A Day in the Life: Sid Kaung Sett Lin

Sustaining Myanmar’s displaced art community

A Day in the Life is a series by A&M where we invite practitioners to share a day in their life.

Sid Kaung Sett Lin. Portrait by Zicky Le. Image courtesy of Sid Kaung Sett Lin.

Sid Kaung Sett Lin is a Bangkok-based curator and cultural organiser who has spent more than a decade building exhibitions, archives and collectives around contemporary Myanmar art. His work began in Yangon and now reaches across the cities where the country's artists have resettled.

In 2016, he served as Curator and Partner of Myanm/art and co-founded the art collective Pyinsa Rasa in 2017. He co-curated /Shi (2022–23) with Min Chit Paing and Diana Nway Htwe, a citywide exhibition that linked over 50 artists across seven Yangon venues by bus route sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Yangon.

Since relocating to Bangkok in 2024, Sid has continued to work with the displaced Myanmar art scene. In 2025 he curated If Only It Is Seen, Thus, From Afar at SAC Gallery, Bangkok. It drew together a generation of Burmese artists scattered across new cities, working across photography, film and installation. Their works turned on questions of displacement and identity. 

In this edition of A Day in the Life, Sid reflects on what it means to sustain an art community and a sense of home across national borders.

Baka, Nya Nay Sein Eain, 2021. Image courtesy of Sid Kaung Sett Lin.

My friend Baka drew this piece, inspired by the song Nya Nay Sein Eain by Antibiotics, an underground rock band from Yangon. It came out of our time on the Discord server, probably while I was pursuing my Master’s degree. At that time, Baka and I kept joking about opening a tiny tea shop where only people from our server could hang out, even though none of us had ever met in person. The singer Kaiza Tin Moong saw the work and signed it, before he passed away that Christmas. It was a small moment that now feels strangely impossible. I am reminded of how life, death, friendships and internet dreams fold into one another, leaving behind something both fragile and unexpectedly enduring across millennial and Gen Z culture.

ARTJOG 2026 facade. Image courtesy of artist.

Shi (ရှိ) is still one of the exhibitions I carry with me. Looking back, it became about the last moment we all existed together in Yangon before slowly drifting apart. The title holds a sadness that none of us could have anticipated.

Be All Ears, 2023, exhibition showcase. Image courtesy of Spaces-31.

As one of my last in-person projects in Yangon, Be All Ears (2023) was an attempt to bring artists back into the same room—to learn, argue, share cigarettes, memes and imagine a future together. Ironically, nearly everyone from that first cohort has since left Myanmar. Although we still meet occasionally across different cities, the room now only survives in fragments of memory and friendship.

Petal of Being, 2024, exhibition set-up at DARKLAB Bangkok. Image courtesy of Vessel.

Together with a group of eight or nine friends, who were all trying to settle down into life in Bangkok, we started Vessel Collective. There was funding, we each contributed USD 100 to USD150 and used a friend’s space to host our first exhibition. More people came than we expected, and for a moment it felt like Yangon’s art community had found each other again in a foreign city. This eventually led us to If Only It Is Seen, Thus, From Afar (2025) at SAC Gallery which happened later that year. Vessel has not been very active since then but we will try to come together and keep the idea of the art collective alive.

I have been based in Bangkok and travel wherever my projects take me. Since leaving Yangon and closing my space this year, I have worked across Sharjah, Berlin, Singapore, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh and beyond. I am still chasing the feeling of having a desk, a routine and a place I can truly call my own. This photo is where I happened to be working when I was writing this entry.

I have been based in Bangkok and travel wherever my projects take me. Since leaving Yangon and closing my space this year, I have worked across Sharjah, Berlin, Singapore, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh and beyond. I am still chasing the feeling of having a desk, a routine and a place I can truly call my own. This photo is where I happened to be working when I was writing this entry. 

Follow Sid to see more of his work here.