In search of a world without borders

The meeting with co-curator of the Thai Pavilion Steve Pettifor transforms the presence of Navin Rawanchiakul, representing his country at the Venice Biennale, into a very interesting opportunity to talk about contemporary Thai art. An avid connoisseur of the art of this Asian country, Pettifor published Flavours, Thai Contemporary Art in 2004, one of the few books on the subject published in English. Since 2007, he has been the editor of Bangkok Art Map.

But let's go in order, starting with the exhibition of Navin Rawanchaikul. Next to the main entrance of the Biennale Gardens is a small restaurant called il Paradiso. Its historic open space overlooking the gardens is a showcase for those who habitually attend the event in the lagoon city. This small restaurant immediately attracted the attention of Rawanchaikul, an artist who likes to present his work in a public space. So the space adjacent to the commercial premises became Paradiso di Navin on the occasion of Thailand's fifth participation in the Biennale; and it is yet another part of Navinland, a work in progress through which the artist has laid the foundations for a model of a world without borders, originating with some lucid and sobering thought about the idea of belonging and identity.

Navin Rawanchikul began to exhibit in 1992 in his hometown, Chiang Mai, in an emblematic exhibition Chiang Mai Social Installation, a group show organized with students at the Chiang Mai art school. The pieces were located in very different kinds of public spaces that included temples and municipal cemeteries. And, as Pettifor writes in the catalog, "Rawainchaikul realized what was then considered a radical intervention in contemporary art. A meeting of artists, including Moontien Boonma and Araya Rasdjiarmreansook, who returned from overseas to impart their experience to a loose affiliate of local creative individuals." The choice of public space was eventually radicalized and became an essential element in the artist's work, thus expressing the clear desire to communicate directly with people.

Navin looks at the world and has transformed it into a vast fresco of teeming ordinary and extraordinary life stories merged within a narrative that becomes a bit of a fairy tale but ultimately with the precise intention of conducting a survey on contemporary identity. Starting with himself, to which the artist refers in the catalogue of the exhibit Paradiso di Navin, "Certainly I am Thai, but I never understood how the arts can be separated by national identity. This question prompted me to propose Navinland for the Thai Pavilion and to intensify the discussion regarding the idea of citizenship and nationality in today's fragmented world."

An internationally renowned artist, as mentioned, Navin was born in Chiang Mai to Indian parents, and he never tires of underlining how the Thai population regarded him as Khaek, an outsider, even though he was born in Thailand. The actors in his work are people who Rawanchaikul encounters every day or those who have worked with him. The frequent use of painting is a stylistic choice since it is a very simple and direct. As he stated in a previous interview, "...people understand right away what you want to narrate." Navin is an exceptional storyteller, but as a good reporter he simply writes his stories and distances himself from any kind of central role. The best known of these is dedicated to the artist Insone Wongsamm who, in 1962, decided to leave on his scooter to visit Florence, the hometown of his master, Silpa Bhirasi, and Italian artist and Academy professor, Corrado Feroci, who was considered to be the inspiration of modern painting in Thailand.

In Paradiso in Venice, Rawanchaikul proposed another tale of identity and he did so, as he often does, through an object, Pha Khao Mar, the ancient and characteristic fabric also worn in Thai villages. For the Biennale he teamed up with the company founded by Jim Thompson, the famous American businessman who over the course of 60 years helped revive the silk business in Thailand on an industrial scale. Thompson's story has become legendary because of his mysterious disappearance during a trip to Malaysia in '67.

Steve Pettifor knows these stories by heart and has told them in many ways in his editorials. He explains that, "contemporary Thai art is attracting enormous interest from the public and the international market." As for the medium, "…painting," he stresses, "continues to play a major role, although many artists are increasingly turning to media such as photography, video performance art or even interventional art". Among the themes under investigation, "the dominant one continues to be people's progressive loss of spirituality, understood not only in the religious sense but as intrinsic to life itself. People imitate Western models and become increasingly consumeristic and materialistic." The strongly kitsch aspect of these attitudes has become one of the subjects in Rawanchaikul's work.

Spiritual impoverishment, especially in terms of the corruption and bulimia of political elites and leaders, is faced firmly by one of the most famous Thai artists, Vasan Sitthiket. "In the late 1980s, his work had great impact in Thailand. Today it has become more familiar." And the artist has not modified his radical attitude. Moontien Boonma does not use half-measures in taking a stand against corruption and the new models imposed on people—consequences of the violent transition from rural to urban lifestyles. The comparison with different Western and modern cultural models is investigated by Ajarn Araya in a series of refined pieces in which the artist contrasts Thai farmers with such 19th century Western masterpieces as Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe or Millet's The Gleaners.

In Thailand there has been a recovery or, better yet, the reuse of traditional techniques such as textiles or wood carving. Thus the artists are critically reinterpreting tradition. The practices of recovering ancient tradition is very present in some of Navin's works like the large movie billboards. In Thailand, there is a long tradition that regards these painted posters; some can still be found in small towns not far from Bangkok.

Asked if Thailand is a country where the social function of art is recognized, Pettifor will respond in the affirmative since it was born from a spirit of opposition. In June at Art Basel, temple of the Western contemporary art market, Rirkrit Tiravanija asked some young Thai artists to paint the white walls of the stand of the 100 Tonson Gallery from Bangkok with news stories that had filled the pages of newspapers in various countries. At Iniva in London, Rawanchaikul will present Hong Rub Khaek (Khaek Welcome) in which he asked the Indians who migrated to Chiang Mai to explain what it means to build a house in a place that is different from the ones in which they were born.
Riccarda Mandrini