sociologists Yến Lê Espiritu and Lan Duong, and building on sociologists Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael Nijhawan’s work on suffering, art and aesthetics, Hue studies how artists “creatively adapt violent scenarios of rescue and how they mediate moments of violence with moments of joy and survival in order to obtain grants and find networks to sustain themselves ‘off-screen’” (45). Therefore, this is not a book focused on analysis of the visual form or what happens to artistic practices as artists traverse Hue’s framing of the diaspora. Minimal images and a loose treatment of naming and dating artwork and exhibitions, or even in one instance, omitting the names of artists in a photo caption of their artwork, make this an uneven read for art historical research. Instead, this is, as Hue stated, a project of “reflexive ethnographic inquiry” in which she contributes to how we understand the lived experiences of diasporic performance artists from Myanmar (44).

Hue introduces her term “elastic vulnerability” through Chaw Ei Thein’s 2013 participation in a human rights symposium in New York. In answering an audience member’s question, the artist stumbled in her attempt to verbalize the inhumanity of state detention in Myanmar while pinpointing an aesthetic that she found in the prison experience. As Chaw Ei Thein (b. 1969) struggled to describe the dignity of a prisoner’s bound body in contorted poses, replicated in her prior performance, her inability to articulate this dichotomy was further compounded by the neglect of the emcee to give her a microphone. Her depictions of past trauma misaligned with the expectations of her audience, which snapped her (in that instance) into silence. Thus, Hue’s framing of elastic vulnerability sets the tone for the rest of the book and exemplifies the balancing act diasporic artists face, whether exiled or self-imposed, when they use performance art to process previously restricted artistic expression. Juxtaposing the anticipated freedom from a move abroad, Hue demonstrates how avenues of visual expression that once appeared limitless outside of authoritarian state structures are narrowed by competing social, political, and economic factions.

Hue’s research is centered on performances conducted in New York in 2009 and 2012, as well as on interviews conducted between 2012–2014 with “audiences, curators, artists, and community organizers” (43). Of note, her definition of a diasporic artist is broad. For example, Wah Nu (b. 1977) and Tun Win Aung (b. 1975) are described as diasporic in Hue’s examination of their work in the 2013 exhibition No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia (No Country) at The Guggenheim Museum, New York, curated by June Yap. However, the artists lived and produced their work in Myanmar throughout the period in question. Yet perhaps Hue is making an interesting distinction between diasporic artists and a small group of Myanmar-based artists who exhibited, almost exclusively, abroad; Wah Nu and Tun Win Aung included. Or this speaks to art historian Okwui Enwezor’s 1997 framing of the diaspora as on a continual transnational journey with “incessant regroupings, recreations, and reiteration” (Okwui Enwezor: Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Terry Smith, Duke University Press, 2025, 118). How then might we view Chaw Ei Thein’s work, created in the US but sent to Myanmar for exhibitions in Yangon, such as Seven Decades (2018)? What these artists achieve in artistic form is an interesting angle to explore.

Hue’s first two chapters contain research on the social, economic, and cultural circuits that shaped external Myanmar visual culture in the early 2000s, but at times are weighted by buzzwords, anecdotes, and a lack of substantive data. Chapter one focuses on the humanitarian industry’s impact on portrayals of Aung San Suu Kyi that circulated from 2009 onwards outside of Myanmar. Here, Hue outlines how forces such as Western entertainers coopted Aung San Suu Kyi’s image as an incarcerated human rights figure in need of rescue, warping her likeness with global aspirations for her spiritual leadership. Hue’s text would be more powerful if it included an exploration of diasporic artists’ artwork alongside this trajectory of Myanmar visual culture, including diasporic artists’ response when Aung Sau Suu Kyi’s refusal to condemn the Rohingya genocide forced the hasty retreat of many institutions. Likewise, Hue’s critique does not offer concrete examples of how certain fellowships informed performance artists or their practices.

In chapter two, Hue focus on the dilemma of for-profit institutions funding exhibitions in the name of philanthropy. For example, Hue contrasts UBS’s World War II conduct against its backing of the No Country exhibit, which featured post-Cold War artists in the aftermath of colonialism and travelled from New York to Hong Kong and Singapore; she positions this as an abuser using the abused for image rehabilitation. However, Hue does not engage with the art historical writing that the exhibition generated, nor does she unpack much of the work exhibited. She writes how close readings of the artwork revealed the “fallacies of borderlessness,” yet offers minimal visual analysis, aside from engagement with Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich’s 2011 Morning Glory and components of Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu’s 2012 Four Pieces (of White) (104).

Of note, these initial chapters capture an era of seemingly abundant funding, when financial institutions like UBS diverted forty million dollars towards nurturing non-Western centric art history. This aspect alone will make Hue’s work generative for future scholars of art economies and curatorial studies. Yet Hue’s positioning overgeneralizes curators and museums in 2012 as steeped in “artwashing” without substantive examples beyond UBS. Here, Hue risks framing artists who exhibited in the show, many of whom were not diasporic, as susceptible to curators’ “notions of rescue, rehabilitation, and salvageability” (104). Hue pivots and then frames the No Country initiative as a “site of opportunity” where diasporic artists are contributing to new imaginings of the region.

Chapters three and four are particularly insightful as Hue focuses on the experiences of Chaw Ei Thein and Htein Lin (b. 1966). Hue highlights how Myanmar diasporic artists must negotiate the “varied manifestations of white supremacy, racial capitalism, xenophobia, and misogyny” within humanitarian and arts spaces (38). For example, Chaw Ei Thein is subjected to male heckling during a 2009 performance in Brooklyn (from an audience of artists). Compounding events, Chaw Ei Thein is then criticized by male Burmese diasporic artists, upon which artists in Yangon heap further condemnation (relayed through her father). Her performance in New York, a site meant to liberate her artistic form, resulted in an onslaught of barriers. Hue captures a world in which diasporic artists volley between funding opportunities in the art market and the humanitarian industry, subjecting their minds and bodies to additional yet familiar trauma as they revisit their past. Neither space, she suggests, offers true fluidity for artists to move forward personally and creatively. One solution, Hue proposes, is the artist’s use of the body. Here, she introduces “unraveling” as a strategy within elastic vulnerability, as seen in Htein Lin’s performance art.

In his 2012 performance Moving Monument in Brooklyn, Htein Lin transformed his body into a screen to “rewind, replay, and remix” media reporting on the 2007 Saffron Revolution, including the state crackdown on monks (196). Hue describes how Htein Lin, a former political prisoner, winding and unwinding a monk’s robe from his torso, used strategic unraveling to control, per his pace and timing, a revisiting of these events. Hue also positions Htein Lin “as an apparatus of surveillance,” countering notions of what an artist living and working in the diaspora should produce (215). He is at once surveilling the state and watching the audience witnessing these events. By revealing his body in a controlled manner, Htein Lin is “facilitating an elasticity between forbidden footage and the linear and sanctified Burmese state version of national civil upheaval” (211). Thus, Hue demonstrates how he reclaims agency over the past through performance art.

At the core of Hue’s book, we see the diaspora as fluid. Individuals might return to Myanmar or leave again to settle elsewhere. In Hue’s examination of Htein Lin’s ongoing series Show of Hands (started in 2012), in which he plasters former political prisoners’ hands in an act of redress and communal healing, Htein Lin described his series as “a project that never ends” (224). Similarly, Hue’s book reminds us that there is no expiration date for the trauma of migration; the emotional rupture of uprooting from one’s homeland can reverberate across decades.