When conceptual artist and peace educator Sai Redacted stepped onto the global stage at the Oslo Freedom Forum to accept the 2026 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent, he did so wrapped in the coarse, stark fabric of a political prisoner’s uniform.
For Sai, the clothing was not a mere theatrical prop; it was a physical manifestation of his own bloodline.
The only child of a high-ranking National League for Democracy (NLD) Shan State Chief Minister Lin Htut, who was abducted by the military during the military coup on Feb. 1, 2021, Sai has spent the last five years dodging checkpoints, operating under a shifting sequence of pseudonyms, and living out of a single 20-kilogram suitcase.
In an exclusive, DVB Newsroom interview following his award ceremony, Sai spoke about the immense personal losses that fund his art, the terrifying reach of transnational repression, and why he believes Myanmar is rapidly being turned into a “new Tibet” under heavy Chinese intervention.
A absurd reality: ‘We are happy they are in prison’
While the international community has largely allowed the Myanmar conflict to slip from front-page headlines, Sai emphasizes that the domestic situation has devolved into a grotesque inversion of normal human emotion.
With more than 30,000 citizens currently languishing in arbitrary detention under the military junta, even the concept of safety has been distorted.
“We are even in that stage that we have to be happy that our family members are in the prisons,” Sai stated.
“Because if they are in prison, that means that they are still alive. It means they survived the torture in the interrogation centers. That is very absurd and very illogical, but that’s the way that our country is.”
Sai has not heard his father’s voice or received a single independently verified letter from him since the coup over five years ago.
His attempts to register his father with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in July 2021 were met with bureaucratic rejections—a defining moment that convinced him he had to flee the country to act as an uncompromised global voice for political prisoners.
The obliteration of home and the shadow of China
The cost of Sai’s global advocacy has been catastrophic for his family assets. During his acceptance speech in Oslo, the artist revealed that his childhood home in Lashio—housing his family’s historical archives, albums, and his father’s vast library—was completely leveled by a junta airstrike.
His mother survived only because Sai had pre-emptively warned her to abandon the property. Compounding the grief of losing his physical roots, the town was subsequently recaptured by regime forces following what Sai labels as direct geopolitical interference from Beijing.
“Our democratic forces did whatever they could,” Sai said. “But I feel so sad that our country has already become like a new Tibet. China, who always claims that non-interference is important at the UN level, is basically interfering in Myanmar at an unprecedented and excessive level.”
The perilous myth of safety in Thailand
For two years, Sai and his wife sought shelter in Thailand, a traditional haven for Myanmar’s exiled dissidents. However, his experience exposes the dark underbelly of transnational repression operating within Southeast Asia.
He describes a harrowing reality for the hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth and activists currently hiding across the border.
“Myanmar people, especially in Mae Sot, are being treated as human ATM machines,” Sai revealed, pointing to systemic corruption, extortion, and targeted tracking.
“It is a daily torture where transnational repression happens. The Thai government is now endorsing the Myanmar military junta for its own interests, which means Myanmar people are not safe at all in Thailand.”
The Mechanics of Transnational Censorship (2025)
├── Exhibition: "Constellation of Complicity" (Bangkok)
├── Objective: Map authoritarian ties between Myanmar, Iran, Russia, Syria, and China
└── Intervention: Chinese Embassy forces removal of Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong artists
This danger manifested tangibly in 2025 during Sai’s curated exhibition, Constellation of Complicity, at the Bangkok Art and Cultural Center. The multi-national gallery aimed to connect the anti-authoritarian struggles of Myanmar, Iran, Russia, Syria, Tibet, and Xinjiang.
The conceptual display triggered an aggressive, invasive backlash from the Chinese Embassy, which forced Thai authorities to structurally censor the gallery.
Visuals of His Holiness the Dalai Lama were forcibly removed, and the names of Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong artists were blacked out.
Holding vulnerable Myanmar passports, Sai and his wife were forced to flee Thailand immediately ahead of localized security tracking.
Mobilizing memory: The Myanmar Peace Museum
Now granted formal political asylum in the United Kingdom, Sai is using his permanent base to scale up operations for the Myanmar Peace Museum, an umbrella initiative he co-founded to disrupt the continuous cycle of state-sponsored violence through active historical preservation.
The museum operates across three distinct strategic pillars:
- Atrocity Evidence Collection: Secretly couriering the physical belongings, clothing, and artifacts of victims killed by the junta into secure international custody to display directly inside foreign parliaments.
- Global Solidarity Intersections: Structurally linking the Myanmar Spring revolution with international democratic struggles to expose the shared tactics of global dictators.
- Frontline Creative Platforms: Providing alternative digital and physical showcases for underground Myanmar photographers and filmmakers capturing raw footage amid ongoing aerial bombardments.
Sai’s ultimate vision is to eventually return to a liberated Myanmar and reclaim the country’s colonial-era prisons.
“We want to take ownership, reclaim those prisons, decolonize them, and restructure them into human rights museums,” he said, citing Taiwan’s 228 Museum and Cambodia’s peace archives as core institutional inspirations.
The irreversible black bar
When asked by DVB English News what it would take for him to finally shed his pseudonym, remove the literal black bar that masks his name, and live a normal life as a celebrated contemporary artist, Sai was somber.
He notes that because he submitted a formal complaint to the U.N .Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the military’s Geneva office formally responded in early 2025, effectively confirming the regime knows exactly who he is.
The pseudonym is no longer a shield for himself, but a calculated compromise to protect remaining links inside the country.
“I don’t know. I would say that part is gone. That ship has sailed,” Sai reflected. “Until the political prisoners are free wholeheartedly, I don’t think that I can go back to my former self. Living fully with my true identity… I don’t think it is attainable in this lifetime.”
“We can never fully heal from the wounds we have suffered for generations, but we will have to try our best to recover,” he concluded.
Watch our Newsroom interview: Creative Dissent Against Censorship in Myanmar on DVB English News YouTube or Spotify. Listen on Apple, or wherever you get podcasts.
