By far the largest event through this month and next is the annual French flavoured cultural spectacle La Fête. Now in its eighth installment and held across various venues, the busy scheduling of art, cinema, performing arts, and entertainment events, still maintains a visual preference towards photography with two exhibitions by French lensmen (see exhibition highlights).
Our cover image and exhibition spotlight this month features Bangkok resident Korean artist Gi-ok Jeon, whose exhibition Dwelling in a Space is being held at Galerie N. Approaching issues of identity, Jeon’s multimedia installation of wire sculptures, ink wash paintings and woodblock prints attempts to meld craft associated techniques with more contemporary ideologies and presentation.
Another artist to blur perceptions between craft or folk art forms and fine art manifestations is Chusak Srikwan. Creating his own style of traditional nang talung, or shadow puppetry, the exhibition Play at Tang Contemporary Art imbues playful toy imagery with darker political symbolism (see exhibition highlights).
In other highlights, Number 1 Gallery is showing a selection of digitally constructed works by established Australian artist Diane Mantzaris. During her residency in Thailand some twenty years prior, Mantzaris formed a friendship with fellow social crusader Vasan Sitthiket, who participates in her show as a guest artist.
Finally, we wrap up this month by mentioning two interesting non-commercial exhibitions with Wantanee Siripattananuntakul’s calendric examination of time in (Dis)continuity at the Chulalongkorn University Art Centre, and recent graduate artist Prapat Jiwarangsan’s politically aligned multimedia installation I’ll Never Smile Again at WTF Gallery (see exhibition highlights).
Steven Pettifor
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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.
Having initially studied the craft as a photographers assistant in Paris and New York, Hegenbarth has emerged as a burgeoning freelance photographer and talent in his own right. After relocating from New York to Thailand, the young lens man found his geo-cultural transition full of uncertainty and upheaval. Such reflections permeate the isolated autobiographical snaps he compiled while travelling through northern Europe, which this month are on display at H Gallery. Hegenbarths banal vernacular habitations exude familiarity, yet there is also a cool detachment of someone peripheral. Abandoned and devoid of human infraction, there is a brooding stillness that pitches the manmade against nature.
The soft light and muted colours suggest a north European aesthetic, similarly projected through the anonymous cityscapes of German photographer Thomas Struth. Hegenbarth also cites the work of several American photographers Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Steven Shore, and more recently Alec Soth as being highly influential to his current approach to imagery.
Laden with disconcerting nostalgia, the browning seasonal foliage and impending grey skies of the shots on display in Disunion imply transience. Marking a passage of time, they indicate diminished historical relevance, an era surpassed, a testament to the decline of old world European empires.
The washed-out edifices to legacy, are polemic to the confident ascendency of new regional powerhouses, particularly that of Asia, where Hegenbarth migrated to establish a renewed sense of home.
Throughout his career photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom has provided a viewfinder into his own vulgar dystopia - the avaricious and deceptive face of contemporary society. After the success of his solo exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum last year, this leading Thai lens man gives local audiences the opportunity to see the same presentation of Phenomena & Prophecies , being held at the g23 gallery at Srinakarinwirot University.
A BFA graduate from the university, the 49-year-old artist has made a strong presence on the international stage over the last 15 years, participating in the XXIV Sao Paula Biennale (1998), First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, International Photography Biennale in Mexico, Cities On the Move (1999), and the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. He was also selected for Blink's 2002 book of the world's top 100 photographers.
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