The Grandmaster:After Tang Chang

Vichit Nongnual’s new exhibition The Grandmaster: After Tang Chang (สนทนากับปรมาจารย์ จ่าง แซ่ตั้ง) pays homage to one of Thailand’s greatest modern artists. Using a diverse range of media—acrylic paint, wool, wax, and ceramic—Vichit has produced meticulous recreations of Chang’s works.

One of Chang’s most famous self-portraits, ตัดมือกวี ควักตาจิตรกร (‘cut the poet’s hands, remove the painter’s eyes’), shows the artist symbolically self-mutilated in an anguished reaction to the massacre of pro-democracy protesters that took place on 14th October 1973. Vichit has rendered this monumental oil painting as a woven tapestry, retitled The Grassland.

Chang translated the Chinese novel The True Story of Ah Q (阿Q正傳) into Thai in 1975, though it was banned and burnt along with hundreds of other books in the anti-Communist purges following the 6th October 1976 coup. Vichit has transformed piles of Chang’s books into ceramic sculptures using the Japanese raku firing process, a technique that results in black scorch marks, in a reference to the book-burning of the 1970s. (Sirisak Saengow also created ceramic versions of banned books, in Unforgetting History.)

The Grandmaster opened at La Lanta Fine Art in Bangkok on 11th January, and runs until 26th February. A lavish exhibition catalogue has also been published, featuring an informative essay by Sheryl Gwee. (Since relocating from the Sukhumvit district in 2018, La Lanta has been part of the N22 group of contemporary galleries, which also includes Gallery Ver, Cartel Artspace, and VS Gallery.)

Smell Like Thai Spirit

Smell Like Teen Spirit, a new solo exhibition by graffiti artist Headache Stencil, opened at Rere Khaosan in Bangkok on 20th December last year. The exhibition, whose title is a pun on the Nirvana song Smells Like Teen Spirit, runs until 4th February.

One of the highlights is Cheese or Shroom, screenprints of Thaksin Shinawatra’s face in various colours. The initial series featured yellow and blue polka-dotted prints, representing the cheese and mushrooms of the title. The artist has also added red and white versions, and Thaksin has agreed to sign the red edition before it’s sold.

Headache Stencil’s real name is Pang-samornnon Yaem-uthai. His previous exhibitions in Bangkok include Thailand Casino, Do or Die, and Propaganda Children’s Day (วันเด็กชั่งชาติ). His one-day group exhibition Uncensored was followed by Uncensored 2 in Chiang Mai and a longer exhibition also titled Uncensored (ศิลปะปลดปล่อย).

Headache Stencil’s work is featured in two books on Thai graffiti artists: Bangkok Street Art and Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti (สตรีทอาร์ตกับกราฟฟิตีในกรุงเทพฯ). The Faith of Graffiti was the first study of graffiti as an art form, and Trespass is a global history of street art.

Fall

Nipan Oranniwesna’s solo exhibition Fall was held at Jing Jai Gallery in Chiang Mai, from 1st March to 2nd June. The exhibition included several works from 2020 that refer to events leading up to the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University. An installation from the exhibition, Then, One Morning, They Were Found Dead and Hanged, was previously shown at the Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai.

Then, One Morning, They Were Found Dead and Hanged dominated the gallery floor, with capital letters carved from teakwood that read “THEN, ONE MORNING, THEY WERE FOUND DEAD AND HANGED. IT WAS LATER ESTABLISHED, THAT THEY WERE DONE TO DEATH BEFORE THEY WERE HUNG.” This text refers to Choomporn Thummai and Vichai Kasripongsa, two men who were hanged by police from a gate in Nakhon Pathom on 25th September 1976, after they campaigned against military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn’s return from exile.

Thammasat students staged a reenactment of the hanging on 4th October 1976, and the right-wing Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper reported this on its front page two days later, with a photograph of one of the students, Apinan Buahapakdee. Apinan bore a slight and coincidental resemblance to King Vajiralongkorn, who was Crown Prince at the time, and the newspaper accused the students of “แขวนคอหุ่นเหมือนเจ้าฟ้าชาย” (‘burning the Crown Prince in effigy’). It was this incendiary and false headline that led vigilante groups to storm the campus.

Nipan’s teakwood text appears on painted clouds, which are based on a photograph taken by the artist on 24th June 2020, the anniversary of Thailand’s 1932 transition to a constitutional monarchy. This metaphorical reference—the sky as an indirect allusion to the monarchy—has also been employed by other artists: t_047’s single ไม่มีคนบนฟ้า (‘no one in the sky’), Jirat Prasertsup’s exhibition Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us (คิดถึงคนบนฟ้า), and Wittawat Tongkeaw’s installation Creation-Conclusion (เริ่ม-จบ). Wittawat commented on the metaphor with the title of his painting It’s Just the Sky, Nothing More.

The gate from which the two activists were hanged was rediscovered by Patporn Phoothong in 2017. A photograph of the gate (simply titled Gate) was also part of Fall, shown alongside framed reproductions of a twelve-page account of the Thammasat massacre—titled Ungpakorn [sic]—typed by Puey Ungphakorn (a former rector at Thammasat) on 25th November 1976.

Patporn made a short documentary about the case, The Two Brothers (สองพนอง), and exhibited the gate itself at Thammasat in 2019. A split-second image of the gate appears in Tewprai Bualoi’s short film Friendship Ended with Mudasir Now Salman Is My Best Friend (มิตรภาพสิ้นสุดกับ Mudasir ตอนนี้ Salman คือเพื่อนที่ดีที่สุดของฉัน). The gate has inspired several paintings, including Jirapatt Aungsumalee’s ประตูแดง (‘red gate’) and Pachara Piyasongsoot’s What a Wonderful World, and the poster Just Because You Can’t See It, Doesn’t Mean It Didn’t Happen.

Bangkok Through Poster 2024Thailand Postlitical Fiction

The fifth annual Bangkok Through Poster exhibition opened at Kinjai Contemporary in Bangkok yesterday. This year’s theme is Thailand Postlitical Fiction: poster designs for imaginary movies commenting on Thai politics. Sixty-seven posters were selected from works submitted by artists, students, and design studios, and many of the posters are accompanied by synopses for the fictitious films they illustrate.

A handful of posters in the exhibition refer to past political violence. One example is a spoof horror film titled Cursed Siam (สาปสยาม) by Canyouhearcloud, referencing the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University. Two posters refer to the 2010 crackdown at Ratchaprasong: All the Light We Can(not) See by Wonderwhale Studio (which uses candles to represent the red-shirt victims), and Animal Sanctuary by Chonlatorn Wongrussamee (which emphasises the killing of wounded protesters sheltering at Wat Pathum Wanaram). Two posters—More Conceal, More Reveal (ยิ่งปกปิด ยิ่งเปิดเผย) by Deepend Studio, and Unfortunately by Njorvks—highlight former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s statement that “unfortunately, some people died” at Ratchaprasong. Kawinnate Konklong’s short film Unfortunately (แค่วันที่โชคร้าย), released last year, also refers to Abhisit’s dismissive comment.

Most of the posters, however, focus on more recent events. Thaksin Shinawatra and his daughter Paetongtarn (the current Prime Minister) are the most common theme, featuring on ten posters: The Missing (You Too Much) (ผมคิดถึงคุณ) by Setthawuth K. (a spoof of The Shining), The Chair of the Promise Land [sic] by Genji Kun, The Zone of Shinnawatra [sic] by Nam.Ni.Ang, The Successor by Gaw Chutima, Hereditary by Kritsaran Hanamonset, The Loop by Thalufah, The Invisible Storm by Antizeptic, The Landslider by Sina Wittayawiroj (a diptych inspired by The Lobster), and Closing the Scenes (ปิดฉาก) by Thiraphon Singlor.

The student protest movement inspired almost as many posters as the Shinawatras, including Chorn Yuan’s A Smile. There are two that refer to 16th October 2020, when riot police used water cannon to disperse protesters at Siam Square: 16 10 63 by PrachathipaType, and Sky Flood, Stars Fall (น้ำท่วมฟ้า ปลากินดาว) by Tnop Design. Panita Siriwongwan-ngarm’s Here at Din Daeng Police Station, a Boy Named Varit Died (ที่นี่ (สน.ดินแดง) มีคน ตาย ชื่อ ด.ช.วาฤทธิ์) honours a 15-year-old boy who was shot at a protest in 2021.

Protest leader Arnon Nampa appears in two posters: The Lawyer Devil (ทนายปีศาจ) by Shake and Bake Studio, and The Letter (จดหมายรัก) by Tanis Werasakwong (known as Sa-ard). The Letter refers to letters he wrote to his family from prison, as does Vichart Somkaew’s short film The Letter from Silence (จดหมายจากความเงียบ), released this year. Arnon’s fellow protest leader Parit Chirawak features in The Penguin 112 by director Chaweng Chaiyawan (a reference to Parit’s nickname and the lèse-majesté charges he faces).

Article 112 also inspired perhaps the strongest poster in the exhibition, Pssyppl’s Lèse-majesté, which depicts blue figures strangling red ones with nooses, a comment on the maliciousness and severity of lèse-majesté prosecutions. Bangkok Through Poster 2024 runs until 22nd December, and Neti Wichiansaen’s documentary Democracy after Death (ประชาธิปไตยหลังความตาย) will be shown on the final day of the exhibition. (The film was also screened in Chiang Mai last year and in 2022.)

Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art

Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art, published this week, documents the history of tattooing in Europe and America over the last 300 years. Uniquely, it covers tattooing as a professional art form, as distinct from its indigenous origins and its amateur practice by sailors, bikers, and prisoners.

As author Matt Lodder writes, his book is also a revisionist history: “I want, here, to reset the scaffolding for a history of Western tattooing as a professional and commercial practice.” Martin Hildebrandt, who opened a tattoo parlour in New York in 1858, is “widely considered to be the first professional tattooer in the Western world”, though Lodder demonstrates that tattooing was a commercial occupation in England as far back as 1719. He also challenges the concept of the ‘tattoo renaissance’, a term coined by the media in 1970.

Tattoo (Tatoueurs, Tatoues) is another key work of tattoo history. Body Decoration (Geschmückte Haut, by Karl Gröning) and The World of Tattoo (De wereld van tatoeage) illustrate tribal tattooing from around the world. The History of Tattooing, published ninety-nine years ago, was the first book on the subject. Andrea Juno and V. Vale’s Modern Primitives, discussed at length in Lodder’s book, is an influential guide to contemporary body modification.

Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage

The standard histories of collage as an artistic practice, such as Collage by Brandon Taylor, trace its origins to 1912, and the newspaper cuttings appliquéd to Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Herta Wescher’s Collage (Die Collage), the definitive work on the subject, discussed nineteenth century examples in addition to the Cubists and their successors. The recent exhibition Cut and Paste antedated the technique by 400 years, though Freya Gowrley’s groundbreaking book Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage, published this week, traces the history of collage over thousands of years.

As she writes in her introduction, Gowrley (who contributed to the Cut and Paste exhibition catalogue) “aims to provide a more expansive history of collage than has previously been produced.” The book’s publisher calls it a “global history of collage from the origins of paper to today”, and at 400 pages it lives up to that description. All previous histories of collage have focused entirely on European and American artists, though the scope of Gowrley’s book is truly international, with coverage of collage in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Again, unlike previous histories of the topic, Fragmentary Forms considers collage not only as fine art, but also examines its role in taxonomic collections, devotional objects, printed ephemera, and domestic craftmaking.

Bangkok Art Biennale 2024

After Beyond Bliss (สุขสะพรั่ง พลังอาร์ต) in 2018, Escape Routes (ศิลป์สร้าง ทางสุข) in 2020, and Chaos:Calm (โกลาหล:สงบสุข) in 2022, the fourth Bangkok Art Biennale’s theme is Nurture Gaia (รักษา กายา). As in previous years, the Biennale (บางกอก อาร์ต เบียนนาเล่) is being held at multiple venues around the city, from galleries to temples. The event opened on 24th October, and runs until 25th February next year.

Taiki Sakpisit’s video installation Dream Sequence (ฝันทิพย์), showing at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, consists of static shots filmed at the house in Paris where Pridi Banomyong lived during his years in exile from Thailand until his death in 1983. The house was purchased this year by Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, founder of the Future Forward party, cementing the property as a symbol of progressive politics thwarted by the establishment, and the Biennale catalogue describes Tiaki’s video as “a kaleidoscopic feast of delusion, desperation, oppression, and perpetual nightmares rooted in Thailand’s flawed democracy.”

Dispatch

Dispatch, an exhibition of photographs by R. Scott Davis, opened at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre on 1st November, and runs until 1st December. Davis photographed EMS workers as they attended emergency calls and accidents, and human specimens at Bangkok’s Central Institute of Forensic Science.

Tsurisaki Kiyotaka also photographed fatal accidents and crime scenes in Bangkok, though his images focus on the victims rather than the EMS staff. The Netflix series Bangkok Breaking (มหานครเมืองลวง) dramatised the competition between the city’s various EMS teams.

Tak Bai Can’t Breathe

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the tragedy that took place at Tak Bai on 25th October 2004. More than 1,000 people protested outside Tak Bai’s Provincial Police Station, and police responded with water cannon, tear gas, and ultimately live ammunition, killing seven people. The surviving demonstrators were crammed into trucks and taken to Ingkhayuttha Borihan Fort military camp, though seventy-eight died of suffocation during the five-hour journey.

For almost two decades, successive governments have failed to bring the security forces to justice for the unlawful deaths at Tak Bai. Finally, earlier this year, just months before the twenty-year statute of limitations expires, seven former police and military officers were charged with the murder of the Tak Bai victims. However, there has been no attempt to enforce the arrest warrants issued for them. The court has announced that it will simply wait until midnight on 25th October for the seven men to present themselves voluntarily and, if they choose not to hand themselves in, the cases against them will be dropped.

The injustice of Tak Bai is heartbreaking, though sadly not unusual in Thailand. At the time of the Tak Bai incident, the government even prohibited footage of the event from being broadcast on television, though the journal Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน) distributed a Tak Bai VCD, ความจริงที่ตากใบ (‘the truth at Tak Bai’), in defiance of the ban. Tak Bai footage also appears in Teerawat Rujenatham’s short film Tak Bai, and in two documentaries: This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน) by Thunska Pansittivorakul, and 18 Years by Prempapat Plittapolkranpim. Walai Buppha’s documentary 20 Years Later features interviews with the families of the victims. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the representation of Tak Bai by Thai filmmakers.)

Yesterday evening, performance artist Jakkrapan Sriwichai lay in seventy-eight different positions, his hands bound behind his back, at Tha Pae Gate in Chiang Mai (photographed by Prachatai). His performance, Tak Bai Can’t Breathe (ตากใบหายใจไม่ออก), memorialised the seventy-eight protesters who died of suffocation, and highlighted the urgent need to enforce the arrest warrants of the men accused of their murder.

Other events commemorating the twentieth anniversary include 20 ปีตากใบ เราไม่ลืม (‘20 years of Tak Bai, we will never forget’), #ตากใบต้องไม่เงียบ (‘Tak Bai must not be silenced’), Indelible Memory (ลบไม่เลือน), Takbai 20th Year Memorization (จดจำ 20 ปี ตากใบ), and Sol Bar Talk Special (คืนนี้ ไม่มีความยุติธรรม ให้ตากใบ). Previous exhibitions commemorating Tak Bai include Heard the Unheard (สดับเสียงเงียบ), รำลึก 19 ปี ตากใบ (‘remembering 19 years of Tak Bai’), Deep South (ลึกลงไป ใต้ชายแดน), Living Memories (ความทรงจำที่ยังเหลืออยู่), and Landscape of Unity the Indivisible (ทิวทัศน์แห่งความเป็นหนึ่งอันมิอาจแบ่งแยก).

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Photophobia series incorporates photographs of the incident, as does the interactive installation Black Air by Pimpaka Towira, Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Koichi Shimizu, and Jakrawal Nilthamrong. Jehabdulloh Jehsorhoh’s Violence in Tak Bai (ความรุนแรงที่ตากใบ) installation features white tombstones marking the graves of each victim. The victims’ names are listed in two installations: Jakkhai Siributr’s 78 and Zakariya Amataya’s Report from a Partitioned Village (รายงานจากหมู่บ้านที่ถูกปิดล้อม).

Cartooning the ASEAN Way of Non-Interference and Consensus

An exhibition of cartoons and comics, Cartooning the ASEAN Way of Non-Interference and Consensus (การ์ตูนภาพ วิถีอาเซียน หลักการการไม่แทรกแซงกิจการภายใน และหลักฉันทามติของประชาคมอาเซียน), opens today at SAE Junction in Bangkok and runs until 3rd November. The exhibition (and its spiral-bound catalogue) features Pornnipa Baoniaw’s comic Everything in the World Is Beautiful (ทุกอย่างในโลกล้วนสวยงาม), in which she compares countries in Southeast Asia to delicate flowers that need nurturing, though her story ends with a montage of fuzzy, black-and-white photographs showing military dominance in the region. The image representing Thailand is a photo of a tank on the streets of Bangkok when the 2006 coup took place.

Imago

Harit Srikhao’s exhibition Imago opened at Bangkok CityCity Gallery on 12th October, and runs until 30th November. Its title describes the final stage of an insect’s metamorphosis into an adult, reflecting the artist’s own maturity. Harit has also undergone a process of art therapy, and the resulting sense of empowerment—like an insect’s emergence from its pupal case—made Imago possible.

The exhibition includes a video installation, also titled Imago, which combines photography with stop-motion animation. The exhibition leaflet refers to “surrendering the autonomy of one’s own image and the struggle in reclaiming it,” a reference to intimate video footage of Harit and his former partner, director Thunska Pansittivorakul. After their relationship ended, Thunska used this deeply personal material in his documentary Avalon (แดนศักดิ์สิทธิ์).

Harit has now taken back control of this representation of his past, by inserting one of the sexually explicit video clips—which appeared at the beginning of Avalon—into Imago. The installation also includes screenshots of intimidating emails that Harit received about the graphic footage, which he printed out and cut into paper butterflies, turning toxic memories into art that symbolises his independence.

These paper butterflies also feature on the cover of Window, a CD single (limited to 300 copies) featuring music from the Imago soundtrack. One of Harit’s previous exhibitions, Whitewash, was censored by the military in 2017, inspiring Aditya Assarat’s Sunset, a segment of the portmanteau film Ten Years Thailand. Harit has codirected the documentaries Homogeneous, Empty Time (สุญกาล) and sPACEtIME (กาลอวกาศ).

Resistant with Style

Resistant with Style [sic], an exhibition of t-shirts with political slogans from the Museum of Popular History’s collection, opens today at The Fort in Bangkok and runs until 23rd October. A similar collection of t-shirts was included in the Never Again exhibition in 2019.

งานรำลึก 48 ปี เหตุการณ์ 6 ตุลาฯ 2519(‘commemorating the 48th anniversary of 6th Oct. 1976’)

This week, Thammasat University will commemorate the 48th anniversary of the 6th October 1976 massacre. A pop-up exhibition, ต่างความคิดผิดถึงตาย (‘deadly misconceptions’), will be held at Thammasat’s Sri Burapha Auditorium from tomorrow until 6th October. (A documentary with the same title was released on DVD in 2011.) At the same time, Thammasat’s Pridi Banomyong Library will host 6 ตุลาฯ กระจกส่องสังคมไทย (‘6th Oct., mirror of Thai society’), an exhibition exploring the wider context of the event. (These exhibitions were scheduled to open today, but as of this afternoon the library display was cordened off and the auditorium was closed.)

Three short documentaries will be screened at Thammasat on 5th October. Respectfully Yours (ดวยความนบถอ), directed by Patporn Phoothong and Puangthong Pawakapan, features interviews with families of massacre victims. For The Two Brothers (สองพนอง), Patporn and Teerawat Rujenatham interviewed relatives of the two young men were hanged by police for campaigning against the return of Thanom Kittikachorn from exile. In Manussak Dokmai’s Don’t Forget Me (อย่าลืมฉัน), archive footage of 6th October is accompanied by narration from a documentary on the Mlabri tribe, providing an ironic counterpoint to the violent imagery.

There will also be an exhibition by the Museum of Popular History at Thammasat on 6th October, ก่อนจะถึงรุ่งสาง 6 ตุลา (‘before the dawn of 6th Oct.’). Elsewhere in Bangkok, another 6th October photography exhibition, ไม่ใช่ 6 ตุลาฟื้นคืนชีพ แต่รากเหง้าของ ปัญญาชนนั้นยังอยู่ (‘not a 6th Oct. resurrection, but intellectual roots remain’), will open at Hope Space tomorrow. The Two Brothers will be screened there on the opening day.

ก่อนจะถึงรุ่งสาง 6 ตุลา (‘before the dawn of 6th Oct.’)

The Museum of Popular History will stage an exhibition at Thammasat University on 6th October, to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre that took place there on 6th October 1976. The exhibition, ก่อนจะถึงรุ่งสาง 6 ตุลา (‘before the dawn of 6th Oct.’) at Sri Burapha Auditorium, will examine the long-term causes of the massacre, particularly the anti-Communist propaganda prevalent in the media during the 1970s. Using newspapers and posters from the period, the exhibition will highlight the language and imagery used to demonise the Thammasat students. (Many of the items will also be shown at a similar one-day exhibition, October Stories: Uprising and Strike Back, at Srinakharinwirot University on 17th October.)

Books and supplements related to the 14th October 1973 protests will also be on display, as will the contents of the กล่องฟ้าสาง (‘box of dawn’), a ‘museum in a box’ released in 2021. The poster Just Because You Can’t See It, Doesn’t Mean It Didn’t Happen features outlines of the bodies of the two men hanged for protesting against Thanom Kittikachorn’s return from exile. Ladkrabang Politics, a group of students from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology in Ladkrabang, painted a silhouette of a hanged student—Hangman—alongside a list of the names of the victims of 6th October. Hangman will be displayed with a folding chair propped up against it, in a reference to a much-reproduced Neal Ulevich photograph of the massacre.