Showing 1 - 10 of 14
Will gentrification respect city's people?
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/06/2023
» We've lived for over a century in the shadow of grandeur: near the Customs House, known to Thais as rongpasi. "We" means my maternal family and the community of Haroon Mosque. Each day before sunrise, the muezzin's sing-song call rings through the neighbourhood, carried on the river wind towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the French Embassy and Assumption Cathedral.
Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
Underwater folly
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/06/2019
» In the aquatic chamber, the tank looms. Encrusted and barnacled, the mighty war machine has become a home of fish and corals. It seems incapacitated, abandoned, useless. Such is an illusion: if the tank is submerged, we're down there with it, drowned in that inexorable aquarium. Look, its gun still points at us, and its shadow all-consuming.
A one-man 'loveable rogues' gallery
B Magazine, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/05/2018
» Sunny Suwanmethanont raises his thick eyebrows and chuckles. He forks a piece of mango into his mouth while he considers something -- an existential query of sorts.
A place where indies can thrive
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/03/2018
» The stone latticework of Cinema Oasis gives its façade a vaguely Middle Eastern look. Up on the 2nd floor gallery that runs along the screening room, pockets of sunlight shine in through the gaps in the pattern. Looking down, you see what's left of what was once a large pond. An oasis, maybe, as the name suggests.
Dissecting a nation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/06/2017
» Pasuk Phongpaichit's and Chris Baker's house is a verdant abode at the end of a maze in an Ekamai sub-soi. The garden at the back has tall trees and a small, tea-coloured pond. The whole area used to be a swamp, said Baker. The couple, both highly respected scholars in Thai studies, have been living there since 1987, or in their lexicon, "just before the boom" -- the high-flying economic expansion whose seismic shifts forever transformed Thailand in the early 1990s. Had they wanted to purchase the plot slightly later than they actually did -- after the boom had set in -- they wouldn't have been able to. "We came just before the high-rises."
A tower of our glory, except the foreign bit
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/09/2016
» I happened to be there at the opening of the sparkling corn-cob skyscraper, the trophy of high-capitalism and symbol of wealth. No fireworks at the launch of the MahaNakhon Tower, that would have been tacky, but we had the beam-me-up light dance and iridescent sky painting, cued to booming music. Jose Carreras sang arias.
Poster boy
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/02/2016
» At his home in Pak Chong, Piak Poster sits on a stool before a half-finished painting, the raised platform encircled by stacks of tools, drawers, paintbrushes and all imaginable colours. “I call this ‘my throne’,” he says with a laugh. “This is where I work, and I still work every day.”
The art of calculation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/01/2016
» Chiang Mai's art scene is brewing with optimistic energy through the city's small galleries and the strong presence of its artists' enclave. Young artists find their debut here, while established brand names -- such as Navin Rawachaikul, the subject of our cover story today -- provide a solid backbone and publicity. Surveying the northern town on the last week of 2015, we sensed a great enthusiasm over a new space to open later this year, a converted warehouse in San Kampaeng called Mai Iam, which looks set to be a scintillating game-changer in the national contemporary art circle.
Never forget, death is not an illusion
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/03/2014
» In our season of mass delusion, what is real? Life and death are real, but particularly death. Death by suicide or by murder, but particularly murder. Deaths of adults and of children, but particularly of children, at Ratchaprasong and in Trat, as well as in Narathiwat, where three siblings, the eldest 11, were killed on Feb 3, and which of course we’ve almost forgotten about because even in death there’s a hierarchy of public attention and allotment of air time. There was also the 14-year-old boy Kunakorn Srisuwan, shot dead by a military bullet (as the Criminal Court ruled) near Soi Mor Leng in the red-shirt riots of May 2010. That’s one death we've definitely forgotten. The only story that orphan boy ever had in his life is about his death.