A Train in Dream (Video Installation) (2025)

Medium - Video Installation, mirror debris, color, sound

Duration - 10 min

Dimension - Variable, Site-specific 

A Train in Dream is an experimental video work by Yeyint Naing that employs the train as a metaphor for childhood memory, collective trauma following the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, and the lived realities of Burmese youth forced into migration by political unrest. The work interweaves sketches, paintings, and archival footage of historical events with landscapes filmed through train windows, captured during the artist’s journeys as a survivor of political displacement.

This project marks Yeyint Naing’s first research-based artwork, developed in collaboration with a neurologist from Chulalongkorn University and counselors from Myanmar who specialize in collective trauma. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the work examines how personal memory intersects with public memory during periods of political crisis, and how trauma reshapes both individual recollection and collective narratives.

Within the installation, the train functions as a metaphor for the collision between past and present, as well as between private and collective memory. The fragments of mirror debris symbolize the shattered hopes of the people of Myanmar. As the moving landscape unfolds, viewers are invited to navigate spaces of nostalgia, remembrance, and trauma. The work juxtaposes the tenderness of childhood recollections with the violence and rupture brought about by the 2021 military coup, revealing memory as both a refuge and a site of ongoing struggle.

Installation view at A Trip Down Memory Lane exhibition (2025) at Museum Siam, Bangkok Thailand 

Still Photos from A Train In Dream