Heads on a roll
There are Chinese miners buried in coal at the moment at Tang Contemporary Art in Bangkok, in an exhibition by conceptualist Xia Jing called “Weapons of Assassination”. Profiled for The Nation by my colleague Khetsirin Pholdhampalit, the show has some harrowing comments on, among other things, our over-reliance on fossil fuels.
Xia gets some sort of message across vividly, at any rate, with a collection of spears and swords of the sort flung about in king fu films, a decapitated Buddha statue, the aforementioned lost miners and the device pictured below, the legendary Flying Guillotine.
This relic of brutality is attributed to an emperor of the Qing dynasty 2,000 years ago, though there’s some doubt that it ever really existed. Xia Jing has come up with a model based on historical hint and her imagination — a sort of hat with a rotary saw on its rim that fits over the head and, with the yank of a chain, severs the neck.
“It took a man’s life the way a camera takes a man’s image,” Xia said cheerfully.
The photos here are by Thanis Sudto of The Nation.
