Kyaw Moe Khine (b.1996), professionally known as Bart Was Not Here, is a Burmese artist in exile based in New York. Rooted in graffiti and raised on imported subcultures, his visual language employs subversion, fiction, and narrative investment. Working across large-scale canvases, sculptural installations, and drawings, Bart constructs sprawling worlds inhabited by recurring characters and shapeshifting motifs.
Growing up under a military dictatorship in Burma, he used graffiti as a tool of agency, adopting the pseudonym at age 13. With limited access to global culture, he absorbed foreign films, literature, and subcultures through dial-up internet and bootleg markets.
Bart’s practice blends cinematic composition with gallows humor, internet semiotics with folklore, and conventional beauty with disobedience, engaging themes of violence, voyage, worship, and myth-making. A graduate of LASALLE College of the Arts, he has exhibited internationally. Following his involvement in the resistance against Myanmar’s 2021 coup, he went into exile, completing residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York.