Dali House

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.

When he first ventured down this cadaverous path with bits in plastic bags, in his 2005 master’s thesis for Silpakorn University, Kittiwat was thinking in terms of consumerism and how common sense is tricked by slick packaging. He’s since delved deep into Buddhist teachings and altered course.

Kttiwat’s exhibition, if not his ongoing dalliance with death, coincides with the funeral of Her Royal Highness Princess Galyani Vadhana, the sister of Thailand’s King.

Funerals for immediate members of the royal family follow the same protocol today as they have done for centuries, with 500 days of mourning following the death, during which time the deceased’s remains are kept in an urn that has faucets through which the bodily fluids are drained from time to time. The illustration here is French, from about 1866, showing deputy king Pinklao Chao Yoohua in the “octagonal coffin”.

The mourning period also allows time for an elaborate crematorium to be specially built, and the government’s Fine Arts Department, working with the Royal Household Bureau, spared no effort in erecting a truly magnificent pavilion for the funeral, which took place over the weekend of November 15. It’s shown below, and below that are the crematoria erected for King Mongkut (Rama IV) in 1869, on the left, and King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) in 1911.

The urn holding Princess Galyani’s remains was moved from the Royal Palace in a beautiful procession to the crematorium in Sanam Luang, the storied royal ground in the heart of Bangkok, which had been painstakingly landscaped for the occasion. Here His Majesty the King lit the cremation fire.

In no way do I wish to demean the royal rites, or any family funeral for that matter, by placing them alongside a mere art exhibition. The linkage is in the Siamese attitude toward death, which holds the process of putrefaction and decay in esteem, something at which Westerners have been conditioned to shudder.

But Western visitors to the holy sites along the Ganges who’ve witnessed the public cremations on open pyres invariably see the beauty in the noble fact of death and departure, and in the frankness with which they’re displayed. The fire in particular, the flame that lights our night, warms our home and cooks our food, becomes a medium that binds the living with the dead and the divine.

Another Thai, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, has been criticised for utilising actual corpses in her video art, but fortunately the majority of people at home and abroad understand what she’s doing. Her work was well received at the 2005 Venice Biennale and elsewhere around the world, even if the New York Times, in a review of a 2004 group show at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, sniffed that it “raises troubling questions of the conflict between professional art-making and religion” and seemed “exhibitionistic”.

“Reading Poems to Female Corpses” shows Araya reciting to the shrouded remains of people who had no living survivors, and thus no one to pray for them as they entered the next life. Art, she felt, would stand in for the absent prayers.

She moved from one corpse to another and dressed them in colourful clothing, all the while “discussing” death with them.

In “The Class” Araya is at a school blackboard “instructing” the prone cadavers around her on what they should know about death and how to behave.

Alongside Araya’s pieces in Venice were works by the late Montien Boonma, which focused on “Those Dying Wishing to Stay”, to use the curator’s comparitive phrases, compared to Araya’s “Those Living Preparing to Leave”.

Montien used redemptive herbs in pieces such as “House of Hope” and “Nature’s Breath”, offering cures, through art, to incurable disease, including modern man’s collective afflictions.

The latter had wooden boxes arranged to form a stupa, decked out with earthen “lungs” and covered in herbal pigments.

The New York Times‘ misgivings notwithstanding, art surely is a palliative, and if faith of any kind can play a role in its magic, let there be religion. Dead bodies isn’t exhibitionism; it’s real life.