Firstly this month we would like to give gratitude to our existing sponsors for their continuing support. We welcome Artery: Post-Modern Gallery for coming on board as a new sponsor. Artery has just relocated from its former space in Silom Galleria to a townhouse on nearby Silom Soi 19 and is marking the move with an installation and performance by Jakraphun Thanateeranon (see exhibition highlights).
We also thank the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (BACC) for returning as a sponsor. A part of their current crop of exhibitions and events is You Are Not Alone , a showcase of international and Thai art staged by the non-profit Art Aids foundation. Promoting AIDS awareness in an effort to eradicate social stigma and ignorance, the exhibition features artists from South Africa, Cyprus, Chile, Lithuania, Spain, Vietnam, Denmark, Norway, Netherland and Morocco (see exhibition highlights).
Continuing from last month, the annual French flavoured cultural spectacle La Fête maintains its busy scheduling of art, cinema, performing arts and entertainment events. Our cover image and exhibition spotlight this month is likely to be a highlight of the festival: internationally renowned artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s thoughtful video installation, Two Planets , on view at Museum Siam .
Having found difficulty in maintaining a permanent home, Gallery Ver has just reopened in a new location out near Chatuchak market. Providing a rare and valuable platform for more challenging, non-commercial and conceptually driven art, the gallery marks its reappearance with a retrospective by 15 of its profiled artists (see exhibition highlights).
Steven Pettifor
Available free citywide, pick up your copy of BAM today and participate in the promotion of art in Thailand. For sponsorship enquiries email: erika_talisman-media.com
Since the late nineties, Chiang Mai based artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b.1957) has moved her main practice from gender related print and sculptural installations to aesthetically arresting time-based videos that have featured in numerous international showcases.
A lecturer in Chiang Mai University’s art faculty, Araya received an MFA from Silpakorn University before further studies in Germany. While her art and poetry have a feminine sensibility, it is as much a challenge of accepted values in Thai art, delving into issues such as dominance, religion, human relationships, origins and destiny.
While early video performances like Pond (1998), were passive in delivery as she recited poetry to a group of pickled cadavers floating in formaldehyde, the scholastic performance The Class (2005), involved the artist directing a tutorial to a line of corpses. Engaging issues of death while highlighting differing religious and cultural attitudes to mortality, The Class was presented at the conducive locale of a 13th century church as a part of the Thai pavilion for the 2005 51st Venice Biennale.
On view at Museum Siam as a part of the annual French initiated cultural event La Fête,
Araya’s Two Planets (2007-8) is a reaction to Western art viewing conventions. Captured against rural backdrops, the video vignettes place reproductions of familiar 19th century canonical masterpieces in front of groups of villagers to record their responses.
Discussing Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), Van Gogh’s Siesta (1889-90), Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) and Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette (1876), the anonymous gathering of pastoral folk sit with their backs to the camera. The often humorous responses from the unconditioned commentators reveal cultural nuances as well as attitudes to race, gender roles and sex. Their sincerity and lack of pretension is a provocation towards the art world.
A long time expatriate in Thailand, and former student in both China and America, Korean artist Gi-ok Jeon is no stranger to alienation. Using art as a means to better understand the environments and cultures she lives in, Jeon combines the traditional techniques of East Asian ink wash painting, woodblock print, along with woven and embroidered materials, to create tactile spatial installations that straddle tradition and modernity.
In her latest identity driven exhibition, Dwelling in a Space, on view at Galerie N, the artist suspends delicate wire weave objects that cast shadows across exuberant playful paintings of her young daughter. Approached from the perspective of a mother with a child of mixed race, she depicts her daughter wearing various colour patterns of local patoong fabric. The indigenous cloth motif extends through threads wrapped around tree branches in the hanging wire frame cages, invoking further spatial relations alongside cultural symbolism.
Having studied the ancient art of ink brush painting in China, Jeon is currently expanding her technical ability by studying printmaking at Chulalongkorn University. Eager to spread her painterly knowledge and keep alive traditional art forms, she has been running the annual JeOn Art Booth, a community of burgeoning ink brush painters that holds regular exhibitions, since 2001. For those interested in discovering more about Oriental brush painting, Jeon is conducting a number of workshops at Galerie N throughout the exhibition period.
In his latest exhibition of photography, Muang Krung Muang Thep, Somsak Pattanapitoon scratches below the surface of his native domain to search for sanctity, while highlighting the complexities of a conurbation in the throngs of relentless development.
An optometrist by trade, Somsak has an acute awareness of our field of vision, fueling his passion for photography. Refining hisself-taught craft over the past decade, he has earned himself a seat on the committee of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.
Inspiration for Muang Krung Muang Thep came during the New Year holiday, when Bangkoks streets become devoid of the daily traffic tailbacks and sidewalk melee. Indicators of the brash pace of development, the dominant concrete and steel frames of metropolitan infrastructure, appear eerily tranquil. The desolate thoroughfares offer a rare respite that Somsak supposes can only be sustained if the populace were to evacuate, leaving the city to wandering resident spirits, or celestial angels. Captured on infrared film, the fleeting natural light of transient moments contribute an ethereal quality to the black and white prints.
Continuing with themes previously established in the 2005-7 Ayutthaya focused series The Base of Siam, temple architecture permeates many of the Bangkok compositions. There are fractions in these depictions of devotional structures, the consecrated desecrated in misguided attempts to improve and modernise. Through a visual intersection of the manmade and the natural, Somsak presents a potent alchemy that celebrates life.
There is an element of the prophetic to Muang Krung Muang Thep, that the citys future trajectory is reflective upon the journey of mankind. In a suggestive but nonconfrontational approach that is ostensibly Buddhist, Somsak subtly nudges viewers to step back, contemplate and reevaluate our actions in the path towards progress.
Begun fourteen years ago, Buildings Entered is an ongoing, lifetime project in which American artist Charles LaBelle documents every building he physically enters. Currently, there are over thirteen thousand buildings in the archive, with additional buildings being added almost daily. Conceptual in nature, the project is both a diary and a historical document in which the artists own life and the space of the world intersect.
Recorded photographically, with the photos themselves never exhibited, LaBelle selects certain buildings to render in watercolor pencil atop gesso painted pages torn from a relevant theoretical tome.
These public drawings are incidental to the individual physical and philosophical encounter between the artist and the penetrated space. Aside from the profiles of specific geographies, architectural nuances, and concurrent cultural characteristics, LaBelles art reflects his personal behaviour patterns, as well as his approach to process, time-based, and performance art.
For the Hong Kong-based artists first solo project in Thailand, Number 1 Gallery will present an ambitious architecturally inspired drawing installation. On view are two bodies of drawings; the 200-composite sketches in the body focused Corpus, alongside the newly created site-responsive series of 100 drawings, A Kind of Counter Sublime (Bangkok Selects 2008 / 2010 / 2011).
Presented as single moments in a larger continuous narrative that is never actually told, the exhibition is both a celebration and critique of what Walter Benjamin called the phantasmagoria of the modern metropolis. Drawing a parallel with the structural aesthetics of the city outside, the installation is comprised of a parasitic wooden structure that creates a new environment within the gallery.
In conjunction with the exhibition LaBelle will hold a talk on his art and a book launch for the recently published Corpus. Hosted by the Reading Room, the event takes place on Wednesday December 21 at 7pm.
Chiang Mai-based director Apichatpong Weerasethakul propelled Asian cinema to new heights when he walked away with the 2010 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The winning film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2009), is sensual in its allusions to dreams and memory, with underlying themes of ancestry, mortality and reincarnation.
Hailed an auteur, Apichatpong has a technical mastery in all aspects of his filmmaking. Delivered through languid atmospheric cinematography, non-linear structures, and enhanced through a poetic sense of space and geography, his emphasis is on rural heritage against modern urbanity, sexuality and homoeroticism, animism and local folklore. He is inspired by the movies he watched as a child growing up in the impoverished northeastern region of Isaan, along with local soap operas, the live theatre tradition of likay, experimental cinema, and autobiographical referencing.
One of Thailands only trained filmmakers to experiment in media art, Apichatpong has previously explored the visual potentialities of shooting on a mobile phone for Nokia Shorts (2003), and the Tsunami-resonant Ghost of Asia (2005), in which he invited three children to direct a solitary ghost character. Conscientiously attempting a more utopian approach to filmmaking, he also recruits amateur actors in his improvisational films.
On view at the Jim Thompson Art Centre, his latest work, multiple video installation Primitive , was filmed around the northeastern village of Nabua. During the 1960s the village was home to several communist farmer insurgents who battled the Thai military before fleeing into the jungle. By implanting fictional scenarios such as constructing a spaceship for a pseudo sci-fi film, Apichatpong metaphorically explores the memories and socio-political legacy of this turbulent period of history by observing the behaviour and activities of todays younger generation of listless villagers.
Derived from the Greek word polemikos, meaning hostile, the word polemic is used to describe disputes, but in relation to the photographs of Australian Stephen Eastaugh and Argentinian Carolina Furque, it is used literally to describe the opposing polar positioning of the Arctic and Antarctic.
Few can claim to have as much experience of these dramatic icy terrains as this intrepid husband and wife pairing. Independently they have ventured to the top and bottom of the world to capture the stunning desolate expanses of some of the planet’s last surviving wildernesses.
A world away from the equatorial tropics where Thailand comfortably sits, the harsh white continents present challenging habitations that few dare to tread. An intrepid traveler who has spent prolonged periods at many of the world’s far-flung outposts, Eastaugh’s embedded journeys provide the inspiration for a diaristic art that scratches beneath the typical exotic touristic veneer.
As a part of the Australian Antarctic Division’s arts fellowship program, Eastaugh joined numerous field trips across Mac Robertson Land in East Antarctica, where he worked in the world’s southern most studio. Capturing the polar light phenomenon of the Aurora Australis, his ethereal colour shots of the Antarctic are mystical in their suspended dreamlike atmosphere. They evoke the humbling isolation of the frozen terrains that reduces humanity to insignificance.
In the northern Arctic around Greenland, Furque uses her Russian Holga camera to capture monochromatic stills of the dark and mysterious, remote and melancholic. A viewfinder into a distant realm, the sheen of her old camera and the developing techniques she employs create a blurring of reality and fantasy that contributes a mood of intimate memory.
Despite the lack of direct human penetration into these icecaps, the destructive behaviour of the global populace is causing ecological concerns for both polar ecosystems. Let’'s hope we can rectify our wasteful consumptive practices before these majestic landscapes degrade into environmental wastelands.
Bruises and scars are physical traces of individual fallibility, but they also provoke assumptions about the history and determiners behind such inflictions. In Bruised, the latest series of acrylic paintings by Thaweesak Srithongdee on view at Thavibu Gallery, Lolay as he is better known, expands his fascination with the human condition to question our existence and ultimate survival.
The 41-year-old Lolay has participated innumerous exhibitions in Thailand and abroad, including a residency at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan in 2005, the Fukuoka Triennale, and the 2010 Busan Biennale. Coming from the southern beach resort of Hua Hin, he has previously engineered a spurious race of Adonic, pectoral defined, super-beings that played with perceptions of body image. The naked doll-like caricatures seem both proud in their physicality, yet modest, even conservative, in their androgny. Typically manifested through paint, print, and animation, in recent years he has extended his slick idealised figures into impressive monumental resin sculptures.
Visualising the contusion theme through water saturated bled colours atop bare white backdrops, Lolay enmeshes organic, sinuous imagery that slices beneath the pop-erotic flesh to reveal the organs and innards that control and sustain our existence. Whereas before he has portrayed specific historic icons such as Hitler, Ghandi, Einstein, and Darwin, for Bruised the individual has become irrelevant as the artist questions humanity's insignificance within the greater cosmos.
A barometer of commercial culture, on the surface Lolay's art champions a plasticized and emotionally detached veneer. Influenced by the mass media trends in animation and comic book art that so captivate Asia's urban youth, his art holds a certain aesthetic kinship to the Superflat art of Takashi Murakami, Aida Makoto's anime paintings, or the twisted fantasies of Odani Motohiko.
In the Western world's post 9-11 paranoia, religious tolerance has been undermined with perceptions of Muslim appearance and behaviour becoming tainted and laden with prejudice. Harassment at airports has become commonplace and there is an increased wavering of civil and personal liberties. In 2010 the French government passed a law banning the public wearing of the burqa the full-faced covering of Muslim women. Even in Bangkok this year, several female high school students were denied permission to wear Muslim headscarves to a school that is located within a Buddhist compound.
Hailing from Pattani province in Thailand's restive south, 28-year-old Ampannee Satoh was a student of photography in France at the time of the burqa ban. As a young Muslim woman she felt compelled to visualise her objection to such a law by donning the outer garment for the series of protesting photos titled Burqa. Having recently returned to Thailand to teach photography at Rangsit University, the photos are on view this month and next at Kathmandu Photo Gallery.
The nine colour images are simply constructed compositions of a burqa-clad female against several backdrops. There is an affirmation of presence as the subject stands alone in front of the iconic Parisian landmarks of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, as well as ancient Roman structures, a tower block backed urban cityscape, and against azure coastal horizons. In a range of hues that include the symbolic red, white and blue of the French tricolour, the flowing shiny burqas shimmer in the daylight further heightening the focus.
Since childhood, Ampannee cites the revealing street photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson as influential to her passion for the lens. Indeed in 1948 the late French photographer himself captured an atmospheric scene of women in burqas praying at sunrise atop hills in Kashmir, India. In today's post 9-11 psychosis, images of veiled Muslim women or men dressed in traditional garb are loaded with thoughts of suspicion and fear. Ampannees series attempts to disarm such growing stereotypes and reiterate the individuals right to freedom and equality.
The daughter of Impressionist painter
Sa-Ngad Pui-ock and a former student of leading female artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, 35-year-old Sudsiri Pui-ock is one of the countrys best emergent artists. Whether surreptitiously installing piles of rocks across her fellow students study areas in Amsterdam, or boldly stepping in front of an oncoming juggernaut to make a street rubbing in Japan, Sudsiris art previously revealed her experiential thoughts on themes such as belonging, territory, and the home.
Based in the northern art hub of Chiang Mai, Sudsiri uses painting, photography, time-based installation and video performance in her examination of aspects of identity, immersion and acceptance within alien cultures. Having undertaken several overseas residencies, much of Sudsiris previous work was born from feelings of isolation. This is evident in the 2005 video performance The Dinner, in which she served a banquet to a table setting of invisible guests as she actually sat dining alone.
One of the artists preferred techniques is traditional paper rubbing with charcoal, which she first used in the 2006 video performance The Street of Two Birds, making rubbings of a manhole cover along a busy road in Japan by dramatically stepping out in front of approaching trucks at personal risk.
As well as paper rubbings Sudsiri has also tried her hand at organic carving, cleaving growing vegetations such as giant pumpkins with elaborate imagery that evokes decorative table dressings in Thai restaurants. While many artists relinquish the role of creative crafting in favour of cerebral engagement, Sudsiri instead believes a hands-on approach encourages greater fluidity through the potential for malleable accidentals.
In her latest solo exhibition Life-Living at Ardel Gallery of Modern Art, Sudsiri displays previously unseen rubbings of a car and the expansive tatami mat The Rice Sea, atop of which she installs newly created bronze sculptures of strange anthro-marine creatures. In sum, the non-confrontational exhibition shows a less angry artist who has resettled back into the Thai way of life, conveying an atmosphere of reflection and spirituality.
Disunion is the debut solo photographic exhibition by Benya Hegenbarth. Graduating with a BA in History from Connecticut College, in the United States, the 32 year-old Bangkok-based German-Thai photographer presents a series of dislocated architectural landscapes from northern Europe.
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