Yangon - The portrait of a painter with a rope around his neck and on a red background was too much for the government censors in Myanmar.

"Absolutely not!" they told the artist in the country's main port city of Yangon, when he complied with the law and sought official permission to exhibit the painting at an art show.

And there the canvas still stands, without a frame, without admirers, without a buyer.

Artists are having a hard time in a country ruled by a paranoid military government obsessed with maintaining total control over 55 million citizens.

"They told me too much red in the painting was forbidden, because red is the colour of revolution," said the 54-year-old artist on condition of anonymity.

"And here is another painting that I wasn't allowed to show," he says as he retrieves the painting from a corner.

It shows a thick tree branch on a green background and above two full moons. It was those two moons that were suspicious to the censors.

"They said that one of the moons certainly was a symbol for junta boss General Than Shwe, and the other one for opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi," the artist explains.

"They sometimes have more imagination than we, the artists, ourselves," he adds with a laugh.

It probably also springs from this overly vivid imagination that the government suspects artists of engaging in subversive acts as a matter of course and therefore monitors them closely.

"But we really do not have any political artist movement in this country. Artists are much too busy merely making ends meet," says one gallery owner.

The portrait of the artist with a rope grew out of a bitter personal experience, while the picture with the two moons was inspired by the moon's reflection in a lake, asserts the paintings' creator.

Neither one nor the other have anything to do with political expression, the artist insists. Still, he fears unwelcome attention from the censors if he speaks out publicly and therefore wants to remain anonymous.

The artist says he is greatly inspired by the German painter Georg Baselitz, who created some furore in the 1970s when he exhibited his paintings upside down.

"I am just as energetic and explosive as Baselitz," he says.

But he readily admits that he can barely make a living from his art.

"Burmese who do have money will rather buy a motorcycle than a painting," he explains, "and the tourists usually go for the cheap mass-produced oil paintings at Scott Market."

There the few tourists still visiting the country can browse through oil paintings of Lord Buddha in any size and countless motifs of robed monks in front of sunsets.

The artist contemptuously calls the market "Cemetery of Canvasses."

The gallery owner, who also preferred to remain anonymous, said performance artists occasionally put on politically charged shows, but that those generally take place behind closed doors.

"People learn about shows through word-of-mouth and they turn up at a certain venue, just to disperse quickly after the show has ended," she explains.

The artist NCS is one of them. He even engages in public performances, one of which was called "I am not a terrorist."

"If my shows trigger certain political thoughts in the audience I cannot help it," the 34-year-old says. "I cannot tell people what they should think. I cannot influence that."

It is difficult for the government censors to apprehend the rather elusive performance artists. They turn up somewhere and before the state can react, they've vanished again.

But things are different for Myanmar's poets, who are monitored particularly closely by the authorities.

One of them was arrested in January. His offence was a Valentine's Day poem.

"You millions of people who know what love is, clap your gilded hands and laugh," it read in Burmese script.

But the author, Saw Wai, structured the verse in such a manner that the first words of each line in the poem together read "Power hungry Than Shwe."

Comedians are another group of artists over whom the government likes to keep a close watch.

"A Burmese with a toothache travels across the border into India to seek treatment there," one of the more famous jokes by the comedy group "Moustache Brothers" from Mandalay begins.

"Why, don't you have dentists in Myanmar?" asks the bewildered Indian doctor.

"Yes, we do, but back home we're not allowed to open our mouths," the Burmese patient explains.

For jokes like this two members of the group had to spend several years in a forced-labour camp.

Nowadays, the troupe is only allowed to perform before foreign tourists, and those have dwindled to a trickle. (dpa)