Moe Satt’s Five Questions to Society Where I Live, poses more new questions than the previous version— in addition to hand gestures “Okay,” “Good,” and “Victory,” he adds a held-up pinky that represents voting, and the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, symbolizing “revolution.” On November 8, general elections were held in Myanmar; Moe Satt posted a photo of himself on Facebook with the tagline: “I voted it, open up new chapter today??”

If he won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, he would use the money to buy the house that he now rents from his sister. Strand Road, where his home is located, was the liveliest quarter of Yangon under British colonial rule over a century ago. Sitting in the Strand Hotel, where William Somerset Maugham once stayed, I was reminded of a joke: Burmese Days was not the only book George Orwell wrote for Burma; so were Animal Farm and 1984. To which Moe Satt said, it is only “after our country has liberalized” that “local artists can finally come into the spotlight, and not just in ways concerned with politics.”

The night before Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD’s landslide victory, we took our leave of him in a bar. On the streets of Yangon, right-hand drive cars are still keeping to the right, while the percentage of left-hand traffic is on the rise. In Myanmar, changes are happening to just about everything.

The Bank of Innya Lake

Innya Lake is located near Yangong University. During the student revolution, the government killed so many students in that area that their blood turned the Inna Lake red. The Bank of Innya Lake is also a popular hang-out and dating place for young people.