Showing 1 - 9 of 9
How Very Thai gave rise to 'Thai Thai'
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 19/12/2013
» Which cultural idiosyncrasies stick when you visit a foreign country? And what value do you accord them? Slightly amusing or perhaps just annoying? Indicative of some deep-rooted essence of that culture or merely a weird aberration? A challenge to your own vocabulary or a means of extending it? And why do some idiosyncrasies persist while others disappear or transform?
Looking Awry
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 27/11/2013
» The challenge for artists to create new or innovative images about contemporary Thailand is the challenge of responding to the fact that this country lacks a singularly dominant, or characteristic, image to react against.
Utopia's debris
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 25/09/2013
» The future may have already arrived; well, for those of us who live in Asia's cities. As is regularly and widely reported, the rapid rate of urban growth and change in this part of the world leaves most of us reeling. As soon as we begin to understand the present, it is usually already past.
Embedded Images
Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 15/05/2013
» Tim Hetherington was a photographer, artist and filmmaker who was murdered as the result of a mortar attack in Libya while covering the civil war there in 2011, the year his co-directed film Restrepo was nominated for an Academy Award. He was 40. This exhibition at WTF has been organised by his friend Chris Wise, the Bangkok-based photographer who also co-runs WTF, and comprises installations of photographs from Hetherington's book Infidel and screenings. Infidel covers the year he spent with a US battalion in northeast Afghanistan, described as "the deadliest place on Earth", as they fought against the Taliban, the same subject as Restrepo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.