The First Bangkok Art Biennale was a midsize show that was spread out through twenty different locations. It was seeable in three long days and ran from October 19th 2018 to February 3rd2019.
Getting off the Skytrain at the National Stadium, one descended from the platform to one of Bangkok’s many elevated walkways, still high above the street, suspended over the city’s eternal snarling traffic jam. On the way to the first Bangkok Art Biennale’s main location in the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, this floating pavement seemed to open up in countless directions, creating paths that went in and out of malls and a world that seemed to flow seamlessly from Siam Square to Siam Discovery, from Siam Paragon to Siam Center, from Centralworld all the way to Central Embassy, with each of these malls hosting the biennale’s works, though sometimes it was difficult to distinguish between the artworks and the malls’ own promotional materials. In this commercial wonderland, in the heat, in the swirl of tourists and Christmas shoppers, I briefly wondered if these elevated walkways were public or private spaces, and whether they served the public good. Inside the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, my first experience of the Bangkok Art Biennale was Happy, Happy Project, Basket Tower (2018), by ChoiJeong Hwa. It was made out of colorful plastic baskets that formed a column running up the middle of the center’s atrium. The guidebook’s description of it expressed a certain ambivalence. It was “concerned with our paradoxical world of superficial happiness,” yet “its bright colors justma[d]e us smile.” I struggled with this inconclusiveness, with the guidebook’s unwillingness to decide whether the work was critical or not, and then found myself thinking back to a black and white photograph I had seen of another work, from a different time and place, in a similar atrium.
Surely, one of the fears that must have gripped the organizers of the first Bangkok Art Biennale was that it would be seen as too closely linked to commercial concerns; that the show would seem to advance private interests at the expense of the public good. After all, its funding was completely private, and much of the work was shown in commercial spaces, malls, hotels, and commercial galleries. So when Adele Tan, one of the show’s curators, told CNN, that, “The funding might be private, but its effect is set to ripple through the public domain more than if we had government money behind it,” her words seemed to suggest that the biennale intended to act—within the limits of the current political situation—in the interest of the public. More concretely, the show’s theme, based on Buddhism, made it hard for the show to advance commercial interests, since it seemed to ask viewers to turn their backs on the superficial forms of happiness that the commercial world offers. For some, the show’s politics, uniformly praised in the many reviews of the show, with the Guardian’s Hannah Ellis-Peterson writing that the Bangkok Art Biennale’s work “defies Thailand’s taboos, be they social stigma or the political restrictions imposed by the military government that took over in a coup in 2014,” also addressed this question, because many contemporary critics and viewers seemed to see a show’s political engagement as proof that the show is acting in the public interest. But making my way through this show, I could not stop questioning the impact of the few works that did fit into its theme, or the effectiveness of the political work in the show, even worrying that some of the biennale’s works simply functioned as boosters for the commercial locations where they were shown.
The biennale’s central theme, derived from Buddhism, with the show specifically pointing to the teachings of Ajahn Jayasaro Bhikkhu, asked us to turn our backs on sensual pleasure and the material world in order to achieve a higher state of happiness that freed us from physical cravings for sensual stimulation. We were meant to detach ourselves and focus on transcendental bliss, thus the show’s title, Beyond Bliss.And so, to the extent that the show matched its theme’s commitment to Ajahn‘s form of Buddhism, it would be unable to promote consumerism. When the guidebook wrote about Choi’s Happy, Happy Project and invoked the “world of superficial happiness,” it was claiming that one of the ways we should read the work was as a criticism of the commercial world and the way it seeks to distract us with inferior, “superficial” forms of happiness. QUALITY: quality (2018), by Latthaphon Korkiatarkul, was meant to function in a similar way. It represented materialism as superficial by scraping the ink off 24 countries’ bank notes, and displaying the scrapings of the ink next to the blank bills. Nature and Normality (2018), by Sriwan Janehattakarnkit, went further: it encouraged us to detach ourselves from these lower forms of happiness. It was a pleasing series of paintings, based on the tenets of Buddhism, and represented the artist seeking to detach herself from the material world to achieve a higher form of happiness. The guidebook told us that the works were about the “non-self and suffering” and that, “for the artist, emptiness and death, was a way to discover peaceful happiness.” Her paintings represented her and her dogs trying to achieve this state of selflessness. Achieving it would allow them to surrender to death, and so through the series, the artist and her dogs were increasingly represented as skeletons. What Will We Leave Behind (2012), by Nino Sarabutra, which was shown at Wat Prayoon (the Temple of Iron Fences), shared this same theme. It consisted of 125,000 small ceramic skulls that filled a circular corridor. The skulls were meant to be experienced underfoot. They seemed to ask us to surrender to death. All four of these works turned viewers away from consumerism, and so, to the extent that they reflected the overall biennale, the show could not be said to promote commercial concerns. But in the end, there were not enough of these types of work to really have much impact on the overall show.
At Wat Prayoon, three other very beautiful works looked at death—in fact, life and death. Chat…Naa’ (2017), by Arnont Nongyao, was made up of a small video camera hung over what seemed to be a disco ball. The camera’s images passed through a video projector onto a screen, where the ball’s tiny circular patterns felt like so many lifeless one-celled creatures. Every couple of minutes a vibration shook the camera, giving the creatures life. In the same space as Chat…Naawas Paolo Canevari’s Monuments of the Memory, the Golden(2018). Initially, I dismissed these three glitter-gold paintingsas just more of the endless series of contemporary monochromes. Then my slight, diffused reflection appeared on one. Its warm glow made me feel as if a benign presence watched over me. Between these two works was Zodiac Houses(1998-1999), by Montien Boonma. It was made of six human-sized, gothic shaped sculptures. Sitting on thin legs at shoulder height, these perfect, minimalist objects seemed to invite us to poke our heads in. Their almost complete closure invoked our anxiety about what exists beyond our world. Inside, their darkness was reassuring. If I had waited and let my eyes adjust, little dots of light would have represented the zodiac. As much as I liked these three works, with their exploration of life and death, they were not works that pushed us toward asceticism, or away from lower forms of happiness, and so they did not help us decide whether the overall show was too closely linked to consumerism. Unlike the earlier works, they did not struggle against it, either, and so they had even less effect on the overall show’s relationship to commerce.
Though these works about death and Buddhism that challenged the commercial world were not a big part of the overall show, they had an otherworldly quality about them. This quality seemed to be the show’s overriding theme. As opposed to the show being held together by its relationship to Buddhism, this otherworldly quality seemed to have united much of the work and to have grown out of these works about Buddhism and death. The show contained other works about death that were not Buddhist and which did not challenge the commercial world. On the seventh floor of the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, both Anneè Olofsson’s Say Hello and then Wave Good Bye,(2018), and Fiona Hall’s Forest Floor (2018), dealt with death. Say Hello and then Wave Good Byewas a stop-motion film that showed a cast of the artist in black ice, a sort of death mask, melting over time. It pointed to the inevitability of death. But seeing death as inevitable and embracing it in the terms of Buddhism are not necessarily the same. Instead, the work seemed to wrap the pain of death in a dark pleasure that echoed earlier forms of romanticism. Forest Floor was made up of smashed bottles, spread out across a low plinth, and painted to look like skeletons. Its broken glass provoked our fears, hindering us from surrendering to death. This, in spite of its painted bones which made it resemble both Nature and Normality andWhat Will We Leave Behind.Olofsson’s and Hall’s works were not Buddhist, nor were they critical of the forms of happiness that the commercial world offers, but they seemed to embody this otherworldly quality, which had a real effect on the overall show.
It will become clear how this otherworldly quality diminished the political effectiveness of some of the show’s works. As I wrote above, a show’s political engagement is often taken as an indication that the show worked for the public good. But even if we subscribe to this idea, it is easy to demonstrate that the works in the show were not that political and so did not give us a justification for believing that the Bangkok Art Biennale acted in the public interest. The Bangkok Art and Culture Center housed many of the works thought to be political; for example, according to the guidebook, Forest Floor was supposed to suggest a genocide. But the work felt less like a genocide and more like a haunted forest in a fairy tale. This otherworldly quality prevented the work from having much political impact. Whether the works were related to romanticism, like Forest Floor and Say Hello and then Wave Good Bye, or, like much of the show’s other work, surrealism, thisotherworldly quality tended to distract from the work’s political content, or undercut the work’s messages. Additionally, this quality gave some of the works the look of fashion advertisements, especially when shown in a commercial location. The other potential problem that political work faced was that in this world of rising inequality, much of it was meant to promote tolerance. More on this later. The political impact of much of the show’s work was in line with the impact of much political work in the commercial art world, especially that of blue-chip artists, whose politics tend to be very muted. In general, biennales, because of their non-profit status, are able to be more political. They are less obligated to depend on easily marketable aesthetics, which can have a parasitic effect on a work’s politics. In general, the Bangkok Art Biennale had more blue-chip artists than almost any other biennale. It allowed this first iteration of the show to start with a bang, but also seemed to have diminished the political impact of much of its work.
The installation Genetic Manipulation (2017), by Heri Dono, was the first work one encountered on the seventh floor at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center. The five figures, each having four dragon legs that met in a bell-like torso, with heads that vaguely resembled those of crash test dummies and hands that were cast from real human hands, seemed to embody the installation’s title. But the work’s politics were undermined by the fact that it seemed less interested in engaging us in the political questions surrounding genetic manipulation than in getting us to appreciate the artist’s imaginings, his strange fantasies, and the work’s surreal, otherworldly, qualities. Around the corner from Hall and Olofsson’s work were two other projects, No More Sewing Machines (2018), by Imhathai Suwatthanasilp, and I have Dreams (2018), by Chumpon Apisuk. Both focused on sex-work in Thailand. This was a daring move in a country that is loath to acknowledge its own booming sex trade. But both were not equally political. No More Sewing Machines’air of mystery, its surreal, otherworldly quality, meant that the work’s politics were hard to divine from the objects themselves. The work was inspired by an exchange with Empowerment Foundation,a long running NGO set up to help sex workers, and consisted of the hair of sex-workers crocheted around the individual parts of sewing machines, creating a beautiful crown on top of each. The objects’ surreal quality derived not only from their resemblance to Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teaspoon, but also to the mystery about why someone would crochet hair onto them. In the end, their connection to sex-work was unclear. Less formally beautiful but more politically effective was I have Dreams. Itwas a straightforward conceptual work. Its video sought to destigmatize sex workers by asking twelve of them from one of Bangkok’s infamous red-light districts about their dreams. The question was a little ambiguous, but mostly the workers’ responses showed their pride at their ability to support their families. The project also included ten tapestries which showed the way that penalties have landed more harshly on sex-workers than other brothel workers, or even brothel owners. Though both Imhathai and Chumpon touched on economic issues, their works would be better understood as an attempt to humanize those who engage in sex-work.
At the other end of the seventh floor were a couple of works whose politics were not at all diminished by their surreal qualities. The Check Point (2018), by NGE Lay challenged the region’s conservative views about women’s bodies. It was a vagina-shaped soft sculpture, large enough so that viewers could pass through it, made from longyi(s), a traditional skirt from Myanmar. Those used in the sculpture came from the country’s eight main ethnic groups. Viewers were asked to pass through it in order, as the artist said, to “realize that it is not a dirty thing or a thing that makes your status drop.” People were constantly photographing themselves emerging from it, with social media posts amplifying the work’s message. Kitty-corner from The Check Pointwas a documentary series of photographs called Quiet Encounters (2001-2018), by Dow Wasiksiri. Not only did the series’ surreal quality not diminish the work’s politics, it increased the work’s impact. Dow’s photographs documented the clash between rural and urban space, as urban space increasingly pushes into the rural. He emphasized the strange realities this clash produced by choosing slightly surreal moments to photograph the landscape. In one, a small boy distractedly runs toward a cartoon character that is also running, but which was painted on the wingless corpse of an abandoned 747. The plane was part of a plane graveyard that seems, from the photograph, to have sprung up within a children’s playground in the vicinity of suburban apartment blocks. These momentary events reinforced the weirdness of the landscape’s larger changes. Quiet Encountersand The Check Pointwere an exception to the rule. Their otherworldly qualities did not impede their political message.
Next to Say Hello and then Wave Good Byeand Forest Floorwas Acts of Appearances (2015–ongoing), a series of photographs by Guari Gill. The otherworldly quality of the other works around these photographs made it easy to misread them. It is likely that many viewers must have seen the series as a reenactment of myths, as opposed to what they were: an exploration of the way a rural community sees the world. This was because all of the subjects of Guari’s photographs wore Adivasi masks from south India, produced by the famous mask makers, the brothers Subhas and Bhagavan Dharam Kadu. Usually, their masks represent mythological creatures, but in this case, Guari asked them to make masks that represented their everyday lives. Along with their friends, the mask makers wore their own masks. The photographs should be seen as an exercise in representation–an attempt to see the lives of the mask makers, in the visual language through which they see the world. And though, in the context of the Bangkok Art Biennale, Guari’s work was easy to misread, it was in essence a work about identity and meant to promote tolerance.
In themselves, the works that were meant to promote tolerance were often good works that challenged regressive values. But we seem to be living in a moment where high levels of inequality are as much a driver of intolerance as anything else. It may be that when the art world focuses on intolerance without taking on economic issues, we treat the symptom without addressing one of its causes. From this perspective, it might be reasonable to worry that if the Bangkok Art Biennale turns out to be a booster for commercial interests, if it leads to an increase in inequality in a country that is already very unequal, in this context, these works that promote tolerance are likely to have little effect. This then returns us to our question about the show’s overall relationship to commerce.
The show had other works that seemed meant to advance the public good but were not meant to promote tolerance. A number of these functioned like advertisements without employing its aesthetics. One of the show’s best political works, Eisa Jocson’s Becoming White[click to see one of the performances online](2018), looked critically at the language of advertising, but there were many works that used this language uncritically. Jocson explored how the commercial world “performs” happiness. She focused on Pilipino migrant laborers working as performers at the Hong Kong Disney Parks. In her videos, she and these laborers performed the gestures of Snow White at the same time, with the multiple Snow Whites pointing to the artificiality of the gestures. Jocson’s work was critical of the language of commerce. However, many other works used it uncritically. This language seemed to offer an illusion of change, but, in reality, it bolstered the status quo. An example of this was the work Dye (2018), by Kawita Vatanajyankur. It was meant to point to the labor of women in the textile industry by having the artist’s body take the place of different parts of its machinery. She was a bobbin having thread wound around her, a shuttle passing through a shed, or her hair was the yarn being plunged into dye. The videos were shot in very shallow, candy-colored spaces. After a bit, one realized that the artist was not naked; she performed clad in a sheer, skin-colored body suit. Presumably the artist’s intention was to take the place of women working in the textile industry, representing them as cogs in the machine, showing their suffering, their exploitation by industry. But there was nothing in the work that pointed us to the women’s real labor. In place of this, we were invited to take pleasure in the artist’s sexualized suffering. Instead of politics, it offered us the enduring spectacle of the objectification of women. This is what the language of commerce seemed to offer, an illusion of change that in reality bolstered the status quo.
Marina Abramovic’s Standing Structures for Human Use (2017) also used the methods of advertising. But the installation, which included a video and six structures, each with crystals positioned roughly at the level of the viewer’s head, chest, and groin, and a pair of earmuffs, offered viewers healing as opposed to politics. Though unlike many of the books on crystal healing, filled with complicated diagrams and step by step instructions, nothing in Abramovic’s installation showed viewers how these structures were meant to be used, not even her video, which instead told the story of her search for a cure for human suffering in Brazil’s crystal mines. Like a laborer from a Sebastião Salgado photograph, we saw her emerge from the mines carrying a crystal. But instead of changing labor conditions, she was interested in healing the suffering of museum goers, who we saw lined up like consumers on Black Friday in front of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, desperate to be cured. In a frenzy, they pressed themselves against the crystals; their ecstasy was that of Bernini’s Teresa.But lacking concrete instructions on how to use Abramovic’s work, we were cut off from these experiences. As in much of her early work, we were invited to envy the experience, not to participate in it. Far from offering bliss in a Buddhist sense, the work used the techniques of advertising to stir our desires. AES+F’s film Inverso Mundes(2015), also spoke the language of the spectacle. It was spread over three screens and seemed to be based on the simple inversion of binaries. In the film, the poor took the place of the rich, women subjugated men, ugly monsters were cuddled like puppies, black youth became the love objects of the police, pigs butchered butchers and donkeys rode people. This is a process that changes the players while leaving the structures of oppression in place. The film felt like a return to bad forms of postmodernism. Perhaps a better summary of the film’s structure would be man bites dog. It was even suggested that the work should be seen as satire and thus as political. But man bites dog is not political, it is the founding principle of the spectacle, whose politics bolsters the status quo.
In spite of these problematic forms of postmodernism, there were a couple of quite good works that felt like returns to it. One was Giant Twins, (2018), by Komkrit Tepthian, which combined half of a sculpture of a Chinese warrior with half of a Thai one, and pointed to the two nations’ friendship. Another was Ho Tzu Nyen’s Earth (2009-2012), an amazing short film that slowly panned and tilted from one small group to another in one long take that revealed a large collection of people somewhere between death and sleep. Each small group momentarily awoke, and subtly assumed the form of some western masterpiece, collecting the history of western art into a nightmarish whole, as though these canonical works had been assigned to purgatory to wait their time of passage.
The most problematic parts of the show were those works that seemed to serve particular commercial interests. Many of these works seemed simply to promote these interests, to advance brands, and to make it easier for them to sell their products. And though the works in these locations still had an otherworldly quality about them, they were close to pop art in spirit. Often, they felt like props from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.Two works were perfect examples of this style, though they were not shown at commercial locations. The size of Yoshitomo Nara’sYour Dog(2017)—it was over three meters—seemed to make us smaller, and Nara’sstrangeMiss Forest / Thinker’s(2016) hair’sbulbous protuberances seemed to form a multitude of uncontrollable life.One only has to think of perfume commercials to realize that this style, with the different fantasy worlds that it presents, has long been the mainstay of fashion advertising. But unlike earlier pop art whose connection to commerce clashed with the art world’s self-image as antithetical to the Kitsch of the commercial world, these works seemed to easily integrate themselves into both the contemporary artworld and commercial sites. The works fit very neatly into the malls with their endless number of trendy fashion brands. Yayoi Kusama’s work, 14 Pumpkins (2017), was shown at Centralworld, one of Bangkok’s most important malls. Often described as self-portraits covered with her trademark polka dots,the 14 pumpkins were suspended through a half dozen of the mall’s different shopping levels. And though biennales do sometimes show work in malls, usually the works appear in separate spaces, or curators choose works that are easily distinguishable from the mall’s advertisements. ButKusama’s pumpkins blended in. They were hard to find in the bustle of shoppers. They physically echoed the Armani booth below them, the cartoony image of Kusama on the bottom of the pumpkin’s reflected the cartoony gorilla image on the top of the booth, and the “Love Forever Yayoi Kusama,” inscription on each pumpkin was indistinguishable from the mall’s other exercises in branding. Additionally, the mall’s own advertising campaign seemed to mimic the biennale’s theme, with its outside amusement park called World of Happiness. Signs promoting happiness were on display throughout the mall. There was a frightening synergy between the mall’s and biennale’s themes, and even, perhaps, the Thai military Junta’s post-coup happiness campaign.
Choi’s works were spread throughout the show, some of them having this Alice and Wonderlandquality about them. His Breathing Flower(2016), with its petals that slowly went up and down, was outside of BAB BOX @ ONE, and his massive, violet, metallic, inflatable, winged pig, Happy, Happy Project, Love Me Pig (2013), at three and a half meters in height, was inside. Choi showed enormous robots, huge fruit, and a joker’s crown. At the mall Siam Discovery, he had Happy, Happy Project, Alchemy(no date provided),a series of cheap plastic objects that seemed to form totem poles, and Shot Gun (2018),made up of colorful plastic AK47s which formed a sphere with the butts pointing out. Here in the mall, there seemed little distinction between the product displays and Choi’s work. Then the guidebook’s description of Choi’s Happy, Happy Project, Basket Towercame back to me. It was “concerned with our paradoxical world of superficial happiness,” while at the same time its bright colors seemed meant to “just make us smile.” In the mall, this ambivalent position collapsed. Here, his work, like Centralworld’s theme, was simply about wallowing in the superficial happiness that the commercial world provided. Roaming the malls and the elevated walkways, I found myself back in the atrium of the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, at Choi’s Happy, Happy Project, Basket Tower,and realized what work it had reminded me of: Daniel Buren’s1971 work In Situ,an enormous version of Buren’s striped canvases had briefly hung through the core of the Guggenheim. In Situwas meant to point to the nature of the institution. Here at the First Bangkok Art Biennale, Choi’s Happy, Happy Project, Basket Towerhad come to do the same thing for the biennale.
©Vincent Pruden
