• LIFE

  Memories stained with Rouge

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 15/10/2015

  » This year marks the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime's four-year massacre that resulted in nearly 2 million Cambodian deaths.

• OPINION

  Seeing the world through another's eyes

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 13/11/2015

  » As much as Facebook is a virtual space of borderless interaction, it has, for many, undeniably become our most immediate and primary news source. It's a personalised pool of information, which though we have chosen consciously, can transform who we are and the way we think without our even realising it. And I have often wondered what it would be like to live, maybe for a day, in the social media world of other people's Facebook accounts.

• OPINION

  The art of activism

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 20/02/2017

  » The Thai arts scene has become more politically engaging in the past couple of years. The 2014 coup, of course, has been the most significant transition point in this respect. Before, it was very much about making sense of the colour-coded divide, trying to get into the mentality behind such ideological conflict. In the post-coup era, however, it can be said that the ideas and interests have become somewhat more unified. Artists have become increasingly aware of and responded more to the authoritarian power and the climate of fear and rights restriction.

• LIFE

  The elephant in the room

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 17/11/2016

  » Last weekend, Something Missing, a performance by South Korea's Theatre Momggol and B-Floor Theatre, which won Best Movement-based Performance from the International Association of Theatre Critics (Thailand Centre) last year, was back at Thong Lor Art Space for its second instalment, called The Rite Of Passage.

• LIFE

  From stuffed rats to geometric abstraction

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 08/07/2015

  » The works in “Synthesis”, on display at Chulalongkorn University’s The Art Center, are best enjoyed individually. From a massive acrylic painting which playfully questions the Thai education system, geometric abstraction portraying urban landscapes to a dead rat stuffed and mounted, the show isn’t exactly “the act of combining separate things, ideas etc into a complete whole”, as the title suggests.

• OPINION

  In the name of the father?

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 05/12/2014

  » Today is Father's Day, so it's natural that I talk about my dad. But there's really nothing to say about him other than he just made me a pot pie with extra quail eggs this morning, and is now, as you are reading this, probably swimming to Bee Gees tunes on a Sony waterproof MP3 player he just bought.

• LIFE

  Painting in the eye of the storm

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 03/12/2014

  » 'You'd better come up here, we should get drunk together and then talk," said Chiang Mai-based artist Mit Jai Inn. The 55-year-old, who insisted I address him as phi (brother) instead of loong (uncle) despite the fact that he was already an established artist before I was even born, was apologetic for not explaining himself very well during a recent telephone interview.  

• LIFE

  Heroic battle of wills

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 04/09/2014

  » A musical that finished its run at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre last Sunday focused on a prominent Thai writer and social activist imprisoned by a dictatorial government merely for “expressing different views”.

• LIFE

  Revisiting truth and integrity

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 29/08/2014

  » At the ending of the 1937 novel Khang Lang Phap (Behind The Painting), author Kularb Saipradit, also known as Sri Burapha, wrote: “I die without the one who loves me, but my heart is fulfilled that there’s someone whom I love.”

• OPINION

  Splitting seems not all that shocking

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 22/04/2014

  » When a banner bearing the message “This country has no justice. I want to split the country” was set up earlier this year across a pedestrian flyover in Phayao province in the North, I was shocked.

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