SYNOPSIS
Essential Desires: Contemporary Art from Thailand, Reaktion Books 2016
Summary
Apinan Poshyananda’s Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford UP
1992) remains the major Anglophone scholarly text on art in Thailand (though is now out of
print). The book surveys how modern Thai artists adapted foreign influences according to local
social, political and cultural contexts; within a broad theme of eclecticism, these contexts
include Buddhism, indigenous ritual, military violence and urban development. Poshyananda
perceptively points out that modern art in Thailand can typically be understood in terms of
style[s] rather than theory and concluded with a speculative examination of what postmodernism could mean for a range of artistic practices in Thailand throughout the 80s.
Essential Desires: Contemporary Art from Thailand departs from the latter period of
Poshyananda’s text but offers a more fractured view of the subsequent era[s] in terms of
foreign influence, academic theories formed in Euro-American contexts, the intensification and
recession of issues of national identity and cultural essentialism during certain periods, and the
contribution of art from Thailand to global accounts of art history and contemporaneity.
Beginning with examples of modern Thai artists who had exemplary influence, the book then
moves through portraits of experimental spaces and projects established in the 1990s to
Thailand’s first participation in the 2003 Venice Biennale, the increased international interest in
contemporary art from Asia, the opening of the Bangkok Art and Culture in 2008 and the art
scene[s] of recent years. The range of practices addressed in relation to these and other
contexts creates a complex picture of artists that variously reflect, challenge and contribute to
local concerns without being strictly defined by the expediencies of discourse or
representation.
The backdrop of Essential Desires is the unstable trajectory of narratives of foreign
influence/local integrity over the last two decades and so. The title is a semantic play on fixity
(essential) and the amorphous (desires), highlighting how artists essentially desire recognition
of art’s discursive and indeterminate character and can exceed the instrumental. While
Thailand’s artists, of course, are not exceptional in the very fact of exploring relationships
between indigenous belief, national identity, often esoteric references and an
international[ized] language of contemporary art, Thailand does offer an established, mature
art scene as a case study in the internal and external pressures that affect the production and
framing of contemporary art from diverse regions.
Outline
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Chronology
Introduction: Contemporary Art from Thailand
This section sketches a broad context for the book, drawing on a range of references
in order to explore contemporary approaches to art from a particular country or
region and trace methods and rationale. These references include Rachel Weiss’s To
and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (UP Minnesota 2011)which looks at
contemporary local art as a reaction against the past and a catalyst for political
debate; and Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe (Black Dog Publishing 2010)which
revealed the importance of art practices previously inaccessible. For the Asia
context, the section considers the implications of Melissa Chiu’s and Benjamin
Genocchia’sContemporary Asian Art (Thames and Hudson 2010), a survey that dates
from the 1990s and maps a variety of genericthemes; and significant exhibitions
such as Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions (Asia Society, New York 1996),
Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery, London 1999) and No Country: Contemporary
Art for South and Southeast Asia (Guggenheim Museum, New York 2013).
The narrative of the Introduction acknowledges the growth of the international art
world since the 90s and highlights ideas of Thai artists seeing themselves afresh in
terms of the wide variety of media, curatorial models and contextual understandings
that came to be used as a consequence of increased international dialogue and
exposure. Checking Thailand's historic status as a syncretic culture that selects and
absorbs foreign influence, this section notes such in expanded terms further to the
80s, discusses the relative 'problem' of strict national representation for Thailand
and points to the inevitability of post-national interest on behalf of artists
themselves for the current era, further to free and accelerated exchange (and
perhaps the shift from the relative sureties of post-modernism to the complexities
of the contemporary). Here post-nationalism can also be partly read against the loss
of faith in coherent ideals of national identity given the cyclical and censorious
nature of Thai politics. At the time of writing, the country was under martial law
further to the 13th military coup since the 30s - when Thailand originally sought to
establish itself as a democracy – and violent antagonisms between urban elite/rural
poor mark the failure of national development and the lack of a unifying notion of
‘Thai-ness’.
Re-Imagining Communities: Art in Thailand during the 1990s
This section looks at the exemplary significance of artists such as Montien Boonma,
who is considered the ‘godfather of modern art in Thailand’ because of his
integration of indigenous elements with an international artistic language. While
Boonma largely drew on palliative Buddhist and Thai references, the very idea of this
integration also affected more critical practices with Chatchai Pupia, Sutee
Kunavichayanont, Vasan Sitthiket and Manit Sriwanichpoom who drew on local
references with various commentaries on the state of a developing country;
between critiques of the relevance of traditional values to the perceived problems of
an encroaching growth of capitalism. The 90s in Thailand was a boom period in
terms of the economy and an international interest in Thai artists, who featured in
many important biennales and other exhibitions abroad. This decade also saw the
founding of spaces and projects in Thailand such as Chiang Mai Social Installation
(1992), Project 304 (1996), About Studio/About Café (1997) and The Land (1998).
The educational background of many of the figures involved was outside Thailand
and they have since established international reputations, such as the curator
Gridthiya Gaweewong, filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and artists Rirkrit
Tiravanija and Navin Rawanchaikul.
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This section maps the splintering and diversities of the Thai art scene[s] more than
Poshayanda's survey could allow for, tracing conflicts of tradition and accelerated
modernity, foreign influence and indigenous values, the patina of 'international' and
the potential consequences for a political culture that demands a coherent notion of
Thai identity. The decade was bracketed by Black May in 1992 and the Asian
Economic Crisis, which began in Thailand in 1997, and while Thai artists were
pressured in terms of critical reflexivity about their country, a great sense of regional
identity was emerging with a number of exhibitions: aside from Traditions/Tensions
and Cities on the Move, there was the founding of the Asiatopia International
Performance Art Festival in 1992, Southeast Asian Art: A Glimpse into the Future
(Tokyo, 1997) and Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s (New York,
1999), amongst others.
Traditions/Tensions: A Lingering Debate
The early 2000s saw the establishment of the Office of Contemporary Art and
Culture (OCAC) with aremit to promote Thai culture to serve the public. OCAC
sponsored Thailand’s first participation in the Venice Biennale 2003 and mandated
that ‘Thai-ness’ be central to this representation. The commissioner/curator
Poshyananda responded with a pavilion reminiscent of a traditional Thai house and
contextualized his choice of seven artists in terms of what it means to export socalled Thai exotica. Taking a cue from this event, this section examines dynamic
tensions and disparities between nationalist cultural proscriptions and the
idiosyncrasies of artists such as Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Michael Shaowanasai,
Pinaree Sanpitak and, later, Jakkai Siributr - each of whom studied internationally.
For these artists, national references are enabling and can function as
contextualization, but this is complicated by their engagement with questions of
gender and sexual subjectivities and an explicit appeal to universal human
experience. This section also looks at the founding of the Bangkok Art and Culture
Center in 2008 – the country’s premier institution for contemporary art - and the
challenges of a curatorial programme that aimed to integrate disparate histories for
the purpose of a celebratory reinforcement of national identity. Critical voices were
provided by exhibitions such as Neo-Nationalism (Art Center, 2005) and the decade
saw the international profile of filmmaker Weerasethakul, who drew on an
animistic, ‘Thai’ sensibility to suggest a critique of blind faith.
Global Imperatives: The Post-National Impulse
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This section explores the increased internationalisation of the culture of
contemporary art from Thailand, with reference to the significance of biennales and
the multiplication of regional art fairs. Any number of major Thai artists have
consciously moved beyond local references (e.g. Be Takerng Pattanopas), rendered
them irrelevant (e.g. Pratchaya Phinthong) or allowed for an explicit criticality on
home turf (e.g. Rikrit Tiravanija’s response to the street protests in Bangkok at
Thailand’s 100 Tonson Gallery during 2010). Moreover, an emergent generation of
Thai artists has begun to question the values which underline the pursuit of a
coherent identity, such as Pisitakun Kuantalaeng explorations of the arbitrary ways
in which history can be written and Tada Hengsapkul’s brazen photographic attacks
on sacred icons and assertion of non-normative identities. During 2014, the 13th
military coup continues to fail to resolve deep-rooted divisions in Thai society and
questions of ‘Thai’ identity appear to have irrevocably shifted towards class- and
regional- based issues.
Conclusion