‘Tradition’ in Thai Modern Art

Abstract

How is ‘tradition’ mapped when art historically deployed in Thailand? Does it correspond to an antithesis with ‘the modern’, or are an historically dependent pair which proceeds to develop or regress in tandem? The slipperiness of ‘tradition’ is due to its appropriation by the official Royal/state/Silpakorn discourse of art with its supporting educational and exhibition structures, rather than ‘tradition’ also claiming legitimacy from outside the official discourses. The ‘ethnic’, ‘folk’ or ‘anti-establishment’ positions are found in artists and work which see themselves as ‘genuine’ and working against the ‘false’.

‘Tradition’ is defined by political and art historical contexts which have been highly selective in their choice of past examples worth nominating, as in their acceptance of motivated exclusions. Much art work did not make it to exhibition let alone into art history because it did not suit official notions of ‘tradition’ and its antitheses conceived of as ‘modern’. Since ‘contemporary’ art has frequently been the field for competing norms about the ‘real’, or about what is ‘ours’, re-excavation of occluded artists and works becomes one way of rethinking the ‘contemporary’, and changing the datum set of works and artists by which the ‘contemporary’ is to be established.

Finally, the notion of ‘ours’ or ‘the national’ has to be bracketed off because it is a construct of a motivated interest: it is not natural. It functions to disturb other ‘non-national’ art practices and art historical treatments.

Figure 1.

Chang Sae-tang, Paiboon Suwannakudt and Pratuang Emjaroen at the home of Pratuang Emjaroen, 1970–71, photo by Gerald Flavin, courtesy Phaptawan Suwannakudt.

Preamble

We can put art works into the economic and cultural frames that underpin the patrons who make the historical art work socially possible. Or we can see this social history as unfolding through the specific biographies of artists who made the works. Art history often has a tenuous hold on history itself, because many of its interpretive trajectories insist on art works as its subject, articulated through a history which is often that of their patrons and collections. Such an object-oriented art history is not really about the lived structure of artists’ lives in the history of their times.

As something of an indicative counter-claim to an emphasis on the art work itself, I begin with three photographs: one from 1970–71 of three artists, Chang Sae-Tang, Pratuang Emjaroen and Paiboon Suwannakudt (Figure 1). The other two from 2013 were taken at the Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre (Figures 2, 3) on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition of Chalood Nimsamer (1929–2015) where the artist is surrounded by his former students at Silpakorn University, all of whom Thai art world insiders could surely name.

Among the artists portrayed in the first photograph (Figure 1), only Pratuang Emjaroen, pictured on the right, achieved prominence early on as a ‘modernist’, system-resisting artist whereas Chang Sae-tang, situated in the

Figure 2.

Chalood Nimsamer and former students (Chuang Moolpinit stands to Chalood’s left, or right in photo), 2013, web image in public domain, provenance unknown.

Figure 3.

Chalood Nimsamer and former students (left is Chalermchai Kositphipat, right is Sutee Kunavichayanont), 2013, web image in public domain, provenance unknown.

centre of the group, virtually retreated from the world as an ‘individualist eccentric’, an abstractionist painter and explorer of concrete poetry.¹ Paiboon, seated on the left, was relegated to the outer fringes of this system as an innovator of mural painting within a (neo-)‘traditionalist’ frame.

In passing I should note that one can only use both ‘modern’ and ‘tradition’ and all their adjectival linkages as if placed within imaginary parentheses. They are the production of highly motivated categories, all with claims to creative power, art historical signification and canonical rankings by institutions and markets. The photograph of Pratuang, Chang and Paiboon raises a very difficult issue for work-oriented art history: how do one eccentric individualist and one surrealist/modernist artist know, and even have their photo taken (by a visiting US Peace Corps volunteer) with, a revivalist-traditionalist mural temple painter? Why are these three artists, later separated by artworld practices and institutional categories, even seen together? This question can only be posed, I think, because we, the artistic or art historical viewers, have retrospectively constructed them as belonging to different discourses, artistic styles, and their works as belonging to different and incompatible series. Here, as persons, they are together. Is this a visual record of a junctural overlap in history, or does their co-presence question art history and point to its functions within canon-making, to both the ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ sides of later positioning, which we cannot simply answer?

In the second and third photographs (Figure 2, Figure 3), which include only one female artist, Kanya Charoensupakul, what are all the men doing together in approbatory unison? I will return to the issue of how this unison was established and functions later. In the third photograph, why does Chalood seem so facilely to accept the adulation and even borrow the aura of younger artists? At left in front is Chalermchai Kositpipat (Figure 3), the TV-star celebrity artist, famous as an inventor of a neo-traditionalist ‘authentically’ modern style.² On the right is Sutee Kunavichayanont, well known for his work History Class (2000), who was awarded the Red Art Award 2 from the Pridi Banomyong Institute in 2006, and was head of the Art Theory Department between 2012 and 2019. Sutee also became notorious for leading, together with the dean of his faculty, Amrit Chusuwan, and other artists, the 2014 Bangkok Shut-Down movement. This resulted, among other anti-democratic calamities, in the overthrow of the elected Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Yingluck had stepped down from her position earlier in 2013, but her proposal to hold an election in February 2014 was the target of the Shut-Down protest, which was masterminded by the notorious pro-royalist politician Suteep Thaugsuban, and laid the basis for the 2014 military coup in May.³

Concepts of Tradition and Art

If we are to interrogate the notion of ‘tradition’ in modern and contemporary Thai art, we may ask: how is this concept mapped when deployed by Thai scholars and critics, or by non-Thais, to Thai art? ‘Tradition’ in art evokes an intellectual and even emotional sentiment, rather than a precise idea as denoted by the single term, prapheni, or ‘the traditional’, ‘the customary’.

‘Tradition’ in art, however defined, generally has three aspects:

1. 1. presumed continuities in stylistics and meanings carried by art work;

2. 2. types of art practices attributed as ‘ours’ (and not ‘theirs’) that are presumed to have been continued from the past;

3. 3. ways of positioning art works within ‘our’ culture as ‘ours’, which include an ideological claim to authenticity and thereby to a controlling authority over what is ‘our’ past.

Tradition, in art and more broadly, has come to be seen as the legitimating fiction of new nations. In the core definitions of Hobsbawn and Ranger, ‘invented tradition” is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms by repetition, which automatically (unthinkingly) imply continuity with the past.⁴ Adaptation took place for old uses in new conditions and by using old models for new purposes.⁵ In particular, ‘invented traditions’ are highly relevant to that comparatively recent historical innovation, the ‘nation’, with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories among others.⁶

In many new state discourses, the word ‘tradition’ has usually been used to point to inheritance, to a series of styles, articulation of visual languages and works that have been carried forward—that is, a continuity is presumed and traditions are ‘lost’ if there is a break. Some kinds of meta-transitions can be attributed in that continuity, or discontinuity may have a regular, trans-historical modality of ‘Thainess’ that identifies what is to be defined or asserted as ‘tradition’. Here the logical disjunction arises from the questions about when, or before what defining historical event or trans-historically constructed series, ‘Thainess’ as a defining quality occurred? For revisions of Thai art, this can even include a claim to an inheritance from the ethnically diverse peoples who lived in the land that would become Thailand several millennia before the Tai began their prodigious undertakings.⁷

Some Thai historians claim, following the most respected 20th-century Thai historian, Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, that the strength of Thai traditions comes from their ability to assimilate.⁸ Prince Damrong coined the phrase prasan prayot (literally, ‘to link to be beneficial’), meaning the ability to draw what is good and useful from a variety of dissimilar sources and to unite.

Figure 4.

Cover of book, Julathusana Byachrananda, Sara samkhan nai ngan jitrakam thai praphenee [Major elements in traditional Thai painting], Bangkok: Mahawitthayalay Silpakorn, 2010.

Others, such as the American anthropologist Herbert P. Phillips, consider that tradition has been carried forward by the inherited pre-modern habit of copying.⁹ There is, however, a contradiction between those considered to have been innovators and those who have re-synthesised a new painting discourse on the basis of what was handed down from court, village, or synthetic Western practices.¹⁰ Pre-modern art, which in the Thai context means art before the 1920s, has mostly been seen as a resource for inspiration, not a stylistic model to be blindly followed.¹¹ Yet others, particularly the influential scholar and member of the Thai Royal Society, Julathusana Byachrananda (also romanised as Chulathat Phayakranonda), have defined traditional Thai painting thus (Figure 4):

Traditional Thai painting is the work of all those craftsmen from each period [in the past] who created pictures, with foundations of painting, which were beautiful and fine. They did so by grasping the taste that became the sense of beauty which all kinds of people accepted in those specific times. In particular, the customary pictorial aesthetics at the time when the craftsman created a painting, passed on the story intended for the onlooker, who could understand this through the elegant pictorial form. It was something that could be accepted by everyone in that society where the pictorial form was customary. Painting has therefore been used as a medium because it could be continuously accepted.¹²

Here Julathusana’s view, articulated without art historical interrogation, is that ‘tradition’ is what the ‘craftsmen’ adopted as a habitual visual rendition of a story—prevalently stories of the Buddha’s previous life (jataka)—which was in line with the expectations of the audience.¹³ Read from the perspective of Hobsbawn and Ranger above, Julathusana’s position fuses ‘the traditional’ with ‘the customary’.

A more nuanced understanding of the traditional interprets it as a dialectical pair with ‘the modern’, but as one side of an antithesis that works with inherited or customary discursive materials. It is a moot point how much of this flexibility is implied by Thai Buddhist practice, which does not require faithful copies of an original, merely the transmission of their ‘essential meaning’, or to what extend it is a result of an antitheses constituted by what became ‘modern’ styles. As Peleggi has argued:

Replication as the prevalent modality of Buddhist art-making did not…prevent the possibility of stylistic change.¹⁴

This is demonstrated in several settings.

The Bualuang Painting Competition, which began in 1974, categorised painting into Thai traditional painting (chitrakam thai baep prapheni), Thai

Figure 5.

Interior of Wat Ratchaorot detail, from Phanuphon and Chaiyot, 2006, see note 16, courtesy Mr Panupong Laohasom.

neo-traditional painting (chitrakam thai neow prapheni) and contemporary painting (chitrakam ruam samai).¹⁵ The current position within the formulation of state cultural policy, the dynamic of the art market, and the broader circulation of form-types and art knowledge, is that the traditional, as such, has no sovereignty or authenticity; it is simply the result of the discontinuity created by the modern.¹⁶

The valuing of tradition arises when its loss is recognised. Such a lament has been a leitmotif of Thai debates of both an activist and more academic kind since the late 19th century. The initial decline of ‘traditional’ Siamese art during the reigns of Mongkut (Rama IV, 1851–68) and Chulalongkorn (Rama V, 1868–1910) was allegedly due to

the policy of modernization and the adoption of western culture in order to save it from colonialism. Ironically, independence and freedom were preserved at the cost of traditional values.¹⁷

This is of course a highly formulaic complaint, and any examination of the temples and their murals created and decorated in the 1820s–50s (that is, before Mongkut’s reign), makes one think there was something short-sighted and self-willed behind it. If one is not trapped by the later rationalisations of cultural nationalism, one could say that the syncretic position arrived at in art under Rama III in the 1840s was highly innovative (Figure 5).

Assimilations between Thai mural painting and Chinese cra ftsmen paintings of offering tables with objects to the Buddha (toh bucha baep jin) anticipated, one may imagine, many of the later transitions between Siamese (Thai) and international art (sinlapa sakon, sinlapa inter) of the 1980s.¹⁸ It is worth paying some attention to the following historical regret found after the 1910s, since it was later frequently replicated in political debates of the 1990s and early 2000s. The Anglophone King Vajiravudh (Rama VI, reigned 1910–25)

wrote that the art of his country was like ‘a poor invalid’ because ‘Young Siam’ had become obsessed with a desire ‘to ape European manners and European ways in outward things to be accounted civilized’. These people were ‘prompt to catch and repeat like a parrot the foreigners’ ideas!’ The King asserted that ‘all sorts of vandalism have been committed against Art, Literature and Morality in the name of Civilization’.

‘Asvabahu’ felt that traditional art – which was dying – could not hope to flourish through the efforts of a few genuine art lovers; what it needed most was the general appreciation and public support.¹⁹

This was a reversal of the earlier position of King Chulalongkorn that it was better to imitate foreigners in order to be recognised by them and secure Siamese sovereignty. This was later translated by Vajiravudh, who had already founded Rongrian Poh Chang (Arts and Crafts School), as we shall see below, to respond to the need to show ‘Thai’ qualities in order to resist that same foreign condescension. He saw the cult of imitation as a brake upon national progress and in a 1911 speech said, “We should realize that we may now venture to think and act for ourselves without waiting for the lead of our preceptors.”²⁰ Similarly, in a later speech of 30 June 1925, he said, “A nation without its own traditional culture is not regarded by others as a nation at all. It is looked down upon by the world and is a subject of derision.”²¹

Here we may see that the ‘traditional’ does indeed correspond to an antithesis with ‘the modern’, and is conceived as, or conflated with, ‘the national’ and linked, if imprecisely, to ‘the international’.²² Often a continuity is proposed between what is an attribute of a modern and now national culture and an inherited past that is deemed beyond deconstruction as a national essence, rather than its very unnaturally constructed present set of values. Both concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’ function as an historically dependent pair that proceeds to develop, or regress, in tandem. Clearly the ‘national’ presumes the historical continuity from the past of a culture and an ethnic identity which is its motivated construction, both physically and in terms of historically bound competition for authority at least. But the slipperiness of ‘tradition’ is also increasingly due to its top-down appropriation by the state/royal discourse of art with its supporting educational and exhibition structures. This is instead of ‘tradition’ claiming legitimacy from outside the official discourses, and from the bottom up, as the ‘folk’ or ‘local’. Indeed, ‘tradition’ can even be constituted as the ‘classic’, with a different stratum of elite collectors to serve as the notion of overarching ‘Thai’ values seen by some foreign observers.²³

This appropriation began by the late 1930s. It is found with the adoption of a heroic realism associated with the People’s Party, a grouping that overthrew the absolute monarchy in 1932, and seen in the friezes for the so-called Democracy Monument completed in 1939–40.²⁴ It was accompanied by invocations of a neo-fascist ideology in the cultural field and a deliberate move to situate the pronouncements of Field Marshal Plaek Phibulsongkhram (hereafter, Phibun) as expressions of the public will and their support as ‘the duty of the Thai’.²⁵

In these ideological currents, the word watthanatham (culture), came implicitly to be seen as prapheni (tradition), although the word watthanatham did not appear in student dictionaries in 1929, but was used in a newspaper by 1934.²⁶ Phibun embraced the term during 1942–44 when the National Institute of Culture founded exhibitions of art held at Cultural Fairs,²⁷ and after 1948 under Phibun’s second government (1948–57). Allied as it was with re-establishing the monarchy, the National Council on Culture was elevated to Ministry of Culture in 1952–58.²⁸ There may have been a post-People’s Party volkisch self-indulgence about art during Phibun’s second reign, which became prominent under the next military dictator, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat (in power 1958–62) (Figures 6, 7). Here, ‘ethnic’ and ‘folk’ tendencies came to cover ²⁹ the construction of a ‘tradition’ which supports an anti-communist drive, or at the very least exists in the gap opened up by anti-communism as an elite and state motivation for cultural expression including art.³⁰

Phibun’s programme emphasising cultural and spiritual development was opposed to the economic development promoted by Sarit

to emphasize filial piety, nationalistic themes, and national security. The message conveyed on the airwaves was that communism was the number one public enemy, so that Phibun’s anti-communism and pro-Americanism points of view would become accepted.³¹

Figure 6.

Chalood Nimsamer, Making Merit, 1955, woodcut, 38.5 × 50.5 cm, courtesy Ms Pratima Nimsamer.

Figure 7.

Chalood Nimsamer, Songkran Festival, 1955, tempera and gold leaf, 76.5 × 52.6 cm, courtesy Ms Pratima Nimsamer.

Attempts were also made to elevate the performing arts and turn Phibun into de facto patron of Buddhism, an attempt promoted in the years 1948–56 by the Phibun-sponsored restoration of main temples.³²

It may be that the ‘traditional’ comprises a number of discourses in conflict at the same time. ‘Ethnic’, ‘folk’ or ‘anti-establishment’ positions are found in artists and works that see themselves as ‘genuine’ and working against the ‘false’. As such, a notion of a genuine and unalloyed ‘Thai life’ became a favourite theme for paintings and prints around the late 1950s.³³

Indeed, the transfer to Thailand of a notion of the expression of a ‘national essence’ as legitimating modern practice was highly cognate with earlier Fascist ideals and pedagogically propagated by the Italian naturalised Thai sculptor Corrado Feroci (from 1944, known as Silpa Bhirasri). It also seems to have evacuated a deeper historical grasp of early 19th-century art in Siam. Feroci’s historical position was complex, and may have inclined him to look for Thai art periods in which grand historical works defining a cultural essence were left, rather than look at work outside the court which had provided those monuments. Feroci left for Thailand in 1923, one year after the Fascist Party came to power in Italy. Return visits in 1930 and 1938 gave him the opportunity to see some of the monuments and public edifices commissioned by the regime.³⁴ Whatever persisted in Thai art to the 1920s–40s was simply deemed ‘traditional’ or ‘Thai’, or it was ‘anti-traditional’, ‘Western’, or ‘not Thai’, whereas in the actual practice of artists, a far more complex and interesting tale of accommodations was involved.

Figure 8.

Damrong Wong-Upparaj, Fisherman’s Village, 1960, tempera on canvas, 92 × 112 cm, courtesy Mrs Tanadet Wong-Upparaj.

Bhirasri published two booklets in English in 1954 and 1956, which summarise this essentialist and anti-Westernising position.³⁵ Later he thought that the very syntheses achieved by ‘Western’ art were the obstructions to the development of Thai painting.³⁶ Bhirasri also thought that it was the personal inspiration of the artist in which Thai cultural essences and forms could find expression,³⁷ rather than inherited conventional forms with which connection had been lost through the physical deterioration of buildings and painting grounds, and through economic flows no longer being directed at temple construction.

‘Tradition’ is defined by political and art historical contexts which have been highly selective in their choice of allegedly worthy past examples, as in their acceptance of motivated exclusions such as the elimination of human figures from the work of Damrong Wong-Upparaj after 1960. His Fisherman Village won the Gold Medal at the National Exhibition of Art (Figure 8). Its “content could be easily recognized as Thai, in contrast to the trends and fads of Western art”.³⁸ Damrong was later to go to Kyoto and accepted a view of national expression found in Japanese nihonga. He had already sought for an uninterrupted legitimacy from Thai practice at the very moment he was inventing a new view of what, as an emotional resonance or intention, could be readily recognised as ‘Thai’ by his audience.

Somewhat later in the 1990s, the Thai curator and art historian Apinan Poshyananda observed:

The main stylistic demands of this neotraditional Thai art were technical virtuosity (preferably with an array of finicky details) and a profusion of garish colours (gold being the favourite).… Neotraditional Thai art embraces characteristics related to allegory and fiction but it has been a most effective catalyst for arousing patriotism and creating a sense of Thai unity. [Three categories of neo-traditional art were] The representation of an imagined indigenous space through neo-Buddhist art; the depiction of rural scenes related to a nostalgic yearning for a lost past or cultural heritage; and the glorification of monarchical leadership and the accomplishments of the royal family.³⁹

Apinan has been a very keen observer and analyst of the contradictory pressures that drive Thai neo-traditionalism and which allow the audience to consider issues “around identity and location”.⁴⁰

This concern with identity carries many surface signs including the ‘Siamese smile’, which is an “important sign of etiquette, hospitality, and joie de vivre”. Apinan sees this ‘smile’ as a form of resistance against colonial threat.⁴¹ But the ‘Siamese smile’ in moments when social conflict surfaces, such as it did in 2008 in the clashes between pro-royalist Yellow shirts and pro-Thaksin ‘Red shirts’, could turn “sour and sinister”, as it later did in the bloody suppressions of ‘Red shirt’ supporters in April–May 2010. In fact, this conflict—which overlapped with the 2008 exhibition Apinan curated at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, titled Traces of Siamese Smile: Art + Faith + Politics + Love —makes this notion of a ‘Siamese smile’ look like an unsuccessful cultural palliative for an underlying political clash. This conflict resulted in the occupation of the Prime Minister’s residence by the Yellow shirts in August 2008, the declaration of the state of emergency in September 2008, and the shutting down of the international Suvarnabhumi airport in November 2008.

It may be difficult to accept, or officials and curators such as Apinan may not wish to explicitly contest the earlier Marxist view of art, that the ‘tradition’ had been ‘lost’. By the adoption of the ‘Siamese smile’, Apinan postulates a behavioural and physical posture that has allowed ordinary Thai citizens to resist political impositions ever since colonialism’s interferences and subsequent military regimes. The continuity of tradition is presumed by the authentic cultural values implied in the ‘Siamese Smile’, whereas a break, or a ‘Marxist’ revolutionary questioning, seems a much more appropriate interpretation of why ‘Siamese smiles’ arose as a kind of false consciousness. This had already been criticised by the influential intellectual and Marxist theorist Chit Phumisak (Teepakorn), whose writing also carried a Marxist denigration of what he would have called ‘bourgeois art’:

In the period of semi-colonial feudalism, most of the people’s images in artworks from noblemen, capitalist business people are backward or fantasies and under the suppression of the nobles. People have only bodies but no brain; like puppets for leaders to control. The real value of the human being does not exist in their art works.⁴²

Curator and critic Thanom Chapakdee follows a Marxist line of argument, which goes back to the 1930s to what now appears to have been the failed, or at least incomplete, revolution against royal absolutism, rather than its successful overthrow. As he states:

The arts which have political goals are in contrast with arts which ‘serve’ the state. However, if the goal of the state is to put absolute power in people’s hands, the arts for people and arts for the nation are the same. The logic of serving the people or serving the state then becomes the same as art for the people.⁴³

Thanom thinks about what kinds of discourse are permitted to artists who implicitly accept Chit Phumisak’s critique, since artists work in a climate of fear of what will happen if so-called ‘tradition’ is overthrown:

If the artists do not have self-confidence and do not respect their own artworks, the consequence is fear. They fear enough as to not create art works from their deep desires, but create only artworks in the national standard without any story about low class people.⁴⁴

To sum up, not only is the notion of tradition subject to interpretations of convenience, which reinforce the social power of those making or collecting those art works deemed ‘traditional’, especially paintings; the concept also masks a grasp on social power whose roots in social position, folk practice, or a proprietary notion of the classical inheritance, are all very vaguely expressed, if at all. Without an articulated community of customary practice, they could allow for the obscuring, if not the concealment, of the real artistic intentions and self-interests of patron and artist alike.

If customary forms—which we might in other terms call ‘folk’ if found among the general population, or ‘classic’ if found among the elite—were communicated to the 20th century from the 19th century, then their transfer and transformation were almost completely restricted by the narrow repetitiveness of the arts practices involved, and by the restrictive artist-teacher and artist-patron relations by which their transmission was facilitated. This means that later claims to inherit, to carry forward, or to creatively transform a ‘traditional’ form or practice are almost entirely ideologically motivated, rather than due to any incidental feature of congruence between the transferred and transformed materials.

Before the ‘Contemporary’: Art Developments from the 1950s–70s

There is unfortunately no detailed study, so far as I am aware, of the relation between art production, generation of private wealth, and various military rulers in the 1950s–70s. But one could make some speculative generalisations about some of these possibilities. The business elite, which became more than just the leading Sino-Thai conglomerates and their families during the 1970s, was highly involved in the conspicuous consumption of art works and the support of art exhibitions and art competitions from the 1970s onwards, with individual forays into art patronage before that.⁴⁵ The Sino-Thai elite depended on wealth that had long been generated by its relationships with various military rulers and, one has to suppose, their dependent family networks, since the 1940s. They profited from and were highly dependent on the military elite for contracts and opportunities. Its leadership was largely drawn from commanders of the Northern Army, the 93rd division next to the Shan states of Burma. Between 1947and 1975 Shan opium was the source of revenue and power for the KMT (Kuomintang/Guomindang, Nationalist Chinese Army) in Burma, and for the Northern Army in Bangkok. It has been pointed out that all of Thailand’s military leaders between 1947 and 1975 were officers from the Northern Army, including Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat and Police General Phao Sriyanond (Figures 9, 10).⁴⁶

Figure 9.

Sarit Thanarat, public domain, after the 20 October 1958 coup.

Figure 10.

Phao Sriyanon, public domain, Wikipedia.

Among the most important Sino-Thai financial entrepreneurs was Tak Piak Chin, later known as Chin Sophonpanich (1908–88), who arrived in Thailand in 1928 from an impoverished village in Shantou.⁴⁷ During World War II he supplied both the Free Thai movement and the Japanese war machine with daily necessities. After founding the Bangkok Bank in 1944 and profitably manipulating war bonds, in 1952 Chin floated a Thai Financial Syndicate whose chairman was Police General Phao Sriyanond (Figure 10). Phao controlled the opium trade from Burma fina nced by Chaozhou (Teochew) traders in Bangkok, and was so close to Chin that when Phao had to flee to Switzerland after a second coup in 1957, Chin himself fled at the same time to Japan, from whence he could return in 1964. Chin was well involved in art patronage by the 1970s and in 1974 his bank founded the Bua Luang art competition.⁴⁸

Outside of some bureaucratic contracts for monuments and employment as art teachers in tertiary and secondary institutions, artists could not seek financial support from the Sino-Thai entrepreneurs’ art patronage until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among these was the support of Sia Lek, the owner of the Mercedes import concession and the theme park Muang Boran (Ancient City), for Paiboon Suwannakudt’s mural paintings in replicas of

Figure 11.

Paiboon Suwannakudt, Mural in Dusit Mahaprasat at Muang Boran, 1972, mural painting, 120 × 200 cm, courtesy Phaptawan Suwannakudt.

Figure 12.

Paiboon Suwannakudt, mural at Montien Hotel, 1976, courtesy Phaptawan Suwannakudt.

historic monasteries from 1972 (Figure 11, 12). These were new paintings, undertaken in styles and dealing with subjects thought to be ‘traditional’ largely re-invented by the artist.

Here one may speculate that the massive accumulation of wealth by a few figures in the Sino-Thai elite and associated military cliques who ruled Thailand from 1945 onwards, did not result in many art purchases until the 1970s. Indeed, the painter Damrong Wong-Upparaj thought there was a boom in art purchases by the international diplomatic community, rather than the Thai elite, from roughly 1960 to 1966. After that, and for reasons he was not sure about, the art market seemed to collapse until the early 1990s.⁴⁹

Although artists like Phaiboon and Angkarn Kalayanapong widely circulated in literary circles we would now consider to be anti-establishment, they were not yet court artists in waiting. A lack of taste and interest in art seems to have governed the Sino-Thai economic elite as a class, until artists began to be taken up as media personalities, particularly in the 1990s, and could be deployed to advertise products. Some such artists became public taste makers along with their celebritisation on TV, including Chalermchai Kositpipat (Figure 13), whom I recall could be named as a major artist by many taxi drivers who had seen him on TV in the early 1990s.

What was this ruling military that was allied with the emergent Sino-Thai entrepreneurial class, itself interpenetrating through marriage the royal court, and unified by the person of the king? This is a vexed and sometimes politically fraught issue in understanding the Thai patronage elite. But what is clear is that both Sarit and Phao were enormously rich. As Pasuk and Baker posit:

The military officer class became somewhat like a ruling caste, distinguished by its unique dress and rituals, vaunting its own purity, and claiming executive privileges. Generals took over executive posts in state enterprises, and honorary posts in sports and social organizations. By their own machismo and corruption, they re-legitimized old-fashioned male privileges and habits of exploiting political power for personal gain. Sarit appropriated women as kings once had, with a special interest in beauty queens. After his death, his assets were estimated at 2.8 billion baht. Virtually all had been accumulated while he was prime minister and the amount represented around 30 per cent of the total capital budget for that period. The government eventually seized 604 million as illegally acquired.⁵⁰

Figure 13.

Surapol Phanyawatchira, Stay for long, 1982, oil on canvas, 110 × 110 cm, courtesy the artist.

Furthermore, the collapse in 1973 of Praphas Charusathien’s regime, which had succeed Sarit’s government in 1957, also resulted in 600 million baht of illegally acquired assets.⁵¹ Sarit had sat on 22 company boards, and Praphas on 44.⁵²

Alongside this kleptocracy, a ferociously repressive police state arose in the 1950s. This was due to no simple transmission of US foreign policy goals, overshadowed as these would become by the wars in Vietnam. Some specialists think that

[t]he Americans certainly had not created the impulse toward repression, which had already arisen in the minds of Phibun and other leading Thais, but US Policy reinforced it. US military assistance accelerated and intensifies the implementation of repressive measure…US Military aid transformed America’s relationship with Thailand’s military government. Thailand’s security requirements had not made alignment with the United States inevitable…military politics – and the lure of military assistance – made alignment with the United States compelling.⁵³

Since some of the artists in the 1950s and 1960s like Paiboon and Angkarn were socially familiar with, if not friends of, progressive writers and activists, they operated in an atmosphere of necessary fear of police repression.⁵⁴ This atmosphere went on until the early 1980s, when artists and activists with formerly leftist sympathies were allowed to return from the jungle, where some had earlier gone to escape the aftermath of the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University.⁵⁵ By the 1980s they were very broadly linked to political opposition, but without much more clarity than broad generational and ideological sympathies. They included both open-minded Marxist theorists like Kasian Thejapira and imaginative surrealist artists like Surapol Panyawichitra (Figure 13).

Despite public monuments of a populist and nationalist sensibility, produced from the late 1920s, such as portraits of the king (Figure 14), as well as a kind of nationalist propaganda art represented by portraits of significant supporters of Phibun like Luang Wichit Wathakan (Figure 15), after 1945 the art world arising under the military seems to have suffered the same kind of failures as anti-royalists like Pridi Banomyong and Phibun from the 1930s. An underlying cause may be that there were significant social and cultural differences inherited among the military after 1945 from the leading members of the 1932 Revolution, most of whom knew foreign languages and cultures from their training abroad. In contrast, the post-war military leaders such as Sarit and the Coup Group that overthrew Phibun in 1957 were mostly “indigenous products”.⁵⁶ The failure of the 1932 Promoters to bridge the ideological gap between Western concepts of democratic rule and traditional ideas of politics, and to develop true political parties with an entirely different patronage structure to earlier systems based on charismatic affiliation, led to the perpetration of a system of government heavily relying on authority, personal relationships and clique politics.⁵⁷ This may have increased interest in an art of nationalist monumentalism. Indeed, one may doubt there was any such phenomenon as ‘Thai traditional art’ in an era which proclaimed Thai values in differentiation from the past.

Post-1945, or one might even say post-1958 coup, with the establishment of the new military ruling system which lasted until 1973, the Palace and royal cliques also played a political role. Even before the 1958 coup the Palace

Figure 14.

Cerrado Feroci photographed with Prince Naris and a sculpture portrait of King Vajiravudh, 1927, Silpa Bhirasri National Museum.

Figure 15.

Cerrado Feroci, Luang Wichit Wathakan, 1937–38, plaster, photograph John Clark, Silpa Bhirasri National Museum.

made a special effort to befriend the police chief Phao.⁵⁸ This was followed by a new praetorian system in which the military, which was nominally the guardian servants of the crown, in fact became its puppetmaster. As pointed out by the leading researcher on the history of this period, Thak Chaloemtiarana:

The revolution of October 20, 1958, abolished democratic ideas borrowed from the West and suggested that it would build a democratic system that would be appropriate to the special characteristics and realities of the Thai. It will build a democracy, a Thai way of democracy.⁵⁹

The stepping away from a populist military paternalism was transformed into a royal nationalism symbolised by the change, in 1960, from the celebration of National Day on 24 June to 5 December, the King’s birthday. If in the late 1930s the National Day celebrations had been accompanied by art exhibitions—whose works unfortunately remain untraced⁶⁰—these were, one may suppose, substituted by the National Art Exhibitions from 1959.⁶¹ What might in another polity have been a simple succession of art styles associated with a limited but not small patronage class was thus transformed into a new national symbolic emphasis on the monarch as fount of value, including initial liberal dispensations in the monarch’s musical taste for jazz and for a time around 1960–64, in expressionist oil painting. In effect the monarchy had come full circle. Having been overthrown by the military, marginalised during the initiation of the constitutional system of Pridi and later Phibun, it was resurrected by Sarit to emerge as the central focus of official Thai nationalism in a manner not unlike that envisaged by Vajiravudh many decades earlier.⁶²

Paying some attention to the political context of symbolic prominence in the 1950s and 1960s is of importance as a control, when looking at the concern with nationalism in some exhibitions in the 2000s. Perhaps the most obvious sentiment amongst artists was expressed by the photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom in 2001 through his reworking, as part of his Pink Man series, of Neal Ulevich’s iconic photograph of the 6 October Massacre, questioning what the outcome had been of the sacrifices of demonstrators in 1976 (and, I suppose, in 1992, too) (Figure 16). He posed the issue thus:

Q: What did they die for?

A: So we can go shopping.

Figure 16.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Horror in Pink, 2001, photograph, courtesy the artist.

The subterranean economic drives for the consumer empowerment of the 2000s were to be projected back on the 1970s where the students sought for political empowerment. In the unpaginated slim catalogue of the exhibition, History & Memory: The hook, the line, and the sinker of Thai History 101, in which this work was shown, the dedication is advanced:

In memory of our heroes who laid down their lives for democracy, in the hope that Thai history will not forget them and that their ultimate sacrifice will not have been in vain.⁶³

The early 2000s led to a nostalgic looking back to the 1970s. But there were also comments of Manit’s spouse, Ing K., which looked back further to the 1950s. After King Ananda Mahidol died in a shooting incident in June 1946, and after long drawn-out inquiries and court trials intended to cast aspersions on Pridi Banomyong, General Phao had three innocent members of the royal entourage executed in February 1955, including Chit Sinhaseni, one of Ing K’s relatives. In History and Memory, she exhibited paintings including Portrait of Little Granny, the widow of Chit Sinhaseni. Ing K. records of her family and this failed group (Figure 17):

Figure 17.

Ing K, Portrait of Little Granny, 2001, oil on canvas, courtesy the artist.

When elephants fight, the grass is crushed. The proverb goes. With this painting, for which ‘Little Granny’ kindly sat for me, I hope I may be permitted to share the suffering of one blade of grass.⁶⁴

Quite why, except for political antipathy to the rise of Thaksin Shinawatra as Prime Minister in 2001, such a highly convoluted preoccupation with history should have surfaced in the 2000s in Thai modern art requires further explanation. The cover statement of the catalogue for the 2001 exhibition at Chulalongkorn University for History and Memory states:

Without history and memory to be our compass, we are doomed to walk in circles, lost in admiration of the same old absurdities. The darkness clings upon us like a curse. We seem destined to repeat the same mistakes forever.⁶⁵

There was a reprise of this history-making exhibition mode four years later in 2005 in Neo-chaat niyom / Neo-Nationalism, a contemporary political art exhibition.

Figure 18.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Pink, White & Blue (the future) 2005, C-print, 57 × 47 cm, courtesy the artist.

Now is the ideal moment for reflection…lest we fall prey to nationalist consumerism, or start running around accusing other people of being traitors to their nation.… Thaksin and his Thai Rak Thai Party [Thais love Thais] have become all-powerful as they adopt a CEO administrative style and pursue a neo-nationalist agenda; as the battle rages between this representative of Thai capitalist interests and royalist conservatives over the people’s hearts and minds.⁶⁶

(Figure 18)

A short dialogue between Manit and Sutee Kunavichayanont included in the catalogue makes it clear that nation[alism] is projected over tradition[alism] as a kind of exaggerated nostalgic appeal:

What are your thoughts on nationalism?

Sutee: If it’s in its place and is not disproportionate, I think it could be a creative force. But if it’s exaggerated and unreasoning, it would become ‘fanatical nationalism’; as [historian] Sujit Wongthes says: ‘Backwards and fanatical nationalism’. I like the term because it’s graphic. Backwards in this case means tradition-bound, extreme conservatism. So they become nationalist fanatics.⁶⁷

It appears to Manit that consumerism is an all-destructive force:

…the mechanism or means by which the cult of capitalism is grown and nurtured, [and which] can transform absolutely anything and everything into profits, even nationalism.⁶⁸

But Manit, in a way that parallels Apinan’s understanding of the ‘Thai smile’ as a critical cover for a hypocritical nationalism,⁶⁹ is careful to distinguish displays of patriotic sentiment from a new totalitarianism concealed by its happy, bright face.

My work [here] can be divided into two groups. The first is about the displaying of patriotic sentiment…. The second set is about ‘The Leader and the Followers’, the leader here being Pink man, a leader with a modern image. He no longer has to wear a military uniform. He is leader in a suit; he is bright and friendly, not strict and grim like the soldiers of the past.⁷⁰

(Figure 18)

Iola Lenzi in her contribution to the catalogue, in part sums up the transposition of ‘tradition’ by ‘nation’.

…in modern and newly democratic Thailand, the successful ‘selling’ of the concept of nation is tantamount to power. While the state attempts to assert its own formulaic construct of nation, many contemporary art practitioners propose an alternative version base-layered on truth and thought.⁷¹

Genealogies

The problem of tradition and neo-tradition is both a formal one—what types of artistic expression constituted the tradition—and a practical one—how were what kinds of art communicated, by which artists, to whom? These genealogies of association criss-cross, but it is clear that the professionalisation of the artist as an independent producer figure separated from a craftsman base is a late phenomenon in Thai visual arts practice. As we have seen, the loss of craft skills was identified early in the 20th century under Vajiravudh, as was the need to have these passed on via a school or educational system. But these new formally trained artisans were not emplaced in

Figure 19.

Chalermchai Kositphipat, Nirvana of Buddha, 1984, pencil on paper.

an autonomous atelier system where the sub-branches could generate new atelier heads and relatively individualised styles. Artisans were trained in the Rongrian Praneet Silapakam (Fine Arts School, from 1933) so they could function as Silpa Bhirasri’s assistants in 1938–39 for the Democracy Monument, which was unveiled in 1940, but this did not amount to the certified individuation of artists as creators of their own styles and contents until the first diploma graduates from Silpakorn in 1949 and the first National Art exhibition in 1949. Chalood Nimsamer is supposed to have been the first to formally graduate with a BA in Sculpture in 1954. Thus, if we are to speak of a transmitted practice, even a craft one, as the basis for a tradition, this situation does not really exist until the 1950s. It is interesting now to look at comments on one of the early art competitions because they are couched in terms of ‘traditional’ and ‘neo-traditional’.

The Bualuang Art [sic, Painting] Competition, firstly organized in 1978 [sic, actually 1974] has been held for three decades for Thai traditional style and creative fine arts. Wallapisara Sodprasert’s work in the exhibition was categorized as Thai traditional, while Chalermchai Kositpipat’s work as Neo-Thai traditional style. Thai traditional and Neo-Thai traditional style are not so different in terms of concept: they differ in ways of presentation. i.e. the former retains and is based on the original traditions of Thai arts, while the latter has separated itself and begun to have the artist’s own form, which could be mixed with western forms.⁷²

(Figure 19)

When the painter Preecha Thaothong drew a distinction between original traditions and the artistic innovation based on them, he was really only referring to the late 1990s and after. He was not telling us how a transfer took place between the traditional, or the customary, and the contemporary redeployment and transformation of its styles or forms.

Sometimes we can establish types of artist and artistic position, particularly based on foreign experience or mediation inwards of exogenous styles. Much modern art history in Asia has not gone much beyond this. We know, regardless of style or practice, what it means to be a mainstream, establishment artist in Thailand, but where artists have to survive through conservative client patronage or narrowly channelled exhibition opportunities, it was difficult in Thailand to clearly found alternative categories. These would include an anti-mainstream and potentially anti-establishment art practice like that of Paiboon Suwannakudt, and sometimes an avant-gardism, like Vasan Sitthikhet’s, which is more one of attitude than any radical revision of the status of art objects or the style they manifest (Figure 20). No art world seems able to handle eccentric outsiders like Chang Sae-tang (Figure 21).

The way in which conformity is socially engineered has consequences for the kinds of anti-mainstream art practices that are allowed. Recently Thongchai Winichakul has analysed the phenomenon of SOTUS, which stands for Seniority Order Tradition Unity Spirit, a Thai peer-group hazing or bullying system of initiation for newly recruited cohorts in the military, which also functions widely at colleges and other peer-group ceremonies, including Silpakorn University.⁷³ Thongchai calls for careful understanding of this system.

I want [the audience] to go back and think whether or not it is true that Thai society is full of shameful naivete. How does it exist if it is not because the Thai people still let the conditions for the shameful naivete to go on, …because this is the society of the coward, the naive and of those who fake naivete? [We let the conditions to go on] to the extent that it is not easy for justice to exist. But if Thai society is so dreadful, we need to face up to it, to confront it, instead of refusing or denying [the dreadfulness]. We must face the reality. There is no other way than to struggle against and change this.⁷⁴

Figure 20.

Vasan Sitthikhet, Committing suicide culture the only way farmers escape debt, 1995, courtesy the artist.

Figure 21.

Chang Sae-tang, Untitled (14 October 1973), 1973, oil on canvas, 208 × 247 cm, courtesy The Tang Chang Private Museum, Thailand.

Conformity in the art world produces solidarity with teachers and shuts out all those who have not agreed or who followed different and sometimes heterodox artistic trajectories such as seen in the life and work of Chang Sae-tang.⁷⁵ We should not forget that the founding of the Silpakorn system in the 1940s and the establishment of the role of a fine artist simultaneously excluded a very large set of class groups from the ‘heights’ of art practice. Not only were self-taught outsider artists like Chang Sae-tang excluded, but also capable craftsmen teaching at art foundations who produced ‘folk’ art, or works with a sensibility thought to be authentically Thai, were not given the status of artist.

The splitting of artists from artisans is significantly marked by artisans not being named in many exhibitions of artisanal work, such as the 2011 catalogue of works by artists working the Queen’s Foundation.⁷⁶ The catalogue states:

The Thai royal artisans could not have continued the gracious tradition from the past Ayutthaya period, to the present without the royal kindness and regular attention from the Kings of Thailand. They kindly enhance the royal artisans to create valuable artworks for the country, to encourage them to pass on the Thai traditional arts to the next generation, and to assist them to improve their works with good acknowledgement of social changes.

Artisans thus create a tradition that is graciously favoured. They are not purveyors of professional excellence or aesthetic innovation. Their work is treasured for its defence of a depersonalised kind of artistic continuity. This is quite different from embodying a more profound and personalised way of approaching earlier art forms or aesthetic sensibilities.

Inside and Outside

Returning to Silpakorn, Paiboon Suwannakudt was a self-declared outsider from his refusal to take part in National Art Exhibitions after the early 1950s. In this he was like other outsider or eccentric artists who were his friends, such as Chang Sae-tang.⁷⁷ But Chalood Nimasamer, the first artist to graduate from Silpakorn with a BA in 1954, who trained in Rome from 1956–58 (Figure 22)

and exhibited in the US graphic art in 1963–64, was also responsible for the deliberate failure to renew the contracts of 12 artists

Figure 22.

Chalood Nimsamer, Cathedral in Roma, 1958, drawing, 43.5 × 56.5 cm, courtesy Ms Pratima Nimasmer.

Figure 23.

Chalood Nimsamer, Lokuttara, 1991, fibreglass and gold leaf, height 700 cm, Queen Sirkit National Convention Centre, courtesy Ms Pratima Nimsamer.

Figure 24.

Chalood Nimsamer, Inthri, 1995, bronze, collection Thai Farmer’s Bank, courtesy Ms Pratima Nimsamer.

at Silpakorn in 1973. Perhaps such a masking or switching is the site of real institutional conflict over resources and opportunities to produce and exhibit art. It also conceals, or makes it difficult to argue out, an implicit ideological conflict over the meaning of art. Art worlds are riven by frequently unacknowledged peer group or inter-generational conflict and this could be no more clearer than at Silpakorn where there was a little-discussed conflict between 1973 and 1976 that resulted in the virtual expulsion of one set of artists.

We must suppose what were effectively expulsions involved a clash between ‘professional’ or ‘certified’ artists allied with Chalood, and the craft and skill-oriented emphasis in the technical training associated with Sompot Upa-In.⁷⁸ Chalood’s lineage, under the guise of a tolerant stylistic flexibility, was associated with an incipiently pro-establishment and later royalist conservative tendency which was sometimes bombastic in expression (Figure 24). The expelled group was from a tendency was associated with the Art for Life movement from the 1970s and a quasi-progressivism loosely associated with the writings of Chit Phumisak.

The 12 artists were re-incorporated and kept isolated inside a newly established Faculty of Applied Art at Silpakorn, and the conservative tendencies could be given a transformative face in the Department of Thai Art founded by Chalood Nimsamer in 1976. However, there is no doubt that much has still to be explained about these mid-1970s ideological and interest clashes within Silpakorn.

In October 1976, a student massacre took place at Thammasat University, which was prompted by the statements of the monk Kittivuttho:

I believe it is the right thing to do. Even though Thais are Buddhists we do not consider this action as murder. Anyone who is trying to destroy our nation, our religion, and our monarchy is not a whole human. We must focus on the fact that we are killing demons. This is every Thai’s duty.⁷⁹

These tensions were palpable when in 1977, a printmaker close to Chalood, Pishnu Supanimit (Figure 25), published in a newspaper article the inflammatory statement that “Art after 1973 used the rights and freedom that exceeded the boundaries of democracy.”⁸⁰

Among Other Issues: Canons and Cross-Regional Evaluations

For Thai art, its artists, critics and patrons have frequently sought external approval and sanctioned intervention since the visits of Rama V, King Chulalongkorn to the Venice Biennale in 1897 and 1906–07. These also included portrait commissions of the King and his family as well as salon nudes purchased from distinguished contemporary Italian painters.

Figure 25.

Pishnu Supanimit, Contrasting form no. 3, intaglio, 66 × 87 cm, gold medal winner at 25th National Art Exhibition 1979, courtesy the artist.

The early part of the 20th century also saw frequent participation of Siamese delegations in international expositions, and the employment of able European artists, usually Italian, for various projects in Siam. These included art nouveau wall paintings by Galileo Chini (1873–1956) in the Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall, which was completed in 1915. By the early 2000s with the various displays of Thai art in the Venice Biennale, some Thai curators and critics like Apinan, became a little tired with the rigid frames in which it was interpreted by non-Thai art critics. This began with the reaction to the exhibition Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia, which was curated by Apinan at the Asia Society, New York in 1997,⁸¹ and was followed by a disjunction between the external articulation of canon-seeking and revision, seen in the 2006 Thailand Eye exhibition in London. Clearly it was as important to change international frames for Thai art, as it was to have the approbation of an internationally renowned exhibition site like the Saatchi Gallery.⁸²

Thailand Eye serves as a fresh and challenging platform for an array of different perspectives, enabling the Western take on Thailand to become less rigid, conventional and reliant on stereotypes.⁸³

Thailand Eye offered a perfect domestic art world foil to current political events without having to express support for the military government. Thailand Eye opened at Bangkok Art Culture Centre in March 2016 and ended on 7 August 2016, the day of the charter draft for the public referendum of the new constitution.⁸⁴

Figure 26.

Rirkrit Thiravanija, Freedom cannot be simulated August 19, 2015, 2016, each 220 × 160 cm, oil on newspaper and linen 2016.

Figure 27.

Detail of 26.

Another issue is the way international selection and canonisation of ‘Thai’ art is a mechanism for Asian curators entering international circuits much as the ‘Thai’ art they promote. As Apinan has stated,

The desire to catch up with the ‘new’ internationalism has resulted in many Asian curators wanting to plug themselves into the global art circuit. Their criteria and judgement of ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ still rely on Western standard for example, who is curating Documenta and Venice Biennale. At the same time, there are those who react to the restrictive canons of the West / Internationalism. Their response to Euro-American paradigm has produced the Asia-centric discourse in search for Asia identity and indigenous space.⁸⁵

The field of ‘international art’ is pre-eminently one of spectacle displayed to the eyes of the Other. It may be no accident that those artists operating in a cosmopolitan situation, where cultural affiliation is only a background material for deployment and who are not in the sway of national imperatives, resist spectacle even as they may engage it as a field of practice which invokes an audience to aesthetic appreciation (Figure 26). Those involved with relational aesthetics, including Rirkrit Tiravanija (Figure 27), “function as an ongoing critique of the spectacle and modes of passive spectatorship of a life mediated totally in and through images and representations including images portraying the Other”.⁸⁶

I doubt, in the situation of political instability of Thailand and of the still present crises of legitimate authority where the military and police behave with impunity towards other Thai citizens, whether the domain of the spectacular has been etiolated. It is a powerful substitute for the real, if an unstable one. In October 2018 the exhibition of much international art alongside Thai artists at the Bangkok Art Biennale in many auratic sites associated with ‘Thai’ traditions, may have sufficiently relativised what was accepted as ‘Thainess’ in art. The exhibition may have allowed ‘Thai traditions’ to appear as one set of preferences among many in Thailand: the choice of art values is the more pressing preoccupation of art. This question is not about where those values are supposed to have come from, in whatever ‘spectacle of traditions’ ruling nationalists may want to propagate for their own various ends.