Showing 1-10 of 16 results
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The good shepherd
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 11/01/2012
» Contemporary art in Thailand is visible internationally, perhaps increasingly so. For example, the conceptual artist Pratchaya Phinthong was featured in a recent edition of Frieze magazine and he has been selected for inclusion in New York's New Museum Triennial 2012 (curiously titled "The Ungovernables"). There are many other examples of comparable recognition for contemporary Thai artists.
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Through the looking glass
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 25/01/2012
» Images of sexy naked bodies typically challenge the possibility of responding objectively to the terms of their representation. Any implication of prurience, voyeurism or the potential to be turned-on or turned-off complicates the matter of clearly deciding what it is we are looking at and how it might be interpreted.
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Responding to the call
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 15/02/2012
» The practice of taking objects from everyday life as material for visual art is now so widespread as to warrant no interest in and of itself. From Tracey Emin's bloodied knickers and overflowing ashtrays, as part of her installation My Bed (1998), to Subodh Gupta's sculptures of steel tiffin boxes, we can accept that the gap between art and life is now closed.
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Lighting a way forward
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 28/03/2012
» Whenever I visit Singapore I think of a line from a novel I read years ago: this is a city with no past and no future, only the present. Singapore's architectural heritage is so freshly preserved that it appears brand new. And given the city's general tendency towards streamlined perfection, one gains little sense of how major changes could occur. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk wrote that the defining essence of his native Istanbul is melancholia; I wonder what Singaporeans think is the defining essence of their homeland.
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One world, Many voices
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 18/04/2012
» When the spectre of Aids emerged at the beginning of the 1980s, a remarkable legacy of critical writing and activism followed. The work of intellectuals such as Douglas Crimp, Richard Meyer and Simon Watney steadfastly drew attention to the terrible ways that language and media representation was stigmatising those affected by the disease _ from pervasive claims that there could be "innocent" victims of HIV to the notion of "high-risk groups" (as if your identity, not your behaviour, made you vulnerable) to the sheer visceral terms by which the disease was portrayed. Images of people with Aids circulated as pure spectacle, denying the complexity of experience and our own responsibility for the spread of the virus.
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Regarding Chitti
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 02/05/2012
» A history of the experimental art scenes in Bangkok has yet to be written. If it's a book, the work of Chitti Kasemkitvatana deserves a chapter. Active as a curator, artist and lecturer in the '90s, Chitti set precedents that survived his eight year hiatus as a monk in the forest monasteries of Chiang Mai. Since 2010 he has held regular exhibitions of beautifully arranged objects that blur distinctions between art and practical function, organised public lecture programmes and become involved in publishing.
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Cinema's death throe
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 30/05/2012
» 'The cultural experience of filmic images and of cinema-going, during an extended historical period, directed and inflected many or all of the ways of living and ways of perceiving populations worldwide." So writes the British academic Stephen Barber in his book Abandoned Images: Film and Film's End (Reaktion Books, 2010), a theoretical study of what he describes as "the great black holes of the historical documentation of film". That is, the architectural spaces of cinemas that receive scant intellectual attention.
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Queering the pitch, deliberately
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 18/10/2012
» The US academic Rosalind Morris once praised a book on Thai studies by noting that "it offers a relentless repudiation of those saccharine tropes through which Thailand has mainly been read". This is a rousing comment and one that suggests great critical insight on behalf of the volume in question. But, taken by itself, we might wonder why those saccharine tropes were used in the first instance. Why would Thai studies employ sweetened ways of thinking about this country?
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Beyond the Fray
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 24/10/2012
» This is Pornpraseart Yamazaki's third solo exhibition in Bangkok since laudable shows at the now defunct Whitespace Gallery during 2007 and 2009. A dexterous artist who pilfers from a variety of trends and precedents in a manner that is not lazy emulation, Pornpraseart's works are distinctly his own and they carry a robust and ambitious sensibility. While awkwardly titled "Mistaken Gear Wheel For Lotus" _ Thai galleries, please start employing copywriters or grammar-check _ this exhibition is another important note on how local artists are responding to the critical legacy of the bloody protests of 2010.
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Strange things
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 28/11/2012
» All the artworks in the inaugural exhibition for a very promising new space _ 338 Oida Gallery _ reflect light: Mit Jai Inn's series of translucent, encrusted pole forms, the silver surfaces of Nim Kruasaeng's paintings and Rirkrit Tiravanija's steel and glass table. Pier Luigi Tazzi created the text-work Sublime Riuscito accompanied by Chinese characters (riuscito is the Italian word for success) at the entrance. To describe the experience of this exhibition as sublime would be an overstatement, but the artworks certainly carry a pronounced sense of intangible significance.
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