Thailand // Rolling back the ball: generations of art worlds in Northern Thailand
In 2005, Ong—his full name is Pisithpong Siraphisut, but most Thais go by a nickname—had just finished art school at Chiang Mai University. He was living in the city and working dead-end jobs. An opportunity arose to buy some land outside the town of Doi Saket, about 20km to the northeast of Chiang Mai, Thailand's "second city." Chiang Mai has a rich history as the capital of the ancient northern Thai kingdom of Lanna; for comparison, the population of its metropolitan area is about one million—Bangkok's is more than 12 million.
"It started with the land," he explained. "I wanted to get out of the city; I found this land and there was no one using it so I thought, ‘what can I use this land for, what can I do?' I wanted to live here, but to be able to live here I needed to create something. At that time there were no alternative residency programs for artists. So I thought we needed this kind of project." Having watched visiting artists pass through Chiang Mai University, he knew the bureaucratic issues that artists often had in programs run by large institutions. "You had to ask all kinds of permission to use some small thing. It stopped people from doing what they really wanted to do." Outside the institutional structures, he imagined, visitors might have more freedom.
When he began to build the first mud house, Ong explains, he did it "without any knowledge." He had seen some examples of adobe building techniques in Chiang Mai and had done some preliminary research, in particular through the technique of the Superadobe developed by the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (www.calearth.org). But mud houses were more or less untested in very wet climates like Thailand's, so it was uncertain how the experiment would fare. Together, Ong and a group of helpers made bricks from dirt packed tightly into sandbags, and laid barbed wire between them as "mortar." First they built a small storage hut; learning from that experience, they then built a portion of the house Ong now lives in. Then the rain came. The house fell down. They rebuilt, packing the bags more tightly with earth this time.
The houses are dome-shaped, brightly decorated and topped with Thai-style roofs made of eucalyptus leaves and bamboo. Windows and doors were recycled from wooden houses local owners were tearing down. When the main house and a guesthouse were both solidly standing, the Compeung website opened its call for proposals, and the first artists arrived. (The program is funded by fees artists pay: for the fee, they get room and board, ample space to work, and basic materials and help executing their projects.)
Compeung derives from the words for "appropriate speech" in Northern Thai language. The word "kam" (meaning word—also idea, or moment) is transliterated "com" to bring out the multilingual associations of the Latin prefix—as in "community." The name poses a question to artists: What is the appropriate expression, the best intervention to make at any given moment? This sense of small appropriate steps, methodically considered, characterizes the way the project was built up from nothing. At each point, Ong and his collaborators defined a reasonable goal with the means at their disposal.
[caption id="attachment_3430" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="House at The Land"]
[/caption]
I had finished my questions and stopped recording. Ong leaned against the brightly painted, plastered wall of his mud house, and said one more thing: "This land is like a new canvas and we're enjoying painting it." Compeung is a collaboration over time, an accumulation of strokes. It has been "painted" not only by painters but also by conceptual, new media and performance artists. Collaborators have come and gone, and currently there are three team members: Ong, Eglantine Badre, and Helen Michaelsen. The three develop the project together and review proposals as a group; usually only one is on site at any given time. "This project doesn't come from me personally, or from the Compeung team only," Ong said. "It comes from the artists. People come here and create something"—several have added structures to the landscape—"or suggest something. The team and the artists and the people around here move the project." The group is now planning a book and a fifth-year artists' reunion.
When I begin to describe this site to art-connected people, they invariably ask: "But it's not The Land?" The Land is a higher-profile project, brainchild of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert. It too has brought international artists to Chiang Mai. The Land has been under construction since 1998. Projects—mainly houses built in a variety of styles by western and Thai artists—have come and gone (some of them, like Ong's first attempt, falling apart in the wet climate). The Land is only loosely a residency program. Structures exist. But basic facilities for visitors don't. The houses are more ideas of a house than they are actual houses. And The Land's development, at once desultory and ambitious, contrasts sharply with the intense pace of Ong's project.
The Land is an idea, one that has enticed visitors and created a context for intellectual exchange, for questioning definitions of art. And Ong's work, and that of other artists of his generation, does draw on that context. Since the 1990s, Chiang Mai has had an energetic—and idiosyncratic—contemporary art scene, with a focus on collaborative art based in practices of daily life. This orientation started with the Chiang Mai Social Installation, a festival instigated by Uthit Atimana and a group of collaborators that occurred once a year from 1992 to 1996.
For Uthit, this was a way to establish an audience for contemporary art in a place, Chiang Mai, that didn't have one. Artists trained in modern techniques in Bangkok came to teach or work in Chiang Mai and found no world for themselves. There was a chasm between art and audience. How to start a conversation that might begin to bridge that gap? Traditionally, art had existed in temples—though those traditions were on the wane—but also, creativity had infused other areas of life. When western art was introduced into the country in the 1920s, it was through a small industry of monumental portrait sculpture of the royal family, created by the Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci and his disciples. Feroci, who arrived in 1923 from Florence, became known as "Silpa Bhirasri" (Art Enlightenment) and founded the institute that became Bangkok's Silpakorn University, the country's premier fine arts training ground.
Most of the teachers at Chiang Mai University studied at Silpakorn. But their ideas about the place of art in society are shaped by their experience outside Bangkok, too. Uthit wasn't just trying to fabricate an audience for contemporary art through education. In Chiang Mai, he couldn't see upholding the distinction between art and life at all. Inspired by Joseph Beuys's social sculpture, the Social Installation brought food and medicine and painting and sex work and monks' sermons all together under the umbrella of art.
Modern art in Thailand—at least the genre of art that's called "modern"— resembles western modernism. Read in a local context, it can also have other connotations. Abstract formal techniques might combine with Buddhist notions: the idea of emptiness, for instance, translates well into visual and spatial form, and one frequent theme in sculpture is the exploration of the relationship between a cast object and its mold, where the hollowness of the mold becomes a shape in and of itself. On the other hand, many artists overtly promote an image of Thainess to both internal and external audiences with Buddhist and nationalist iconography. "The first generation of students I taught, I taught to sell their identity," Uthit once told me. "With the next generation, I wasn't satisfied with that." And indeed, Uthit was frustrated by the fact that CMSI had turned into a well-known international art event, with visitors sometimes outnumbering locals. He ended it in 1996.
CMSI was briefly revived as the "Eukabeuk Event" in 2001—the nonsense word eukabeuk serving as a way to dodge the artworld notoriety of CMSI. But the primary energies that created CMSI have diverged into other projects. "The Land happened," Uthit said, "and I said, ‘OK—do it.'" You can hear the relief in his voice: someone else was taking up the torch. "And then the Midnight University started; that was so exciting." The Midnight University began as a study group of university faculty around the 1997 economic crisis in Thailand, but became a much more ambitious, three-pronged project, adding free classes for the public, and some media-savvy activist efforts. The Midnight University has drawn attention to issues such as the displacement of villagers by the Pak Moon Dam project in Ubon Ratchathani and Thailand's recent coup.
What's happening now—in the long, trailing wake of the Chiang Mai Social Installation and the projects that followed it? The Midnight University is quiescent; one of its primary instigators, Somkiat Tangnamo, has become Dean of Fine Arts, and it's more difficult for him to take radical political positions. Kamin's gallery, which once supported collaborative ventures, has become his personal studio. The Land moves slowly. Uthit is building an academic program in Media Arts and Design, a major bureaucratic undertaking that takes all his time. Students and younger artists in Chiang Mai can no longer depend on these more established figures to create large-scale, community-oriented projects that they can join in on. Some who had participated energetically in collective projects have drifted away. And last fall, the economic crisis hit. On the heels of the tsunami, the coup, the recent takeover of Bangkok's main airport by protesters—tourism, the fuel of the Thai art world, has taken hit after hit.
A commercial gallery scene thrives quietly, though, around Nimmanhemin Road, near the university art museum and Media Arts and Design. Galleries, shops and stylish restaurants cater to tourists staying in the nearby high-rise hotels that cluster here a couple of kilometers outside the old city walls. But these galleries pose a different kind of question: is Chiang Mai's art scene losing its distinctive character, becoming a smaller and more concentrated Bangkok?
One new venture just getting off the ground in the Nimmanhemin district might suggest otherwise. Jay (Santhipap Inkong-ngam) is preparing to open a new collectively run, multi-use space, an economic and cultural experiment, on Nimmanhemin soi 17 (a smaller street off Nimmanhemin Road). A video artist himself, Jay most recently curated Xiang-Rama, a program of music, film and video from five cities in four countries. The program showcases hybrid forms like Lao hip hop, but also documents threatened local culture. In Luang Prabang, Laos, Jay says, "The architecture is protected by UNESCO; it still looks the same. But in just a few years, the people have changed." This is an enormous and contested issue. Jay's response is a modest one: he wanted to create an archive to preserve these works and to continue to make them available to others.
At the same time, as already-tenuous NGO funding was drying up with the economic crisis, he was seeking a way to operate more independently. "I look around at my friends," he says, "and the ones who have good ideas for society have a hard time making a living." Two such friends—a green designer and a musician—joined him in this project, and they fortuitously found a space that had just been vacated by a failed restaurant. The three collaborators are now completing work on a multifunction space called Malateh (Mala, from a Hindu word for flower, and teh, from Chinese tea, reflecting the dual cultural influences of the region), which will be part grocery store, part tea garden, part video archive and educational project. Each one takes responsibility for one part. Jay is organizing classes, some of them free, combining simple local practices (like how to stuff bamboo with sticky rice) with high-tech, theoretical topics (music theory, digital photography, video editing). Jay's interest is in horizontal learning outside academic institutions that strike him as hierarchical and deadening. "We'll always have a round table in our classes."
"It's kind of communist," he says—a political label that's no more widely accepted in Thailand than in the US. We would probably say collective. The collaborators agree to pool proceeds from the three parts of the space and split them evenly. Jay contrasts it with an entrepreneurial model in which the product is of no importance: "I'm not going to start a coffee shop when I know nothing about coffee." Nor will he make a big push to propose projects tailored to fit the guidelines of foundations or cultural agencies. Jay says, "We just think about what we have and what we can do."
The sense of modesty resonates with Compeung's ethos of appropriateness. It doesn't seem to be the time for wild ambition. Eukabeuk's motto, in 2001, was "no boundaries"; Compeung and Malateh do have some boundaries. They don't seek to stunt their participants' imaginations, but they think of limits as enabling conditions—not arbitrary restrictions.
Aesthetic autonomy is an almost oxymoronic concept in Thailand. Malateh's economic activities will support the art practices of the three collaborators. Their focus on the local and sustainable is striking, but their blend of art and commerce characterizes the Thai art scene in general. On one end of the spectrum, the socially and politically engaged Chiang Mai Social Installation broke down boundaries between art and commercial (or religious) activities. But similarly, the Chiang Mai University Art Museum houses several commercial ventures, as does the new Bangkok Art and Culture Center (a Guggenheim atop a shopping mall).
The CMU Art Museum also houses Media Arts and Design, the new academic program run by Uthit. Though oriented toward professional training, MAD should not be underestimated as a place for theoretical research and education—as the program's motto puts it, it is a "new space for thinking," emphasizing critical thinking skills. As it slowly grows, this program may be able to begin to provide a context that's been missing since CMSI came to an end. A small group of Media Arts and Design students have now been given the opportunity to take over a building in downtown Chiang Mai to create a design studio and gallery. Offering rental space to help finance their projects, they'll also work for commercial clients and create their own varied art projects. Mute Mute announces itself as "a space for running many radical ideas."
[caption id="attachment_3429" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Jay at Malateh"]
[/caption]
Malateh and Mute Mute are new projects, just getting off the ground, and it's still not clear where they will go or what impact they'll have. They may face a struggle. Compeung has been running a full program for three years, but the art scene in Chiang Mai has yet to sit up and take notice. When I told Uthit that a group of students from another Thai university were visiting there, he asked, "Why?" Ong works with galleries in Chiang Mai, curating shows by his artist residents; he goes back and forth to openings in Chiang Mai to keep showing his face in the art community there. The art community is small. But still, people are more likely to come to Compeung from the U.S. and Europe than to come from down the road in Chiang Mai city. "We've rolled out so many balls. It's up to them whether they want to roll them back. Some people roll back. But some people just keep the ball." With the advent of a few likeminded projects, a new network is forming. Like Compeung itself, it is a collaboration over time, slowing rolling the balls back and forth.
by Rebecca Zorach
[/caption]
I had finished my questions and stopped recording. Ong leaned against the brightly painted, plastered wall of his mud house, and said one more thing: "This land is like a new canvas and we're enjoying painting it." Compeung is a collaboration over time, an accumulation of strokes. It has been "painted" not only by painters but also by conceptual, new media and performance artists. Collaborators have come and gone, and currently there are three team members: Ong, Eglantine Badre, and Helen Michaelsen. The three develop the project together and review proposals as a group; usually only one is on site at any given time. "This project doesn't come from me personally, or from the Compeung team only," Ong said. "It comes from the artists. People come here and create something"—several have added structures to the landscape—"or suggest something. The team and the artists and the people around here move the project." The group is now planning a book and a fifth-year artists' reunion.
When I begin to describe this site to art-connected people, they invariably ask: "But it's not The Land?" The Land is a higher-profile project, brainchild of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert. It too has brought international artists to Chiang Mai. The Land has been under construction since 1998. Projects—mainly houses built in a variety of styles by western and Thai artists—have come and gone (some of them, like Ong's first attempt, falling apart in the wet climate). The Land is only loosely a residency program. Structures exist. But basic facilities for visitors don't. The houses are more ideas of a house than they are actual houses. And The Land's development, at once desultory and ambitious, contrasts sharply with the intense pace of Ong's project.
The Land is an idea, one that has enticed visitors and created a context for intellectual exchange, for questioning definitions of art. And Ong's work, and that of other artists of his generation, does draw on that context. Since the 1990s, Chiang Mai has had an energetic—and idiosyncratic—contemporary art scene, with a focus on collaborative art based in practices of daily life. This orientation started with the Chiang Mai Social Installation, a festival instigated by Uthit Atimana and a group of collaborators that occurred once a year from 1992 to 1996.
For Uthit, this was a way to establish an audience for contemporary art in a place, Chiang Mai, that didn't have one. Artists trained in modern techniques in Bangkok came to teach or work in Chiang Mai and found no world for themselves. There was a chasm between art and audience. How to start a conversation that might begin to bridge that gap? Traditionally, art had existed in temples—though those traditions were on the wane—but also, creativity had infused other areas of life. When western art was introduced into the country in the 1920s, it was through a small industry of monumental portrait sculpture of the royal family, created by the Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci and his disciples. Feroci, who arrived in 1923 from Florence, became known as "Silpa Bhirasri" (Art Enlightenment) and founded the institute that became Bangkok's Silpakorn University, the country's premier fine arts training ground.
Most of the teachers at Chiang Mai University studied at Silpakorn. But their ideas about the place of art in society are shaped by their experience outside Bangkok, too. Uthit wasn't just trying to fabricate an audience for contemporary art through education. In Chiang Mai, he couldn't see upholding the distinction between art and life at all. Inspired by Joseph Beuys's social sculpture, the Social Installation brought food and medicine and painting and sex work and monks' sermons all together under the umbrella of art.
Modern art in Thailand—at least the genre of art that's called "modern"— resembles western modernism. Read in a local context, it can also have other connotations. Abstract formal techniques might combine with Buddhist notions: the idea of emptiness, for instance, translates well into visual and spatial form, and one frequent theme in sculpture is the exploration of the relationship between a cast object and its mold, where the hollowness of the mold becomes a shape in and of itself. On the other hand, many artists overtly promote an image of Thainess to both internal and external audiences with Buddhist and nationalist iconography. "The first generation of students I taught, I taught to sell their identity," Uthit once told me. "With the next generation, I wasn't satisfied with that." And indeed, Uthit was frustrated by the fact that CMSI had turned into a well-known international art event, with visitors sometimes outnumbering locals. He ended it in 1996.
CMSI was briefly revived as the "Eukabeuk Event" in 2001—the nonsense word eukabeuk serving as a way to dodge the artworld notoriety of CMSI. But the primary energies that created CMSI have diverged into other projects. "The Land happened," Uthit said, "and I said, ‘OK—do it.'" You can hear the relief in his voice: someone else was taking up the torch. "And then the Midnight University started; that was so exciting." The Midnight University began as a study group of university faculty around the 1997 economic crisis in Thailand, but became a much more ambitious, three-pronged project, adding free classes for the public, and some media-savvy activist efforts. The Midnight University has drawn attention to issues such as the displacement of villagers by the Pak Moon Dam project in Ubon Ratchathani and Thailand's recent coup.
What's happening now—in the long, trailing wake of the Chiang Mai Social Installation and the projects that followed it? The Midnight University is quiescent; one of its primary instigators, Somkiat Tangnamo, has become Dean of Fine Arts, and it's more difficult for him to take radical political positions. Kamin's gallery, which once supported collaborative ventures, has become his personal studio. The Land moves slowly. Uthit is building an academic program in Media Arts and Design, a major bureaucratic undertaking that takes all his time. Students and younger artists in Chiang Mai can no longer depend on these more established figures to create large-scale, community-oriented projects that they can join in on. Some who had participated energetically in collective projects have drifted away. And last fall, the economic crisis hit. On the heels of the tsunami, the coup, the recent takeover of Bangkok's main airport by protesters—tourism, the fuel of the Thai art world, has taken hit after hit.
A commercial gallery scene thrives quietly, though, around Nimmanhemin Road, near the university art museum and Media Arts and Design. Galleries, shops and stylish restaurants cater to tourists staying in the nearby high-rise hotels that cluster here a couple of kilometers outside the old city walls. But these galleries pose a different kind of question: is Chiang Mai's art scene losing its distinctive character, becoming a smaller and more concentrated Bangkok?
One new venture just getting off the ground in the Nimmanhemin district might suggest otherwise. Jay (Santhipap Inkong-ngam) is preparing to open a new collectively run, multi-use space, an economic and cultural experiment, on Nimmanhemin soi 17 (a smaller street off Nimmanhemin Road). A video artist himself, Jay most recently curated Xiang-Rama, a program of music, film and video from five cities in four countries. The program showcases hybrid forms like Lao hip hop, but also documents threatened local culture. In Luang Prabang, Laos, Jay says, "The architecture is protected by UNESCO; it still looks the same. But in just a few years, the people have changed." This is an enormous and contested issue. Jay's response is a modest one: he wanted to create an archive to preserve these works and to continue to make them available to others.
At the same time, as already-tenuous NGO funding was drying up with the economic crisis, he was seeking a way to operate more independently. "I look around at my friends," he says, "and the ones who have good ideas for society have a hard time making a living." Two such friends—a green designer and a musician—joined him in this project, and they fortuitously found a space that had just been vacated by a failed restaurant. The three collaborators are now completing work on a multifunction space called Malateh (Mala, from a Hindu word for flower, and teh, from Chinese tea, reflecting the dual cultural influences of the region), which will be part grocery store, part tea garden, part video archive and educational project. Each one takes responsibility for one part. Jay is organizing classes, some of them free, combining simple local practices (like how to stuff bamboo with sticky rice) with high-tech, theoretical topics (music theory, digital photography, video editing). Jay's interest is in horizontal learning outside academic institutions that strike him as hierarchical and deadening. "We'll always have a round table in our classes."
"It's kind of communist," he says—a political label that's no more widely accepted in Thailand than in the US. We would probably say collective. The collaborators agree to pool proceeds from the three parts of the space and split them evenly. Jay contrasts it with an entrepreneurial model in which the product is of no importance: "I'm not going to start a coffee shop when I know nothing about coffee." Nor will he make a big push to propose projects tailored to fit the guidelines of foundations or cultural agencies. Jay says, "We just think about what we have and what we can do."
The sense of modesty resonates with Compeung's ethos of appropriateness. It doesn't seem to be the time for wild ambition. Eukabeuk's motto, in 2001, was "no boundaries"; Compeung and Malateh do have some boundaries. They don't seek to stunt their participants' imaginations, but they think of limits as enabling conditions—not arbitrary restrictions.
Aesthetic autonomy is an almost oxymoronic concept in Thailand. Malateh's economic activities will support the art practices of the three collaborators. Their focus on the local and sustainable is striking, but their blend of art and commerce characterizes the Thai art scene in general. On one end of the spectrum, the socially and politically engaged Chiang Mai Social Installation broke down boundaries between art and commercial (or religious) activities. But similarly, the Chiang Mai University Art Museum houses several commercial ventures, as does the new Bangkok Art and Culture Center (a Guggenheim atop a shopping mall).
The CMU Art Museum also houses Media Arts and Design, the new academic program run by Uthit. Though oriented toward professional training, MAD should not be underestimated as a place for theoretical research and education—as the program's motto puts it, it is a "new space for thinking," emphasizing critical thinking skills. As it slowly grows, this program may be able to begin to provide a context that's been missing since CMSI came to an end. A small group of Media Arts and Design students have now been given the opportunity to take over a building in downtown Chiang Mai to create a design studio and gallery. Offering rental space to help finance their projects, they'll also work for commercial clients and create their own varied art projects. Mute Mute announces itself as "a space for running many radical ideas."
[caption id="attachment_3429" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Jay at Malateh"][/caption]
Malateh and Mute Mute are new projects, just getting off the ground, and it's still not clear where they will go or what impact they'll have. They may face a struggle. Compeung has been running a full program for three years, but the art scene in Chiang Mai has yet to sit up and take notice. When I told Uthit that a group of students from another Thai university were visiting there, he asked, "Why?" Ong works with galleries in Chiang Mai, curating shows by his artist residents; he goes back and forth to openings in Chiang Mai to keep showing his face in the art community there. The art community is small. But still, people are more likely to come to Compeung from the U.S. and Europe than to come from down the road in Chiang Mai city. "We've rolled out so many balls. It's up to them whether they want to roll them back. Some people roll back. But some people just keep the ball." With the advent of a few likeminded projects, a new network is forming. Like Compeung itself, it is a collaboration over time, slowing rolling the balls back and forth.
by Rebecca Zorach
