The yeast of life, the grain of death
Photos from Daily Xpress
Artists usually have the same affinity for death they have for life, but Thai artists have a rich tradition of morbidity to draw on and a religion that wasn’t supposed to be a religion, Buddhism, that cosies snugly against the country’s old and tenacious animism.
In this Kingdom you can’t help but get sucked up close to elusive immortality and its ubiquitous absence. In the news daily, on the soap operas, and running like a dense lode of cobwebs through the art, death comes so near that you gag on its smell.
Kittiwat Unarrom, whose family runs a bakery in Ratchaburi, came across some stale loaves of bread in the fridge. “I suddenly realised that stale bread smells just like corpses,” he told Daily Xpress art editor Khetsirin Pholdhampalit.
“Body & the Death”, Kittiwat’s exhibition of bread moulded realistically into the shapes of human heads, limbs and other body parts, is at Bangkok’s Whitespace Gallery until December 14.
Some pieces are laminated in resin to preserve them, some wrapped in clear plastic and suspended from the ceiling, retail-style. The decomposition process is documented in photographs.
“I wanted to reflect the universal fact of life — birth, existence and decay, that everything is subject to change,” the 31-year-old said. See the rest.
