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”.
The images of the paintings are from my newspaper, The Nation, whose style-section editor, Khetsirin Pholdhampalit, was permitted a rare interview with Chatchai for a feature published on November 5.
She found him quite candid for a man who’d withdrawn from the scene for six years, until just recently winning a government award (his 13-year-old son went and got it for him) and finally showing some fresh works in Singapore.
But the new pieces – especially the series called “The Heart is a Lonely Painter” – are utterly gloomy, devoid of even grim humour. Carson McCuller’s harrowing autobiography was the seed germinated in that batch, but even the wit of Mark Twain’s “The Diary of Adam and Eve” loses its chuckles when inspiring another new series by the unhappily divorced painter, “Sweetless Sugar”.
“The art scene today is noisy and chaotic,” Chatchai complained to Khetsirin. “I’m like an outsider who doesn’t know what they’re all talking about. It’s become a space limited to a certain group, and the value of art is associated with reputation and money. Why is the art world so tiring?”
You can read more about Chatchai here and see more samples of his work here. Khetsirin’s article for The Nation might be here if you can find your way to November 5 in the back issues.
