The unsmiling Siamese
This is a detail. Click it to see the whole thing.
All of the paintings here except for the one on the right are recent works by Chatchai Puipia of Bangkok, who’s admired at home and abroad for his jolting self-portraits, most famously with a sardonic grin that was meant to make Thais ponder their country’s reputation as “the Land of Smiles”. In fact, he point was, there’s nothing to smile when the very assets that made them Thai were vanishing in their enslavement to global consumerism.
A reviewer for the New York Times saw “Siamese Smile” as part of a 1996 exhibition in the Big Apple of contemporary Asian art and called it “a servile, grinning mask of a face that’s frightening in its ‘hit me’ expression”. See the rest.
