Three dimensions of shrewd perspective emerge in 'FT3D', a compelling show at the Japan Foundation Bangkok

The guys from FT3 have brought home their stuff from Japan to show off to folks who will appreciate it even more – heroes with bad guys watching them, completely bizarre fashion, and a generous layering of mystic surrealism. The show is quite a ride.
The contributions of Thaweesak Srithongdee, Deang Buasan and Chakkrit Chimnok to last year’s Third Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale are at the Japan Foundation Bangkok all this month.
Recast as “FT3D”, for “Fukuoka-Thailand-3 Dimension”, the show is testament to the eclectic imaginations of young Thai artists.
There was a time, 28-year-old Chakkrit somehow knows, when Siamese wore banana leaves as clothes. He painstakingly sewed together remarkably elaborate outfits for an astronaut and Mrs Universe and dressed his parents in them. You can see their photos in the exhibition, proof that this is no abstract idea but something actually wearable.
David Beckham might get a kick out of Chakkrit’s banana-leaf football; Naomi Campbell will surely smile at his banana-leaf high-heel shoes.
“They represent my ideal world, where people wear banana-leaf clothes,” says Chakkrit, who had an hour’s crash course in pattern-making and tailoring at the government’s Department of Skill Development.
“Banana leaves are sometimes used to wrap foods or in religious ceremonies, but otherwise they’re just discarded.
“Yet they could be used in fashionable costumes.”
No doubt your pet monkey will love you more, too, but Chakkrit is really trying to contrast the past and present, old and new, traditional spiritual values and modern materialism.
He’s been recycling stuff in his art since he was a student at Chiang Mai University. A banana-leaf miniskirt, shoes and a jacket constituted his 2001 thesis. He has to take pictures of everything, of course, since these togs tend to rot off your back, and it’s largely the pictures that tell the story, an interesting one at that.
Chakkrit spent three months
in Fukuoka patching together banana leaves as furniture and lamps and showing the Japanese that they could do the same thing with bamboo leaves. Calico also went into 20 bamboo-based garments inspired by kimono patterns for Fukuoka Fashion Live 05. You can see the video from it at the Bangkok show.
Deang’s brother drowned when they were children, and his grief long lingered in his sculptures of loss and despair. In Fukuoka he showed a painting of his youthful self gazing at a lifeless dummy on the floor, seedpods suspended between them as if in water.
The theme re-emerges in Bangkok as a dance between realism and surrealism. “Lotus under the Moonlight” has a woman, seemingly born in myth, gathering flower petals by the water. Deang plays with reflections and angles, illusion and visual effects in every corner, including beneath the water’s surface.
The flat canvas actually results from three-dimensional modelling, through which he decides on his forms and perspectives.
“I like the traditional Buddhist art of Thailand and Cambodia – it’s realistic and yet surrealist,” says the 30-year-old Silpakorn grad.
“I appreciate the aesthetics of the high-relief figures and ornaments of Angkor. For this painting I mean to convey an idealistic world where deities and humans live together.
“My previous works have been quite mournful, so this time I wanted to create something beautiful. I don’t care if people criticise me for being old-fashioned in my approach. To me, working with such a meticulous process is like meditation.”
Deang’s clay sculpture “Nakra” recounts a legend his father told him, about the mythical naga and humans together performing religious rites for Songkran. The human and reptilian forms meld together in a highly ornamental style.
“I like the way Michelangelo formed the muscles in his sculptures and the aesthetic qualities of the mythical creatures at Angkor. I didn’t paint colours on it because I was afraid the light and shadow would be overwhelmed.”
There’s nothing playful in Thaweesak’s bizarre figurative paintings and drawings. He wants world peace.
One painting features a half-nude woman, another a skull, and both are entangled in strings of something like noodles – the “messy” part of the effort that the 36-year-old finds quite challenging.
Viewers might have more of a challenge reconciling these images with his 40-minute video screening nearby – it has portraits of such pushy world figures as Mao, Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
But there is room for heroes as well – quite literally in the case of the Japan show, where Thaweesak, another Silpakorn alumnus, turned a plain white room into a shrine for them by inviting viewers to place portrait stickers on the walls. He painted a car and a motorcycle white, covered them with whimsical pop cartoons and parked them there too.
“The head stickers represent us – the little creatures of the universe,” he says. “I wonder why some people seize power and try to change the world for their own benefit. Hitler is a hero to some, though to most he’s the symbol of the Holocaust. The definition of a hero depends on each person’s point of view.”
The war in Iraq got him stirred up about the nature of hero worship, and he’s since devoured books on Hitler and Mussolini and visited a Holocaust memorial in the US.
Last February he presented “The Existence and Initiation of Heroes” in Singapore. Foregoing the fictional superhero, his installation pointed out that everyone’s a hero.
In his all-white hero’s abode, a dog kept watch eye on a fax machine, the TV awaited breaking news, and a scooter stood ready to race the viewer to the scene of whatever emergency might crop up.

“FT3D” continues until November 30. The Japan Foundation is on the 10th floor of the Sermmit Tower on Soi Asoke. It’s open Monday to Friday from 9am to 7pm and on Saturday until 5pm. Call (02) 260 8560-4.

Khetsirin Pholdhampalit
The Nation