ATLAS BANGKOK

Kamol
Tassananchalee:
#13 in the series
“Four Elements,
E arth, Air, Fire
8c W ater,” 2014,
stainless steel, 5
by 23 by 4 feet.
C ourtesy M inistry
o f C ulture,
Thailand.

Who’s/Whose
“Thai Contemporary?”
by G regory Galligan

T H IS M O N T H , as visitors alight at the Venice Biennale, Thasnai Sethaseree in its international mix) at the Yerba Buena
they will encounter Okwui Enwezor’s provocative “All the Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Painter Yuree Kensaku and
W orld’s Futures” exhibition, which according to the event’s sculptor Pinaree Sanpitak each had booth solos at the Art Basel C O M IN G SO O N
Korakrit
website aims to highlight “territorial and geopolitical dis­ Hong Kong fair in March. Korakrit Arunanondchai, with his Arunanondchai s
figurations” around the globe. In describing the pavilions of painted denim and hip-hop video practice—introduced to the solo exhibitions at
the Giardini as a “ramshackle assemblage” that reflects the U.S. with a high-energy performance last year at New York’s the Palais de Tokyo,
Paris, June 24-
world’s current disorder, Enwezor, the 56th Biennale’s artistic MoMA PS1—will have shows this year at the Palais de Tokyo, Sept. 13, and the
director, proffers a metaphor that also applies perfectly to the Paris, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. At Ullens Center
Thai contemporary art scene. T he system here, now steadily home, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre has just hosted a for Contemporary
Art, Beijing,
producing inventive work, makes a considerable impact both popular, two-person exhibition, “Imply Reply,” which presented Aug. 21-Oct. 19.
regionally and globally—albeit all too often in spite of itself. sculptural installations by veteran Chinese conceptualist Huang
O n the bright side, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, one of the Yong Ping and Thai artist-philosopher Sakarin Krue-on—the
G R EG O R Y
nation’s most accomplished and progressive conceptual artists, latter still vividly remembered for his Terraced Rice Field Art G A LL IG A N is
recently had concurrent solo exhibitions in New York, at the Project in Documenta 12 (2007). cofounder and
Sculpture Center and at Tyler Rollins Fine Art. RirkritTira- Aligning themselves with the “M ekong” scenes of Cam­ director of the
Thai A rt Archives,
vanija, Thailand’s champion of relational aesthetics, has launched bodia, Myanmar and Vietnam, as well as those of Southeast Bangkok.
a group exhibition “The Way Things Go” (on view through Asian sister nations Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore,
May 24 and including Thai contemporaries Arin Rungjang and Thai art-world insiders never think twice about who or what

ART IN AMERICA 65

One image from Araya
Rasdjarmrearnsook’s
diptych The One and
Three Niranams, 2015,
black-and-white
photographs, 7 by 10
inches each. Courtesy
Tyler Rollins Fine
Art, New York.
constitutes the “Thai contemporary.” Outsiders looking for
a formula should note how unlikely it is that anyone born
before the early 1950s could even be considered for the
coveted moniker. An artist’s age, per se, is not the determin­
ing factor; rather, it has to do with an aesthetic sea change, a
turn away from craft to concept, precipitated by a generation
of Thai artists who emerged from regional and overseas
art schools in the mid-1990s. The subsequent flowering of
a new sensibility has resulted in some of the most sophis­
ticated contemporary art to be found anywhere. After the
shift, “contemporary” no longer meant only “living”; it also
meant globally aware and experimental.
Still lacking its own truly progressive private or state-
sponsored museum of modern art, however, Thailand too
often sees its finest contemporary works swiftly spirited
away to Singapore. T hat modern city-state certainly “gets”
the winning formula and is hurriedly building permanent
collections of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art
for two National Heritage Board-sponsored museums: the
Singapore A rt Museum, already rich in Thai contemporary
holdings, and the National Gallery Singapore, which will
open its doors to the public this November in two Beaux-
Arts buildings (formerly the supreme court and city hall)
repurposed by the French firm Studio Milou.
W hile Bangkok hesitates, other regional cities are
making bold moves. H ong K ong’s 100-acre W est Kow­
loon C ultural D istrict will be anchored by the $642-m il-
lion M+ museum, which, though not slated to open until
2018, already boasts a collection of some 4,000 works.
Similarly,, Gwangju, South Korea, is now ambitiously
proclaim ing itself a “hub city of Asian culture,” bolstered
by the debut later this year of its vast, state-sponsored
Asian C ulture Complex.
T H E ONLY S O U T H E A S T Asian nation that was never
colonized— something that Thais understandably take great
pride in—the New Siam nevertheless struggles to define its
own contemporary art agenda. As several local collectors fol­
low their own tastes and snatch up important artworks, the
public awaits some sure sign of the museums these individu­
66 MAY 2015 ATLAS
als have promised to build, or some glimpse of their mission
statements at least. Three years ago in Bangkok, the conser­
vative collector Boonchai Bencharongkul, having for many
years made purchases out o f academic art shows, unveiled his
own $24.6-million behemoth, presumptuously dubbed, in
pseudo-civic fashion, the Museum of Contemporary Art, now
housing some of the most idiosyncratic works to issue from
the country over the last 50 years or more.
Thailand has yet to find the right balance between honoring
the past, celebrating the present and envisioning the future. This
shortcoming is traceable, in part, to the country’s ongoing (and
sometimes violent) political unrest. At the same time, life flows
normally, with the well-heeled sector having yet to develop a truly
informed interest in contemporary art, one to rival its current
fascination with fast cars, five-star hotels, fine wines, expensive
watches, swank condos and luxury-brand shopping emporiums.
This year, Thailand seems to have confused the Venice
Biennale— a platform for showcasing the best a country can
offer—with an opportunity to pay tribute to a Thai modern­
ist master. The ministry of culture (operating behind closed
doors) selected Kamol Tassananchalee (b. 1944), a senior aca­
demic artist known for mystical abstract painting, sculpture
and printmaking. Tassananchalee, who has enjoyed a success­
ful career teaching at universities in both the United States
and Thailand, plans to fill the Thai pavilion with the type of
symbolic sculpture that bespeaks an earlier assimilative era in
Thai art history rather than the current wave of sociopoliti-
cally inflected conceptualism.
Though artistically reputable in his own right, Tassanan­
chalee is thus a peculiar choice for the Biennale. His installa­
tion will comprise stylized pieces in stainless steel, aluminum
and neon, evoking the four ancient elements: earth, air, fire and
water. This is doubly ironic. W hile offering work that expresses
earth-consciousness in a dated representational mode, Tas­
sananchalee has nonetheless recently been criticized by envi­
ronmental activists for taking part in the felling of a 143-year-
old Mahaad tree in the southern Thai seaside town of Krabi,
where he and collaborators sculpted portions of the segmented
and gutted trunk into fanciful abstract public sculpture— all to
assist the city in branding itself an art destination.
Since first joining the Venice Biennale in 2003, Thailand
has presented a number of cutting-edge artists, among them
M ontien Boonma (1953-2000), Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957),
Michael Shaowanasai (b. 1964) and Arin Rungjang (b. 1975).
In 2009, though, Gondola alParadiso Co., Ltd., an installation
by five artists brilliantly satirizing the country’s tourist culture,
went sour due to logistical problems and infighting—which
led to a top-down approach that scuttled the “open call” system
in favor of state-conceived pavilion shows, a process that now
seems to be veering toward the conservative. W hile Thailand
sorts out these and related boondoggles, one can only hope for
a swift peace among all parties involved—before the rest of the
region jets into the future without them. O
Atlas is a rotating series of columns by writers from Chicago,
Bangkok and Cairo.
Copyright of Art in America is the property of Art in America, LLC and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.
Copyright of Art in America is the property of Art in America, LLC and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.
Copyright of Art in America is the property of Art in America, LLC and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.