Dali House

“What is it about Asians and smiling?” asks the stranger in the Land of Smiles. The famed Thai welcome gets some decent (though not definitive) scrutiny from both sides of the International Date Line in the inaugural exhibition at the new Bangkok Arts Centre, “Traces of the Siamese Smile: Art + Faith + Politics + Love”.

That impressively big show, continuing through November 26, has Chatchai Puipia’s “Siamese Smile” both on the wall and at its heart. It’s certainly a favourite at Dali House, also on view here.

This one’s not a smile at all, of course, but a grimace. Chatchai isn’t too keen on his fellow Thais kowtowing to foreigners. Thailand is so hospitable, however, that its new health minister, a well-connected but completely unhealthy thug named Chalerm Yoobamrung, last week asked the press not to say anything about tainted milk products that might upset the Chinese.

When the Chinese get upset, they tend to keep smiling, or at least they bare their teeth, much like Chatchai. It’s difficult for many Westerners to tell whether Asians are happy or in the throes of indigestion, which is why they used to refer to Orientals using the politically incorrect term “inscrutable”.

At the top of the post, side by leering side, are two paintings on sale on October 20 at Sotheby’s London. Ravinder Reddy’s untitled, undated oil can’t beat Yue Minjun’s “Hat No 2″ in terms of grinsmanship, which is perhaps why the young Indian’s work is expected to fetch no more than 100,000, which is 50,000 less than the even younger Chinese artist’s four-year-old hat.

In fact the hat guy seems to like Reddy’s piece better. He’s having a good belly laugh at seeing the very surprised look on a gilded idol’s face. Together they look like an excellent stand-up comedy team.
See the rest.

The photos here are from The Nation, except that of the Puipia piece from Tonson.

Peggy Wauters cuts the heads off cute dolls and replaces them with hideous gargoyle bulbs that are supposed to represent orphans waiting in vain to be adopted. That’s a sour summary of the Belgian’s “Myths and Monstrosities” exhibition at Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Gallery until April 20, but of course it’s all quite interesting.

Wauters cares about society’s “others” — like the orphans and the disabled and prisoners too. Her Orphans series is a kick at the modern world’s continuing inability to find homes, let alone love, for all the outcast kids.

In her quest to promote a tolerance for imperfection, she also berates urban alienation and plastic surgery and turns tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” on their head, with the wolf cowering before a vicious-looking Riding Hood.

As Khetsirin Pholdhampalit reports in The Nation, Wauters grew up in Aalst, a town famous for its carnival, and we all know the bizarre creatures that carnivals lure in and then put on display.

The Tonson Gallery is getting quite well known outside Thailand and also counts Louise Bourgeois among its artist clients. A local talent represented there is Chatchai Puipia, whose sculpture “Dedicated to the one I love”, shown here, must feel quite at home in Peggy Wauters’ world.

Peggy Wauters’ website

One of the best online resources providing an overview of the seriously eclectic art happening in Thailand is that of theRama IX Art Museum on Bangkok’s Yaowaraj Road, though even it’s still got a ways to go to approach definitiveness. There is good linkage with other galleries, though, including two over on Silom Road that specialise in “emerging artists”.

There’s an elastic term for you. At what point in his career does an artist stop “emerging” and arrive at where he supposedly wants to be/ ought to be? With his first big sale? His first write-up in the paper? When his name is in lights on Broadway?

Anyway, I’ll leave it to the dealers to decide when a caterpillar’s become a butterfly, though this facet of time’s passing is woven into the current art of a kingdom whose people proudly remember their quietly contemplative ancestral ways while rushing headlong into the loudly wired future. The country’s best-known artists fret grievously, and those not still shouting warnings from the gate look about for avenues of retreat.

La Lanta Fine Art and the Thivabu Gallery both have lots of contemporary Asian painting, sculpture, photography and drawing and do alright selling prints, frames and decorative notebooks. On this page is a cursory survey of paintings by some of their featured Thai artists, many originals selling for under $2,000.

At the Thivabu (the name is an amalgam of Thailand, Vietnam and Burma), Jitagarn Kaewtinkoy from Suphan Buri strikes me as one of the more unusual creative talents. That’s “Three Faces” at the top of this post and “Mr President” here. The cartoonist’s sensibility betrays his age, 28, but he’s got a ferocious satiric streak and a sharp eye for character. Bush isn’t the only politician who need worry. See the rest.

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.