Dali House

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

Click the image to see it much larger.

Last October “Doo Phra”, the oil painting above by Thailand’s Warthit Sembut, won one of the Young Thai Artist Awards meted out annually by the cultural foundation established by Siam Cement, one of the country’s leading corporations and one with deep royal connections. The foundation invited Warthit to bring his family to the awards presentation in Bangkok; his parents drove all the way from Chiang Rai in the far north to attend.

When they got to the venue, they found an empty frame dangling among the other prize-winning works.

The foundation, supposedly made of concrete, had collapsed at the mere possibility that Warthit’s painting would draw complaints for its depiction of Buddhist monks sinning — they’re lustily looking over amulets. The Buddha advised us to detach ourselves from material things and be free of desire. For the clergy who carry his message to be coveting superstitious trinkets is surely a dual sin.

The title of the painting, “Doo Phra”, means “monks watching” or, if you turn the translation slightly, “watch the monks”.

The Siam Cement Foundation had reason to worry about complaints. The month previous there’d been an unholy row over another painting that showed monks in a bad light. Anupong Chanthorn’s “Bhikku Sandan Ka” — meaning “Monks With Traits of a Crow”, a phrase the Buddha used — won the gold prize at the 2007 National Artist Awards and was displayed at host Silpakorn University. This one depicted two squatting monks with the beaks of crows and in the company of crows.

A storm descended on the campus. Dozens of monks and scores of laymen from Buddhist universities staged a series of protest rallies, demanding that the university withdraw the award and remove the painting from the show because it insulted the clergy. Some protesters wreathed a photo of Anupong and, as it was incinerated, monks chanted a funeral prayer.

The soundbites for the TV news came from a leader of the People’s Network to Protect the Nation, Religion and the Monarchy. This group had been involved in the summer rallies outside Government House where the drafters of Thailand’s new constitution were prodded to include a passage declaring Buddhism the national religion. Several monks staged a hunger strike to underscore how much this meant to them.

They stopped when Her Majesty the Queen, clearly endorsing the belief upheld in every Thai constitution that the King is the defender of all religions in Thailand, including Islam and Christianity, said in her birthday speech that Buddhism shouldn’t be involved with politics. Politics was at work in this demand for a “national” religion, 80% of Thais agreed, according to a poll. That fight would have to be put on hold until the election in December, and, the deposed prime minister’s proxy party having won it, we’ll see what the protectors of the old power structure, the old privileges and the old restrictions, do next. See the rest.

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.

The structures of life that were torn away by the tsunami continue to be replaced, in some tiny hopeful way, by memorials to the dead and to the memories, and the latest to be dedicated in Thailand is “Hold Me Close”, a work by no less a figure than Louise Bourgeois, the Paris-born, New York City-based adventurer of the psyche who, at age 95, remains an active link to the uncompromising early days of surrealism and at the same time a beacon of individualism.

The photo above and the others on this page of Bourgeois’ new pieces are by my colleague at The Nation, Phatarawadee Phataranawik. As she reported last month from the site in Nopparat Thana National Park in Krabi, this larger segment of the work sits among the trees just off the beach and has a view of Koh Phi Phi, the resort island that was brutally swept clean by the great waves.

The monument had been intended for Phi Phi itself, but as I’ve learned since, the owner of the proposed location there would rather hang on to his beer bar, if it’s all the same to anyone else’s conscience. The government’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture secured an alternative site on the mainland for the Bt6-million work, which Bourgeois donated.

The larger segment rests at the end of a 40-metre wooden walkway through the woods: a tall, wooden beehive-like structure that houses a sculpture of the hands of a man and women in gold leaf on bronze. The women’s hands were modelled on the artist’s.

Nearby in a man-made pool is another sculpture, a child’s hand in bronze enfolded in a granite wave.

Interestingly, replacing something that was missing was how Bourgeois was introduced to art. See the rest.

I was admiring this painting Deang Buasan of Thailand and realised I liked it so much because it reminds me of Edmund Dulac’s illustrations.

Deang and his disparately minded fellow artists Thaweesak Srithongdee and Chakkrit Chimnok had a show in Bangkok recently that had been previewed last year at the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan. If you look up “FT3D” on the Web you might find more.

Deang’s brother drowned when they were children, so there’s always a water element in his paintings, as well as evident grief. In Fukuoka he showed a painting of himself as a child gazing at a lifeless dummy on the floor, seedpods strung between them as if they were both drifting in water.

“Lotus under the Moonlight” – designed, like all of his two-dimensional work, from a 3D model – does wonderful things with reflections and angles, illusion and visual effects in every corner, including beneath the water’s surface.

Compare it to Dulac’s illustration here for “The Voyage of the Basset”, written by James C Christensen with Renwick St James and Alan Dean Foster. This wasn’t anywhere near the best work by Dulac but, as we’ll see when we get to sizing up different people’s water nymphs, he was a marine genius.

Edmund was born Edmond in Toulouse, France, in 1882 and raised for the bar, but instead of going into law, he raised the bar in illustrating books, and “Golden Age” children’s books in particular.

When I was a kid we had a massive edition of “The Snow Queen and Other Stories from Hans Andersen”, which had originally come out in 1911, and as I grew older Dulac’s pictures (this one from “The Nightingale”) scared the hell out of me, then fascinated me, then charmed me, then … well, some of the mermaids are kinda hot.

Dulac chucked law school in favour of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and started collecting prizes for his watercolours, then in 1904 – freshly divorced from an American woman 13 years his senior – shipped off to London.

A year later, in “Rip Van Winkle”, Arthur Rackham became the first to use a new process, now called colour separation, to mass-produce his illustrations. It was a huge success, Rackham ingeniously capturing the quirks of Washington Irving’s characters (see the story and pictures here), and the colours were beautifully faithful to his original paintings thanks to being printed on sheets of specially coated paper that had to be “tipped-in” to the book rather than bound in with the rest of the pages.

These pages were forever falling out of our Hans Andersen book and threatening to migrate with the wind that was so vigorously illustrated on many of them. Below is another memorable image from that tome, illustrating “The Garden of Paradise”.

The new process also meant that the illustrations didn’t require heavy ink lines to hold the coloured washes in place – the lines covered up ovelaps in the colours – and Dulac’s work was perfectly suited to it. He was hired to do 60 illustrations for “Jane Eyre” and other works by the Bronte sisters, and was soon contributing to Pall Mall magazine alongside Rackham, to whom he would forever more be compared. They both have their argumentative devotees.

Rackham’s “Rip” and equally popular “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” a year later were published by Hodder & Stoughton, and when Rackham jumped to another house, Hodder jumped on Dulac to illustrate “The Arabian Nights”.

In an arrangement that would remain in place for years, the paintings were commissioned by the Leicester Gallery, Hodder got the reproduction rights and put out the book, and then the gallery sold Dulac’s paintings. Shown here, “The Princess and the Pea”. There was something new every year, perfect for collectors: “Shakespeare’s The Tempest”, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”, “The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tale”, “The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe” …

In 1913, two years after remarrying (Elsa Arnalice Bignardi, who was shy despite being Italian-German, and evidently not much fun intellectually, so Edmund would later complain), Dulac discovered the Far East, about the same time as our post-impressionist friends, and showed it off to the rest of the West with “Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights” the following year.

During the Great War he did a lot of fund-raising with illustrations for “King Albert’s Book”, “Princess Mary’s Gift Book” and “Edmund Dulac’s Picture Book” for the French Red Cross, but by the time his “Tanglewood Tales” came out just after the armistice, nobody was much interested in these sort of gift books anymore. New techniques in printing had enabled photography to take hold, and rather than his illustrations, it was Dulac, all of 35, who was in a bind.

Portraits and his caricatures for the weekly newspaper The Outlook paid the bills, but only just. He illustrated the 1920 history “The Kingdom of the Pearl” and got into product design (he was the master of postage stamps for a while) and, for his friends WB Yeats and Sir Thomas Beecham he did theatre design.

In 1923 Dulac and Elsa separated and soon after his friend Helen de Vere Beauclerk moved in with him. She stayed with him for the rest of his life. Third time lucky.

This is one of three illustrations in this post from “The Snow Queen and Other Stories from Hans Andersen”.

Yeats dedicated his 1933 poem “The Winding Stair” to Dulac, and four years later Dulac returned the favour by composing the music that accompanied readings of Yeats’ pieces on BBC radio.

Unfortunately it was a mess and the two had a row, but it was resolved, and after World War II, when Yeats’ body was moved from France home to Ireland, Dulac designed a memorial for the poet’s former grave in Roquebrune.

Through the ’40s he did loads of drawings for Hearst’s American Weekly. He also managed to remain the busiest of book illustrators, when the jobs appeared. He did “Treasure Island”, “The Golden Cockerel” and was working on “Comus” when a third heart attack killed him on May 25, 1953, at the age of 70. It was published posthumously.

I was talking about mermaids, and look what’s there was when Dulac wasn’t around to help.

Two by Rackham:

Below left, John William Waterhouse’s “A Mermaid” from 1900, and on the right, an artist best left unidentified but, you know, typical.

Edmund Dulac, who possibly belonged underwater.

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