Dali House

“The Way of Sleeping” by Lampu Kansanoh is rather a standout among the Thai works on the Christie’s auction block in Hong Kong on May 24. The sale of “Southeast Asian Modern and Contemporary Art” is dominated by Filipinos and Malaysians, but has a sound sampling from the Land of Smiles too.

Lampu’s 2006 oil on canvas is expected to fetch upwards of HK$45,000, which is marked down to $6,000 when translated into American.

I also like Yuree Kensaku’s “Truck Driver’s Sweetheart”, same year, same medium (with metal added), roughly the same price, but lacking the same restraint of Lampu’s picture, which I consider a big plus when you’re throwing your psyche around.

This is Prasong Luemuang’s untitled gouache and paper collage, which costs a little more, perhaps HK$80,000 (US$10,000).

Moungthai Busamaro’s “Woman under the Pink Tree” from 2002 is available for considerably less, maybe around US$2,000, but it’s an engaging streetscape that would be fun on any wall. See the rest.

Bangkok has loads of galleries to keeps the country’s artists busy, and I see a lot of stuff I like, but Waiyawut Promrut made me sit bolt upright, and he’s fresh out of art school.

The recent graduate of Silpakorn University is presenting these paintings and others in “re/vivre” from April 20 to May 10 at ArtGorillas, a gallery at the Lido in Siam Square that specialises in new talent.

Waiyawut Promrut, say the Gorillas, is going for a “revival of Renaissance art in the modern era, where lives evolve in perplexing ways”.

It also says his reinterpretation of masterpieces like Vemeer’s “The Milkmaid”, Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat” and Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare”, among others, “convey his own chaotic survival idea”.

A bunch of curator-speak, really, but to Waiyawut, well done on the use of frogs and octopi in a style realistic enough to amuse Señor Dali. Excellent deployment, also, of flamingoes, greyhounds and many, many rats and goats. See the rest.

Two and a half years ago Dali House had a gripping yarn about elephants that can paint pictures. Surely there couldn’t be much more in the trunk?

Imagine my shock to learn that that sneaky zoologist Desmond Morris has spilled the beans on the little trick that pachyderms are packing when they seem to whip up a figurative painting — as opposed to some random abstract.

As shared with the world last month via Britain’s Daily Mail, Morris was dispatched to Thailand by “his friend the scientist” Richard Dawkins to uproot the truth about elephant artistry.

To see tuskers with brushes, Morris was assured, he only had to travel outside Bangkok as far as dirty little Pattaya a couple of hours away. He set off for the Nong Nooch Tropical Garden, which has in its floral midst a dusty circus area where the elephants do their stunts.

Spying from among the mob of tourists, he watched three young female elephants painting flowers. The animals’ mahouts handed them a series of brushes daubed in different colours and seemed to stand aside while art was created.

But Morris noticed the trainers tugging on the elephants’ ears. A yank up and down was the signal to make a vertical line, a sideways pull for a horizontal one. Blobs were formed when the ears were pushed forward.

And it turned out, Morris reported, “that each of the so-called artistic animals always produces exactly the same image, time after time … Mook always paints a bunch of flowers, Christmas always does a tree, and Pimtong a climbing plant.”

Morris nevertheless graciously gave the beasts a rave review for “translating” the nudges “into attractive lines and blobs” with great precision.

In the end, Morris the secret agent was outed. The mahouts dragged him out into the open in front of the crowd, laid him on the ground and ordered one of the tuskers to give him a massage with its foot.

“I saw one of the largest elephants approaching with what I swear was an eager gleam in her eye …”

Read the ghastly conclusion on the Mail’s website. No one likes an art critic.

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.

“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.