Htein Lin is one of Myanmar’s most challenging contemporary artists. He’s currently engaged in a landmark project to make gypsum plaster (or plaster of paris) casts of the hands and lower arms of former political prisoners. Earlier this month he had a one-man show of recent paintings at Yangon’s River Gallery II. He’s long been a pioneering performance artist.

We started with the arm casts – 300 were stacked in a pile by the window of his home. That’s 300 out of at least 3000 that could be made if the entire population of former political prisoners were covered, and 300 out of around 1000 that probably will be made by the end of this year. Then “A Show of Hands” will go on public display first in Myanmar and later overseas. The main interest of this project may well not be the hands themselves, but rather the videos shot while each cast is being made. Htein Lin explained that the basic process takes 20-30 minutes (and costs about $2). Often, though, a session lasts much longer as stories are told about life in and out of prison. Some emerge only slowly, others more quickly. Some are laced with humour, others with sadness. Some reflect tensions that existed in prison, others move on. Some barely touch on the unfolding reform process, others are filled with political commentary.

Htein Lin was of course a political prisoner himself from 1998 to 2004. Many of the videos therefore capture a dialogue based on shared experience. In one respect, though, he is finding fellow prisoners’ stories quite different from his own. That comes when he makes casts with female prisoners. During the junta years male prisoners of conscience tended to be placed together, and rarely mixed with ordinary criminals. By contrast, their female counterparts usually joined the general prison population, and lived with women from disparate walks of life. Their memories are thus quite distinct. Beyond that, problems of personal hygiene were typically more severe for female prisoners, and also come through in their accounts.

On occasion making the casts turns into a public performance. In Yangon, Htein Lin set up his operation on the site of a 1988 massacre to boost awareness among generations with no direct knowledge of what happened back then. In London, he made casts of former political prisoners in the UK diaspora outside the Tate Modern art gallery. He also does action painting (with his hands) close to shopping malls or in other key locations to claim public space for art and raise public interest. Again, the entire event is captured on video as security guards turn up to question why this display of creativity is taking place on what they regard as their turf. It’s all part of a wider attempt by local people to test the boundaries of freedom of expression in transitional Myanmar.

Finally, Htein Lin engages with the community by opening his warehouse studio in Ahlone for local people to walk in, take a look, and be artistic. Almost a decade ago, in 2005, he was briefly arrested for a street performance in which he set up a roving stall to sell paintings for just a few kyats, and he may do something like that again (preferably without the same consequences). He is also embarking on a photography project to capture modes of Yangon life that will soon be gone – people selling fruit, vegetables and plants on the street, or hawking brooms and other minor household items. His method involves taking one photo of his subject, asking his subject to take one photo of him as that person, and then registering on a map where the encounter took place.