The Horizon and the Holy: Re-imaging the Thai Monarchy Following the 2020 Protests

In an abandoned school, in Thailand's rural Isan region, humans walked on the sky. A mural of a royal blue sky, made of coloured dust, lay on a classroom floor. Each day, the breeze from open windows blew the dust, changing the image. This shifting sky made of earth was part of Nipan Oranniwesna's site-specific installation Then one morning, they were found dead and hanged (2020). It used symbols familiar to all Thai people to boldly re-image democracy, monarchy and Thailand's long history of struggle between the two. This work, and others that use such potent symbols, reframe Thai political history and enlighten the way many Thai artists are imagining the future of their country.

The political timescale of Thailand is fraught. Those who have been fighting for democratic reforms for decades feel that little has changed. In the ongoing student-led protests that began in 2020, frequent references to the massacres, revolutions and coups of the twentieth century imply that these silenced histories are repeating. Old dreams for a powerful constitution and reformed monarchy have been held back. The overlap between past, present and future leaves many Thais unmoored, unsettled by how things are but hesitant to disrupt anything out of cynicism or fear of what may come. Bringing about an alternative future for Thailand requires contestation of the political histories of two co-legitimizing forces: the monarchy and religion.

In the Buddhist theocracy of Thailand, rulers deploy symbols of holiness to affirm their right to hold power. From 2020 to 2022, protesters organizing for democracy in Thailand attempted to hijack these highly regulated symbols and resurface buried narratives to critique monarchy and religion. The king's sovereignty is rooted in his holiness, as sanctioned by Thailand's Buddhist order, known as the Sangha. In modern Thai history, conservative and progressive contingents have weaponized spiritually symbolic images in a battle for political legitimacy. Conservative political legitimacy calls on "official-nationalist symbols of monarchy and religion", while progressive political legitimacy turns for its justification to "popular sovereignty as symbolized by the constitution".¹ Through royal purity campaigns and purging Buddhist religious institutions (including the Sangha), the current regime has reinforced the mutually legitimizing relationship between the monarchy and Buddhism.

Recently, artists have taken up royalty and religion as their subjects to reveal this foundation of conservative political legitimacy to be fraught. This essay discusses works of art that deploy two such motifs—the sky (ฟ้า) and the 1901–02 holy man rebellion or Phi Bun rebellion (กบฏผีบุญ)—and how they express a cutting critique of the conservative version of political legitimacy. Symbolically, the sky is inherently bound to the holiness of the king and his divine right to rule as dharmaraja (righteous ruler). The revolutionaries of the 1901–02 Phi Bun rebellion acknowledged the spiritual legitimacy of another leader, challenging the absolutism of heavenly authority. Whereas royal propaganda and iconography disseminated the symbology of the sky throughout Thailand, state curricula suppressed the specific history and symbology of the Phi Bun rebellion. The works of art discussed here deploy the imagery of the sky—a symbol of the king's religious purity—to question this critical aspect of monarchic legitimacy. Works of art that recall the Phi Bun rebellion approach this same facet of legitimacy from a local, historical angle. Both motifs have the capacity to question the absolute nature of monarchic rule in a time of increasing consolidation of the current regime's religious and political power. Artists referring to the sky and the Phi Bun rebellion invoke over a century of political struggle. These artists are reconfiguring the old stories and hierarchies that govern the use of these symbols of holiness in Thailand.

This article unfolds in two parts, focused on the motifs of (1) the sky and (2) the Phi Bun rebellion. Each part begins by discussing the historical roots of the motifs and their role in reviving or recontextualizing lesser-known histories. Then, in each part I examine case studies: Thai contemporary artists deploying the motifs to demonstrate their challenge of the singular holiness of the monarchy. These artists take up these motifs through re-imaging: inflecting historical symbols to create novel images that call upon present publics to both remember a past purposefully erased and imagine a future deliberately forestalled. Artists Mit Jai Inn, Jirat Prasertsup and Nipan Oranniwesna ambiguate the supremacy of the sky, entangling it with earth. They take up literal and figurative horizons of possibility: the horizon signifies a meeting point at the limits of earth and sky, an ever-receding hopeful future held out by a repressive regime. Thanom Chapakdee, Teerawat Mulvilai and Montika Kham-on use performance to take up the past as an active site of contestation and reconstruction. Through resurfacing buried pasts in the present, they activate progressive futures. These artists, in ambiguating hierarchies and bending time, intervene in the political timescale of Thailand, forging a way forward.

I argue that by addressing the sky and the Phi Bun rebellion, artists cut to the core of the co-legitimizing forces of the monarchy and the Sangha (the Thai Buddhist order created by King Rama V's 1902 Sangha Act),² which has been a major target of royal policy under King Rama X. Through re-imaging the monarchy in relation to political histories, the works of these artists chart a course toward progressive, alternative futures for Thailand.

Part 1: Lord of the Sky

Open Strike: The Sky in Protest

In Thai, sky (ฟ้า) can mean both the colour blue and heaven but can also refer to the king. This association derives from the monarch's traditional title of เจ้าฟ้า chaofa, literally 'lord of the sky',³ a title also given to historical Shan or Lanna leaders and sometimes translated as "prince" or "princess".⁴ To be the chao of something denotes that this thing obeys one's will, so the title chaofa means that one commands the sky itself, with the implication of guiding it towards progress.⁵ Referring to the king as the sky acknowledges he is of heaven. This status is echoed by the king's title, Rama, the embodiment of dharma, or righteousness, merit and cosmic law. In this way, the sky is a symbol that speaks to the source of legitimacy of Buddhist kingship: the king as dharmaraja.

To circumvent Thailand's lèse-majesté laws, artists and political activists have long deployed the imagery and language relating to the ฟ้า (sky) to refer indirectly to royalty. Defaming the Thai monarchy and threatening its inviolable status is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Abstract means of picturing the king open opportunities for collective discussion without using the monarch's image. In Thailand, abstract political images are not only necessary but highly successful, because they hijack the ubiquitous symbology established by royal propaganda. The ongoing protests for democratic reform that began in spring 2020 have continued to use this strategy. References to the sky in today's protests have precedents in the acts of creative resistance that took place during the Redshirt movement, following the 2006 coup that deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. On 30 December 2008, Redshirt leader Natthawut Saikua delivered the speech "เสียงจากดินถึงฟ้า [Voice from the earth to the sky]":

We were born on the earth, grew up on the earth, walk on the earth. When we stand on the earth and look up, we know we are so far from the sky .… but even though we speak from the earth, it will be heard in the sky .… what is greater than force is the power of the mass of the people.⁶

Saikua's claim of daring to speak to the sky and invocation of the distance between 'normal' people and the sky are rooted in the conventions of royal addressal in Thai formal language. When addressing royals, the speaker uses the phrase "ใต้ฝ่าละอองธุลีพระบาท"—declaring that the speaker is beneath the dust under the feet of the sky—thus emphasizing the distance between oneself and His Majesty. Since its original delivery, Saikua's speech has been widely recirculated among protesters.⁷ In mid-August 2020, a student at Chulalongkorn University recited the speech in honour of the Redshirts' efforts, deliberately linking the 2020 protests to the earlier movement.⁸

On 17 September 2010, two days before the fourth anniversary of the coup, independent Thai news outlet Prachatai published Redshirt poet Phiangkam Pradupkwam's "จดหมายถึงฟ้า [Letter to the Sky]".⁹ The poem had thus been long familiar among Redshirts when in 2019 the hashtag #จดหมายถึงฟ้า began to circulate more widely on social media. The poem was reposted on 18 September 2020, by the Facebook group 10เมษา (April 10), whose name references the military crackdown on Redshirt protestors that began on 10 April 2010. Pradupkwam's letter was published amidst escalating Redshirt protests in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, where Pradupkwam recited a version of the poem.¹⁰

The poem/letter was a bellwether, providing a foretaste both of the protests that would erupt two days later and of the language and imagery those protests would take up. On the fourth anniversary of the coup against Thaksin Shinawatra, Redshirt protesters gathered at the Ratchaprasong intersection in downtown Bangkok.¹¹ There, they painted a wall of anti-monarchic graffiti on a construction hoarding, marking what professor of Southeast Asian studies Serhat Ünaldi called "the first open strike against the sacred charisma of the Thai monarchy".¹² By late evening that same day, police had removed the graffiti. The word 'sky' appeared numerous times in the graffiti: "one-eyed sky (ฟ้าตาเดียว)", "the sky is no barrier (ฟ้าบ่กั้น)", "You are not the sky, [but] more likely a pathetic dog (มึงไม่ใช่ฟ้า, มึงคือหมาที่น่าสมเพช)", "the sky has no eyes because the sky is blind (ฟ้าไม่มีตาเพราะฟ้าตาบอด)".¹³ Some messages referenced King Rama IX's loss of vision in his right eye as a metaphor for ignorance. The pronoun 'you' (มึง) is an impolite form of the second person, used among friends of equal rank or in disparaging contexts. To address the king in such terms, which at best would claim equal status to the king, would be grounds for imprisonment. This blatant slander of the monarchy attempted to erode the equation between the king and an untouchable heavenly state, figuratively bringing the king back down to earth.

Between 2010 and 2020, references to the sky as such continued as King Rama X ascended to the throne and Thailand suffered its twelfth coup since 1932. In 2020, protesters increasingly used the colour blue (สีฟ้า) itself to stand in for the monarchy. On 28 August 2020, in one of the more infamous acts of protest, the lead singer of The Bottom Blues Chaiamorn, "Ammy" Kaewwi-boonpan threw "royal blue" paint at police at Samranrat Police Station.¹⁴ Ammy subsequently set up three-metre canvases printed with the faces of government leaders for passersby to pelt with the royal blue colour.¹⁵ These early iconoclastic gestures (evocative of Yves Klein's proto-performative Anthropometry¹⁶) walk a tightrope between performance art and protest. They escalated into flagrant lèse-majesté when Ammy burned a portrait of King Rama X in front of Bangkok's Klong Prem Central Prison.¹⁷ Ammy's use of blue paint became a viral phenomenon repeated by other artists and musicians such as in t_047's music video "There is No One in the Sky" (ไม่มีคนบนฟ้า). The video references the monarchy through shots of the sky, gold-framed photographs and blue paint that drips from the ceiling, smearing the picture frames.¹⁸

Although the colour blue and the sky avoid figural representation of the king, this thin veil of symbology alone does not protect artists from prosecution. On 26 February 2022, Tantawan "Tawan" Tuatulanon offered a choice of blue or red ribbons to passengers of a Bangkok Skytrain to signal their approval or rejection of Thailand's lèse-majesté law respectively. Of the nearly 200 ribbons selected, no passenger chose blue.¹⁹ Tuatulanon was subsequently detained by police for several hours.²⁰ Student and political performance artist Vitthaya "Ramil" Klangnil was charged for displaying a flag that replaced the central blue stripe of Thailand's flag with a transparent strip. When combined

Figure 1.

Mit Jai Inn, Paphonsak La-or's Prospects (2022). Courtesy of 39+ Art Space.

with directly antagonistic language and political dissent, the sky as a symbol is too legible to Thai people to lend protesters plausible deniability.

And yet the symbology of the sky echoes across more than a decade, traversing a regime, a generation, another coup and a new protest movement. Thai artists and activists have set in motion a remarkable transformation, breaking the monarchy's monopoly on the symbology of blue: the colour is now not only an emblem of the king but also a powerful memorial to more than a decade of protests.

The Sky in Art

Mit Jai Inn: The Horizon of Reality

How many other wishful daydreams have sustained men with courage and hope, not by looking away from the real, but, on the contrary, by looking into its progress, into its horizon.²¹

—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

The sky is blue, but not always. In the exhibition Paphonsak La-or's Prospects, artist Mit Jai Inn painted horizon lines during sunrise and sunset, when the sky is stained with a rainbow of colour. 39+ Art Space in Singapore displayed this exhibition of 12 paintings and a tunnel installation from January to March 2022 (Figure 1). Mit's rainbow horizons destabilize the image of the sky as an eternal and constant entity. Mit Jai Inn looks to the potentiality of the horizon as a landscape of hope, a site of becoming into the as yet undetermined future.

Mit's paintings depict sunrises and sunsets in Thai political refugees' countries of asylum.²² Mit's horizons were inspired by the artist's close friend, Paphonsak La-or. La-or's 2017 exhibition, Far From Home, featured mountain ranges in 13 countries where 28 Thai political exiles were living.²³ Unlike La-or's photorealistic landscapes, however, Mit's blurry horizons could be anywhere in the world. The inability to pinpoint specific times and places positions viewers in a more liminal, globalized space-time. No viewer could identify any of the paintings as a particular country from the imagery alone, and yet all viewers can identify with the bittersweet beauty of sunrises and sunsets. Unlike the politicized details of Thai protesters' fight for democracy, the experience of daybreak and nightfall transcends national borders. For exiles, in particular, this daily solar rhythm is a poignant link to their homeland beyond the horizon. Through Mit's paintings, Thailand's political struggle is rendered at once impersonal and heart-wrenching, relatable to anyone on earth who looks to the sky.

Mit Jai Inn's paintings upset the balanced equation between the monarchy, the sky and the colour blue. They depict the sky at moments when it is inflamed with rainbow colours, pointing out the provisionality of the truism 'the sky is blue'. This idiom means that something is obvious, i.e. the sky symbolizes the monarchy, clear as the sky is blue. Mit Jai Inn's paintings of sunrises and sunsets destabilize this truism around the sky's reliability. If the sky is not (always) a consistent blue, what other partial truths support the inviolable image of the monarchy? If the sky can be a chaotic rainbow, perhaps the monarch is not always the lord of it.

In the symbology of the sky in Thailand, sunrise and sunset signify regime change. The indistinguishability of sunrise and sunset in Paphonsak La-or's Prospects, however, belies the uncertainty of the political situation in Thailand. Mit's paintings depict skies in rhythmic flux, the chaotic but cyclical surety of dawn and dusk. The rainbow sunrises and sunsets resemble each other, making it impossible to tell whether Thailand is at the beginning of a long night or welcoming the dawn of a new day. Each of the paintings contains 'windows' that, when lifted, depict a temporal moment contrasting with its surroundings: behind or beyond a sunset is a sunrise and vice versa (Figure 2). The dominance of any one regime seems fragile in the context of the cycle of sunrise and sunset. This cycle points to a timescale

Figure 2.

Mit Jai Inn, Paphonsak La-or's Prospects (2022). Courtesy of 39+ Art Space.

that transcends political events, and also to the inevitability of eventual regime change. The emergent epicentres of power, however, may not be more enduring, nor their endeavours any more impactful than their predecessors. As Thailand teeters on the precipice of change, many Thais are fearful of what movement in any direction might bring.

The symbology of sunrise and sunset appears in other protest-related art and media, but often with more strongly positive, hopeful associations. The music video, "There is No One in the Sky (ไม่มีคนบนฟ้า)" by t_047 incorporates sunset and sunrise iconography. Political groups like Talufa (ทะลุฟ้า, break through the sky)²⁴ played the song at the protests near Democracy Monument on 19 August 2021. The music video opens with a setting orange sun in between the eaves of a Buddhist temple and concludes with a rising sun cross-faded with footage of protesters waving phone-camera lights.²⁵ The sun sets on a symbol of institutional religion and rises with the protests, suggesting that the hope for a new day for Thailand lies in collective action rather than a new regime. As the refrain of the song—"There's no faith so high, no one in the sky; There's only you and I who live and die"—suggests, religious institutions and the monarchy cannot save the populace and that no one, not even the dharmaraja, is immortal.

The ambiguity of sunrise and sunset in Paphonsak La-or's Prospects challenges the purely positive associations that protesters may have with these transitional times between day and night. The paintings portray a cyclical concept of political revolution, one in which the rise and fall of regimes are inevitable, but there is little meaningful difference between each. Neither dawn nor dusk promises a stable utopia, only change beyond human control. Mit Jai Inn critiques the short-sighted optimism that progressive movements place in change as such. Mit founded Cartel Artspace in Bangkok and has been a key figure in politically engaged Thai art since founding the Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI) in 1992. He continues to actively participate in protests. In Mit Jai Inn's eyes, however, things today are "exactly the same" as they were in the past.²⁶

What, then, fuels the continued involvement of seasoned activists like Mit Jai Inn in Thailand's Sisyphean trudge towards democracy? Although Mit Jai Inn's paintings render sunrise and sunset as neutral or ambiguous moments of change, they are not devoid of hope. Mit re-images the sky not as a stable, clear blue, but as a rainbow horizon: a meeting point between earth and sky. The horizon is a political space in which monarchs and people meet as equals. Indeed, sunrise and sunset are phenomena that emphasize the relationality between earth and sky, and how the sky changes depending on the position of the earth. In focusing on this spatial and temporal meeting point of a sunset/sunrise horizon, Mit invokes the call of protesters to be heard by the sky from their stance on the ground as peers.

The political horizons of Paphonsak La-or's Prospects evoke the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch's theory of hope, articulated in The Principle of Hope (1954). For Bloch, hope is contingent on "not-yet-consciousness", things beyond the boundaries of the current public imaginary from which new visions of the future are born. Especially at moments of historical transition, Bloch's hope offers rescue in the horizon, in the future beyond what one can see.²⁷ In Bloch's view, the uncertain elements of reality are precisely what make movement towards a better future possible.²⁸ Bloch's hope is one which transforms anxious uncertainty into opportunity.

Mit's paintings depict horizons, which, as sites of uncertainty and meeting between earth and sky, are landscapes of hope.²⁹ The exhibition's title, Paphonsak La-or's Prospects, describes a state of non-determination and becoming, where "prospects" suggests the generative possibilities of the future. 'Prospect', from the Latin 'pro' and 'specere', is a specifically visual term that describes looking forward to a distant landscape. Here, the forward-looking orientation of prospects evokes Bloch's term for the future-facing aspect of the not-yet-conscious: forward dawning. For Bloch, the imaginary of every era is limited by conceptual horizons, but in revealing that which is "beyond each existing horizon", artists can promote forward dawning.³⁰ Imaging the anticipatory site of the horizon, Paphonsak La-or's Prospects holds out hope in the fact that the future—night and/or day—is undetermined.

Paphonsak La-or's Prospects is not so much an assured promise of salvation in the horizon as it is a reminder of the process-state of the present. The Thai people, nation and ruler are always becoming. Mit Jai Inn's repetition of sunrises and sunsets acknowledges the fact that a changing sky has heretofore failed to deliver a stable government. For Bloch, repetition and examination of the past can itself be a generative process. This is because (past and present) thought is in a perpetual state of unfinish, inherited by succeeding generations.³¹ Each generation of protesters and artists inherits and re-images the sky. The sky's historical symbology is both a weight and a wellspring of possibility. In pointing to both the reality of Thailand's repeated failure to politically progress and the tantalizing possibility manifested in the horizon, Mit Jai Inn's hope, as an artist and activist, is characterized not by passive optimism, but by dogged determination. Indeed, this action-oriented "militant optimism" is one grounded in the realization that the emergent future holds neither "the night to end all days" nor "the day to end all nights".³² Instead, the future is wrought by the daring of those "hoping beyond the day which has become".³³

Jirat Prasertsup: The Person in the Ceiling

Whereas Paphonsak La-or's Prospects imaged the boundaries of the sky and earth in terms of the horizon of hope, Jirat Prasertsup suggests that "the sky is the limit" may in fact be a severe restriction. Mit Jai Inn's Bangkok gallery, Cartel Artspace, showed Prasertsup's installation, คิดถึงคนบนฝ้า Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us from December 2020 to January 2021. Prasertsup painted the gallery ceiling with billowing orange clouds. He built a lower ceiling over the painting with two missing ceiling tiles to provide windows onto the artificial sky (Figure 3). Black lettering, half-buried in the gallery floor, read คิดถึงคนบนฝ้า (thinking of the person in the ceiling). The saying "thinking of the person in the sky" is common among royalists, expressing that they miss and mourn the late King Rama IX. Prasertsup intentionally misspelled ฟ้า (sky) as ฝ้า (ceiling). Here, the heavens are demystified and replaced by an artificially low ceiling. Rather than evoking limitless possibility, Prasertsup's flattened-out sky places a hard ceiling on visitors, holding them down, close to the ground.

When viewers climbed a ladder to stick their heads into the ceiling panels, they were greeted with a sculpted bust of the late king's beloved dog Tongdaeng (ทองแดง), protruding from the painted sky (Figure 4). (Tongdaeng's famed deference and proximity to the king even enabled lèse-majesté charges to

Figure 3.

Jirat Prasertsup, Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us (2020). Photographed by Preecha Pattara. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.

Jirat Prasertsup, Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us (2020). Detail. Photographed by Preecha Pattara. Courtesy of the artist.

be brought against someone who posted "sarcastic" pictures of the dog on Facebook).³⁴ Poking their heads into 'heaven', viewers found that the sacred, omnipotent dharmaraja, who answered commoners' desperate prayers for decades,³⁵ is nowhere to be found. With no one for viewers to look up to (and no one to look down on them), except a dog in the ceiling, the royalists' blind adoration for the "person in the sky" becomes ludicrous.

In an adjacent room, Prasertsup's Oral History (2020) references international iconography to re-image and lampoon Thai monarchic lore. Oral History consists of a flattened white tube of toothpaste affixed to the exhibition wall with yellow duct tape. King Rama IX, famed for frugality, allegedly "squeezed every tube of toothpaste until it became as flat as a piece of paper".³⁶ The legends of Rama IX's humble lifestyle contrast starkly with the financial policies of the current regime. The banana-yellow duct tape adhering the toothpaste tube to the wall remixes Maurizio Cattelan's infamous Comedian (2019)—a banana duct-taped to a gallery wall. Like Comedian, Oral History is an edition of three and raises questions about how we conceive of financial value.³⁷ Why would a king flattening a toothpaste tube go down in urban legend in a nation whose monarchy is one of the richest in the world?³⁸ In the context of the Thai Buddhist theocracy, narratives of the monarch's 'groundedness' testify to his spiritual purity, legitimizing his rule. In 2020, protesters eroded this narrative of frugality, protesting the massive political leverage enabled by the Thai monarchy's tens of billions of dollars worth of assets.³⁹

Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us suggests the consequences of mythologizing the king's 'down-to-earthness'. Contrary to equalizing earth and sky, these narratives moralized and elevated the king. In the 1980s, narratives of earthly frugality characterized the royal propaganda disseminated through rural Thailand. Images of King Rama IX sweating and labouring on rural development projects went beyond humanizing the king: they deified him. These photographs carried the condescending undertone of the exhibition title: the king was to be lauded for deigning to descend to earth. This propaganda established royal hegemony,⁴⁰ transferring the Thai people's hope for salvation from the government to their king.⁴¹ Images such as these and of the king's visits to rural provinces beginning in the late 1950s bound the far reaches of the modern Thai nation-state together.⁴² Despite their public relations success, King Rama IX's hundreds of development projects did not invest a significant portion of GDP nor achieve meaningful development in many areas of high need on the nation's periphery.⁴³ Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us points out the hollowness of royal propaganda that consolidated hope for salvation into one person and the tenuousness of a nation stuck together by an individual who is now gone. Prasertsup shows that always looking up to a sky that looks down on you is itself a form of limitation.

Nipan Oranniwesna: Dust Under the Feet

Nipan Oranniwesna's site-specific installation Then one morning, they were found dead and hanged (2020) inverts and flattens the traditional hierarchy between earth and sky. The installation re-mediates photographic and textual archives, assembling fragments from the century-long struggle toward democratic reform in Thailand. These re-imaged archives of a past that is still unfolding call attention to the inefficiencies and ephemerality of cultural memory. Portraying the sky with fugitive materials, Oranniwesna shows the sky, like memory, to be not omnipotent but fragile, prone to change and, ultimately, human.

The installation consisted of three parts. The artist printed a transcript of a conversation with Dr Puey Ungpakorn, who resigned as rector of Thammasat University following the 6 October 1976 massacre. Oranniwesna displayed pages of the transcript in frames partially filled with dust. The artist stored these along with blueprints of the Red Gate (the site of a lynching that incited the 6 October massacre), in cabinets flanking the walls of the classroom. Except for a narrow perimeter, the entire classroom floor was dusted with white, grey and royal blue pigment powders rendering a photograph of the sky (Figure 5). Oranniwesna took the reference photo from his front door on 24 June 2020, the anniversary of the bloodless revolution of 1932 that marked Thailand's transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy.

Oranniwesna's installation of transcripts and photographs gathered from a silenced history connected the abandoned schoolhouse in Ubon Ratchathani to historical and ongoing resistance against Bangkok's dominance over political and spiritual narratives. Leading curator and art practitioner Thanom Chapakdee commissioned the work as part of the first Ubon Agenda, hosted in the abandoned Thangjai Anukool School in Ubon Ratchathani, Isan, in November 2020. Exhibiting contemporary art that recovered buried histories in an abandoned school was, in Chapakdee's words, an act of "resistance against the state".⁴⁴ King Rama V's 1902 Sangha Act brought temples and education in Thailand's eastern border region of Isan under the oversight of the king and the Supreme Patriarch (Somdet Phra Sangharat) from the Ministry of Education.⁴⁵ For Chapakdee, asking visitors to access art through museums and galleries is analogous to making people "go to the temple", invoking the overturning of local spiritual sovereignty. Chapakdee strategically chose an abandoned school for the Ubon Agenda to "contrast with the

Figure 5.

Nipan Oranniwesna, Then one morning they were found dead and hanged (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

institutions" of the Sangha and state-sanctioned schools and highlight the "small narrative" not included in textbooks.⁴⁶ Chapakdee brought art outside the gallery to reclaim a former site of indoctrination for guerrilla education.

On the floor of the installation, coloured dust fell over wooden capital letters excerpted from a conversation with Dr Puey Ungpakorn: "Then, one morning, they were found dead and hanged. It was later establish, that they were done to death before they were hunged [sic]." "They" refers to Vichai Kaetsripongsa and Chumporn Thummai, two state employees found hanged on the "red gate" in Nakhon Pathom on 24 September 1976, following their protest of the return of military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn to Thailand.⁴⁷ To condemn the murders, students at Thammasat University staged a mock hanging on 5 October. With the support of the monarchy, right-wing paramilitary groups gathered outside the university, justifying their presence with claims that the actor playing the hanged student resembled then crown prince, King Rama X, and thus violated lèse-majesté.⁴⁸ Dr Ungpakorn recalled that the Armored Division Radio Station colluded with the Siam Star (Dao Siam) newspaper to reproduce a photograph exaggerating the resemblance, stoking royalist hysteria.⁴⁹ The ensuing violence between right-wing groups, monarchist mobs, police and students escalated into a military coup. In 2020, student protesters frequently referenced the massacre to combat the "organized forgetting" in the decades following the event.⁵⁰ Ubon Ratchathani was Chumporn Thummai's hometown, and Then one morning, they were found dead and hanged brought this poignant memory home.⁵¹

When Oranniwesna first visited the abandoned school, the classroom was empty save for a vintage, gold-framed portrait of now King Rama X. The portrait was perched on the top of the blackboard, to the left of the doorway as one entered the room. The artist chose to leave this object—a ubiquitous fixture of Thai schools, living rooms, restaurants and street corners—in place for the installation. Anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris points out, however, that the photographic visibility of the monarch makes him "no more immediately accessible to 'the people' now than he was a hundred years ago, when commoners could only approach his dignified body from the perspective of his foot's sole".⁵² The institution of the monarchy is beyond the reach of ordinary people and takes a public position "above politics".⁵³ Despite this inaccessibility, omnipresent portraits of the monarch watch over Thais, who are expected to "revere him by revering his image".⁵⁴ It was this reverence of the current king's visage, and the illegality of its defamation, that escalated into the events of 6 October. Although King Rama IX denounced the massacre in the following days, the U.S. embassy reported on 7 October that the coup of the previous evening under the pretence of lèse-majesté "had at least the tacit approval of the king".⁵⁵

In 2020, protesters critiqued the monarchy's ongoing involvement in politics nearly a century after the birth of Thailand's constitutional monarchy on 24 June 1932. The 1932 revolution's commemorative Democracy Monument in Bangkok has served as the rallying point of progressive protesters from 1973 to today.⁵⁶ Oranniwesna's 24 June reference photograph for the installation's floor drawing is an afterimage of a revolution that, although culturally prominent, almost no living Thai remembers. These anniversary photographs of the sky mark the artist's personal re-imaging of historical memory as annual data points. Oranniwesna's photographs embody hope as a ritual practice of daring to ask the question, "Has the sky changed this year?"

Reconstructing this photograph of the sky in dust further problematizes the relationship between photography and memory. Oranniwesna's largely site-specific installation practice instantiates his attitude towards memory: "either personal or collective [memory] is not that permanent. The winners write history, so it's movable."⁵⁷ Thailand has endured a dozen successful coups since the first constitution was issued in 1932, making permanence a privilege especially afforded to the monarchy.⁵⁸ The dome of the sky itself is a

Figure 6.

Nipan Oranniwesna, Then one morning they were found dead and hanged (2020). Footprint detail. Courtesy of the artist.

reminder of the late King Rama IX (recall the phrase "thinking of the person in the sky"). The fear of being forgotten, however, plagues the ongoing youth movement.⁵⁹ This fear is rooted in both the centralized control of school curricula and the contrast between the disappearances of political dissidents and the narrative of continuity and immortality surrounding the dharmaraja. Instead of seeking to fix the leaders of Thai protests more permanently in the public memory as other artists have done,⁶⁰ Oranniwesna's dust mural makes the sky movable.

With light and air moving through the open windows on the far wall of the classroom, Then one morning, they were found dead and hanged changed each day of its exhibition period from 21–30 November. The artist recalled that nearly all of the white pigment⁶¹ blew away over the course of the exhibition.⁶² Rather than an omnipresent entity of heaven, Oranniwesna's sky is rendered a changeable, transient thing, itself made of particles of earth. People could come so close to the sky as to be able to "shake hands" with it,⁶³ and judging from faint footprints left in the dust, even to walk on it (Figure 6). In a reversal of the royal addressal, "ใต้ฝ่าละอองธุลีพระบาท", here the sky is dust under the feet of common people. The installation brings the sky down to earth.

Oranniwesna's work coincided with the 2020 protests and the revival of discussions of the Phi Bun rebellion in art. To Oranniwesna, the 6 October massacre in Bangkok was not an isolated incident, but one event in a long historical progression that includes the Phi Bun rebellion in Ubon Ratchathani (discussed below). Both exemplified the state's violence against its people. In the 2020 Ubon Agenda, the throughline of resistance to central power connected the recent protests, earlier movements for democracy and the historical battle for sovereignty in Isan, Thailand's under-resourced northeast region. Oranniwesna's installation paired intentionally universal symbology of the sky with stories of protests in Bangkok that nonetheless resonated in the abandoned, yet still watched-over classroom. Taken together, the Phi Bun rebellion in Ubon Ratchathani, the 6 October massacre in Bangkok and the 24 June sky reigning over them all are reminders of how long various groups' struggles for liberation have persisted in the centre and periphery of the country.

Part 2: The Holy Man

Whereas the artists discussed above are based in Bangkok, this section turns to artists whose work centres the history, practices and future of the borderland of Isan. Artists deploying imagery of the sky—a symbol of the king—discuss monarchic spiritual legitimacy from the top down, or the centre out. Artists who re-image the sky inflect an already universal symbol with new, subversive meanings. Artists exploring the 1901–02 holy rebellion, however, offer a critique from the perspective of the bottom, or the periphery. They take up a locally specific event and symbol whose history has been repressed. In re-imaging this buried holy man rebellion, they re-engage publics in taking up its forestalled, futuristic dreams.

Works of literature, primarily by Isan authors, have long made indirect references to the 1901–02 Phi Bun rebellion and the prophecies preceding it.⁶⁴ In the context of the visual arts, however, 2021 marked a resurgence in phibun imagery, even among Bangkok-based artists. This is in part due to Thanom Chapakdee's 2020 Ubon Agenda, which he hoped would get people in Isan to talk "more openly" about the rebellion and raise broader awareness of Isan histories.⁶⁵ In 2021, the media platform Isaan Record published a series on the Phi Bun rebellion that heavily featured Chapakdee, drawing a connection between the Phi Bun rebellion's demands for autonomy from Bangkok with the struggle of the Redshirts in 2010⁶⁶ and the 2020 protests.⁶⁷

Art that invokes holy man rebellions questions the monarchy by raising historical challenges to its absolutism. Holy men were spiritual leaders who often integrated Buddhism with local beliefs. In Isan, these spiritual leaders sometimes led political rebellions that contested the spiritual and political legitimacy of the monarch. The rebellion is a thorn in the side for the current monarchic regime as it battles to affirm its own spiritual purity, moves toward absolute control over the Sangha, and promotes the hegemony of the Sangha over the people's religious practices.

The History of Holy Men and Protest

Holy men have long been in tension with the central government.⁶⁸ Historian Charnvit Kasetsiri identified three holy man rebellions during the Ayutthaya period, all of which took place when royal power was threatened by foreign powers and locals faced economic pressures.⁶⁹ Chatthip Nartsupha also traces multiple holy-man-led uprisings that promised a new order, up through the 1960s.⁷⁰

The 1901–02 Phi Bun rebellion was one of the largest.⁷¹ At the turn of the nineteenth century, political elites in Bangkok sought to better control the northeast province of Isan in the face of rising political and religious dissent along Thailand's border with Laos and encroaching French colonial powers.⁷² By the late 1800s, the royal family and state supported the extension of a textually orthodox Sangha, discouraging the supernatural aspects of Buddhism practised by the majority of the populace.⁷³ The newly centralized and formalized structures of Bangkok political elites and the Sangha had a mutually legitimizing relationship that eroded the status of holy men.⁷⁴ In 1902, the Sangha Act made King Rama V the head of the first unified Buddhist hierarchy in Thai history.⁷⁵ In addition to religious consolidation, new taxes levied by Bangkok disrupted local patronage systems in Isan, breeding resentment against centralization efforts.⁷⁶ These acts of political and religious consolidation coincided with the 1901–02 Phi Bun rebellion in Ubon Ratchathani, wherein Siamese troops clashed with militant followers of the holy man Ong Man, an associate of holy man Ong Keo, resulting in the death of some 300 rebels.⁷⁷

Holy men challenge the supreme authority of the monarch as the dharmaraja, the highest interpreter of the dharma. The spiritual status of holy men, linked to oral traditions and supernatural beliefs in local spirits, lent them political credibility in Isan.⁷⁸ Historian Thongchai Winichakul described Thai modernization as the merging of the monarchy with the "geo-body" of Thailand, extending the absolute authority of the monarch to exactly the borders of the nation-state and overriding local sovereignty.⁷⁹ At the turn of the twentieth century, local spiritual leaders were forced to join the Buddhist order or proclaim themselves independent "holy men" with supernatural powers.⁸⁰ Holy men often became the leaders of protest movements, especially in southeastern Isan, where Ubon Ratchathani is located.⁸¹ This is in part because the cult of phi (ghosts or local spirits), in which holy men have authority, is historically stronger in the Lao-influenced religion of that region.⁸² The holy man rebellions represent the potential for supernatural beliefs to escalate into bids for sovereignty along Thailand's borders. Concurrent with the 1902 Sangha Act, the 1901–02 Phi Bun rebellion marked a particularly salient challenge to the renewed marriage between monarchic and religious legitimacy.

The 1901–02 Phi Bun rebellion is specifically relevant to Thai politics today in light of a new crisis of legitimacy. Sangha reform and purification are part of King Rama X's efforts to concentrate the power of the monarchy after the death of his father, King Rama IX in 2016.⁸³ This centralization of power was a reaction to a "dual crisis of legitimacy" faced by Thailand's ruling political elites in the twenty-first century: a religious legitimacy crisis (in the form of sexual and financial scandals and sectarian division of Buddhism), as well as a political legitimacy crisis (including two military coups, violent protest crackdown and the death of King Rama IX).⁸⁴ By reforming the Sangha, King Rama X restores legitimacy to the crown.⁸⁵

King Rama X's Sangha purification efforts have eroded the political power of current religious leaders. Several prominent religious leaders were arrested in May 2018.⁸⁶ On 11 November 2020, the Supreme Sangha Council forbade monks from participating in protests against the current government administration.⁸⁷ These conditions, among others, preclude the possibility of a contemporary holy man rebellion.

King Rama X has passed two amendments that purged the Sangha and appointed a new Supreme Patriarch (2017).⁸⁸ The justification for these interventionist amendments cited King Rama V's absolutist rule. King Rama V's religious centralization policies culminated in the 1902 Sangha Act and the concurrent Phi Bun rebellion.⁸⁹ Because King Rama X is citing King Rama V as a precedent, artists' references to the Phi Bun rebellion against King Rama V are especially provocative today.

The Holy Man Rebellion in Art

Thanom Chapakdee: Making Merit and the Ritual Archive

3 April 2022 marked the 120th anniversary of the most deadly battle of the Phi Bun rebellion. That night, Thanom Chapakdee executed a long-planned artistic and spiritual intervention in Ban Saphue, Ubon Ratchathani, in conjunction with the 2022 Ubon Agenda. He invited the community to ทําบุญ (make merit) for the 300 lives lost in the Phi Bun rebellion.⁹⁰ Merit-making is a Buddhist ritual that can contribute to the enlightenment and good rebirth of oneself or deceased loved ones. Making merit operates through the Buddhist temporality of reincarnation, in which one can alter the future through intervening in and accounting for the past. Chapakdee's participatory ritual involved Ban Saphue residents in addressing their buried history to re-image the future not for kin, but for revolutionaries.

Chapakdee's ritual of ทําบุญแจกข้าว (making merit, donating rice) secured the political and spiritual approval of Buddhist monks for a tradition of the Isan people that falls outside the Sangha orthodoxy. In planning the 2022 Ubon Agenda, Chapakdee and the authorities in Ban Saphue district reached a compromise in ทําบุญแจกข้าว (making merit, donating rice). Making merit and giving rice to monks are common in Buddhist tradition, but for Chapakdee, the merit-making ceremony for the Phi Bun rebellion was explicitly "not Buddhist".⁹¹ Rather, donating rice on behalf of phi (ghosts) is rooted in the historical traditions of the local people to pay respects to the dead and curry favour with spirits. In a reversal of the historic antagonism between Isan holy men and the official Buddhist order, local Buddhist monks supported the ritual.⁹² The support of these monks, who hold spiritual and political authority in the community, was a step towards legitimizing the local, historically discredited beliefs of the Phi Bun rebels.

Making merit for rebels imbued this seemingly benign, Buddhist-sanctioned act with subversive power. This first merit-making ceremony for the holy man dissidents was so long delayed in part because the rebels were enemies of the state.⁹³ They rose against Bangkok under the mast of a holy man who was not a student of Buddhism.⁹⁴ Chapakdee's year of preparatory work and community dialogues, as well as his research collaboration with the media site Isaan Record, transformed the Phi Bun rebellion from a shameful taboo into a topic of public discourse.⁹⁵ Ultimately, the entire community participated in the ceremony, finally integrating this political history into Ban Saphue's futurity. Chapakdee hoped that the merit-making ceremony would become a biannual ritual in the community. Ritualized re-imaging of the rebels' future prospects through merit-making would create a living memorial to an event largely excluded from official Thai histories.⁹⁶

Chapakdee's preference for renewing memory through ritualized action rather than textual sources alone is a form of history-making that echoes the traditions of embodied knowledge of the Isan people. The Phi Bun rebellion was in part incited by and carried forward by the Isan tradition of mor lam—Lao-language country singing that transmits oral histories of common people. The spoken histories of mor lam preserved the prophecies that fuelled the Phi Bun rebellion through the twentieth century. In spreading the superstitious prophecies of holy men, mor lam became a "weapon of thought" powerful enough to inspire fear in the state.⁹⁷ Chapakdee originally intended to include mor lam in the 2022 Ubon Agenda, but local authorities deemed this version of the proposal too political.⁹⁸

For a people whose histories have often been marginalized by the state, ritualized re-imaging of the rebellion through merit-making may be a more resilient monument than traditional written archives. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor distinguishes between the "archive" of seemingly enduring materials (i.e. objects, texts, sites) and the apparently ephemeral "repertoire" of embodied practice (i.e. rituals, spoken language, play).⁹⁹ Taylor notes that because written histories were often recorded and purged in accordance with the memorializing needs of those in power, written culture is "easier to control than embodied culture".¹⁰⁰ Chapakdee hoped biannual merit-making would deploy this evasive power to continue the mor lam singers' Phi Bun repertoire.

In aiming to establish an embodied practice of memory, Chapakdee's merit-making is a gesture toward building what historian Toyin Falola terms the "ritual archive". Unlike the museum archive, the ritual archive "is never (fully) collected but retains power and agency in invisible ways" that hold revolutionary, anticapitalist capacities.¹⁰¹ Like the spirit of resistance and endurance shared in mor lam song, the ritual archive dodges capture. It ensures that the people of Isan maintain control over their own history. Although the bodies of the rebels were detained and desecrated, a ritual of making merit in their names not only manifests a better future for their spirits, but also renews the potency of their cause.

Teerawat Mulvilai: Ritual and Repertoire

Performance artist and head of B-floor Theater Teerawat "Ka-ge" Mulvilai re-imaged the violent history of the Phi Bun rebellion in the present 2022 Ubon Agenda. Performers embodying the ghosts of the rebels walked their execution path through Ubon Ratchathani. With their screams and blood red clothes, they brought contemporary urbanites face to face with the emotionality of the rebellion. By creating an evocative performance from a fragmentary archive, Mulvilai involved publics in active imaginative visioning and reconstitution of their past.

Teerawat Mulvilai has orchestrated multiple performance pieces about the Phi Bun rebellion over the past two years. To lift spirits and bring people together amidst the 2020 movement for democracy, Mulvilai founded Ratsa-Drum, a participatory protest and performance drumming group. Mulvilai's first work featuring the Phi Bun rebellion was ชันสูตรความกลัว (Biopsy of Fear)

Figure 7.

Teerawat Mulvilai, Phi Bun Performance Part 1: Performance film at Ban Saphue (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

(December 2021). The work projected archival photographs of the rebellion behind drummers at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center. In 2022, he directed a two-part performance about the Phi Bun rebellion in conjunction with Ubon Agenda, which also featured members of the RatsaDrum group. The drummers, wearing their white performance uniforms inked in red and black with common protest slogans such as "No 112" and "No god, no king, only human", accompanied local volunteer performers around the site of the battlefield in Ban Saphue. On 3 April, Part 1 of the performance began along a palm-lined path (Figure 7). Mulvilai believed the palms resembled those in the background of an archival photograph of the rebels detained at Thung Si Muang, reproduced in Term Wiphaphakjanakij's "History of Isan".¹⁰² Covered in white paint and wearing deep blood red, the performers contorted into eerie, supernatural phibun ผีบุญ (holy men/ghosts), each with their own magical powers.

Part 2 of the performance began at 4:44 pm on 4 April, a reference to the Buddhist calendar year of the rebellion 2444. The performers traced the route of the rebels' public execution (Figure 8). They dropped like felled trees in a metaphoric beheading at Thung Sri Muang. They howled and shook blood red fabrics at the monument of Prince Sapphasitthiprasong, the royal commissioner who received the order from King Rama V to execute the rebels.¹⁰³ Finally, the performers made their way to the river, where the rebels' bodies were dishonourably disposed of.¹⁰⁴

For Mulvilai, the performance served as a fantastical re-imaging of the past. He hoped it would inspire the audiences to remember the suffering

Figure 8.

Teerawat Mulvilai, Phi Bun Performance Part 2: 444 Live Performance (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

and struggle of their ancestors.¹⁰⁵ In the context of a purposefully forgotten history, however, the surreal performance did not so much recall memories as inspire future visioning. Historian Toyin Falola, author of the term "ritual archive", notes that images and artistic productions are "bodies of knowledge" that have the power to draw attention to and affirm the disappearance of the past.¹⁰⁶ The performers embodied the spirits of phibun from fragments of photographs, letters and stories from over a century ago. They transformed an incomplete archive into a participatory "body of knowledge", inviting spectators to envision and fill the gaps left by history. As Diana Taylor notes, "The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by 'being there,' being a part of the transmission."¹⁰⁷ In Mulvilai's performance, knowledge transmission was an embodied process that went beyond historical reenactment into the realm of improvisation. It unfolded through active, speculative creation both from performers and viewers, who Mulvilai said "walked the path of history" through 2022 Ubon Ratchathani. The participants were caught up in "being there", where "there" was the present becoming and future envisioning of the rebellion.

In Ernst Bloch's framework of hope, looking at the past is not merely an act of remembrance, but a generative process of extracting unmined "cultural inheritance" from which to build a better future.¹⁰⁸ Mulvilai's performance re-imaged the buried and unreconciled grievances of the past in present Ubon Ratchathani. It did not merely ask audiences to remember, but called them into their roles as participants in history. Newly empowered by their cultural inheritance, they can forge the future.

Thunderstrike

On 27 June 2022, curator and art practitioner Thanom Chapakdee passed away. To the democratic activists and performance art communities he had championed over the past several years, his death felt like a "thunderstrike"¹⁰⁹—sudden, incomprehensible, even incapacitating. At his funeral, Mulvilai led RatsaDrum drummers in "breaking the air", a tradition to announce one's presence to local spirit chao and ask for their blessing while in their dominion. The mor lam band สะเวินใจ (Delight) from Khon Kaen who performed at protests for democracy in the region¹¹⁰ lauded Chapakdee's activism and accomplishments. The drummers hurled a rainbow of coloured dust into the air, and for a moment, dust and sky became one. Mulvilai planned for the coloured dust to "create the feeling of the protests in the funeral", with their audacious hope and refusal to be silenced. Even as the funeral was commemorative, it channelled the vibrant traditions of the Isan people and the defiant "aesthetics of resistance" that Chapakdee practised into carrying forward his life force. Although they mourned the loss of a great leader, "the people who are left have to move on, and keep fighting", noted Mulvilai.¹¹¹ "That would be Thanom's wish."¹¹²

At the funeral, Thanom Chapakdee's sister and father joked about how his legacy was already haunting their dreams in the form of a revived and powerful phibun army. In uniting a village to make merit for rebel ghosts, daring them to remember the past to build the future, Chapakdee was, in his own way, a phibun. Chapakdee made community his practice, and the celebration of his life demonstrated all that he had manifested: the artists and performers whose practices he sustained, the activists he agitated alongside, the spirit of a community powerful and decentralized enough to outlive the death of its creator. No one is immortal, but Chapakdee identified and mobilized something that has outlasted Thailand's coups, holy men and even kings: the hope of the Isan people.

Montika Kham-on: A New Sky

We will let our imagination take flightliberate it from what oppresseslooking forwardto protect the past we hold dear.

– Montika Kham-on, Siamese Futurism video essay, 2021

The people of Isan have been prophesying, singing and dying for their future for a long time. Montika Kham-on's music video Siamese Futurism (2021)

Figure 9.

Montika Kham-on, Siamese Futurism (2021). Courtesy of the artist.

reverses the stereotypical 'backward' temporality assigned to Isan and its people. The seven-minute music video re-images the prophecies of the Phi Bun rebellion as a futuristic vision for Isan. Drawing from the motifs of science fiction, it highlights the Isan people's centuries-old, revolutionary imagination of the future. Siamese Futurism reveals Isan's unique position—on the border of the country and the horizon of possibility—to be well suited for envisioning Thailand's future.

Siamese Futurism, set to the mor lam song Praka Prui by Rasmee Isan Soul, renders a surreal, alternate future for Isan through disparate shots: a rainy landscape, children playing along the banks of the Sa-erg-guan pool, a young woman awakening from a dream and staring into outer space, and an unforgettable movement ritual (Figure 9). The video and its accompanying video essay were displayed in the November 2021–March 2022 exhibition Crypto for Cryptids, curated by Speedy Grandma. The video essay was shown on the wall outside a blacked-out room screening Siamese Futurism to provide a version of historical context for Kham-on's sci-fi revisioning of phibun.

Kham-on first encountered the story of the Phi Bun rebellion through Isan author Thanat "Phu Kra-dat" Thammakaew's short story, งั้วง่าว NguaNgao (2011). A section of the story describes how the rebellion leader Boonchan's gong rang through the clash with the Siamese troops and can still be heard from the deepest part of the Sa-erg-guan pool.¹¹³ "บุญจันยังบ่ตายมา (Boonchan is not yet dead)" wrote Phu Kra-dat. Siamese Futurism opens with the same line, claiming that Boonchan is merely slumbering at Tabang Mountain, waiting to rise again.

Siamese Futurism envisions the future through refrains from the past. The music video opens with an older woman burning banknotes printed with the visage of King Rama V. This act could be construed as lèse-majesté but in fact, references the prophecies preceding the Phi Bun rebellion. The holy man's prophecies, spread by mor lam, foretold world-altering phenomena, such as rocks (hin hae, the dirt of Isan) turning into gold.¹¹⁴ Not only villagers but also Bangkok-appointed officials entertained these irrational superstitions, collecting hin hae in preparation for the new world order.¹¹⁵ Kham-on's Siamese future envisions the rebirth of the holy man phibun and a new era, where, as the prophecies foretold, there is no need for paper money. Here, dirt holds enough power to render Thai currency—and the image of the monarch that authenticates it—impotent.

Siamese Futurism situates the technological futurism of science fiction in rural Isan, a region often stereotyped as stuck in the past. A young woman, representing Kham-on's mother, who is from the region, stands by a round mound of hin hae that allows her to travel through time and space. Although space-time travel is a classic sci-fi motif, in Isan, it could also solve the mundane issues of an underdeveloped economy and transportation system. For Kham-on, the idea of an Isan where people "don't have to leave their hometown" and go to Bangkok just for the hope of finding a job is itself futuristic.¹¹⁶ Some Bangkokians unfairly characterize Isan as "thirty years behind", even while the central government's meaningful investment in the region's infrastructure has been postponed for at least as long.¹¹⁷ In the context of this present reality, the ability for Isan people to live dignified lives in their hometowns may itself be as revolutionary and improbable a future as dirt turning to gold or the return of phibun. The image of sci-fi space-time travel for Isan people emphasizes the absurd distance between rural and urban technologies of the present.

The penultimate shot of the video essay features a sunset with the caption, "The holy men have not given up their lives, they have only been biding their time in their slumber, waiting for the arrival of a new day." Here the sunset, similar to that of Mit Jai Inn's paintings or t_047's music video "There is No One in the Sky", symbolizes a monarchic regime change. In Isan, however, a changing sky has an added meaning. The Isan saying "รอก่อน เดี๋ยว ฟ้ามันก็จะเปลี่ยนสี (wait, and the sky will change its colour)" consoles those facing an unbearable present reality with the hope that the future that may be different. In 2015, an anonymous artist published the political cartoon "Wait and the Sky Will Change Color" on Facebook as part of the series "Manee Has A Chair".¹¹⁸ The series spoofs the Manee books that teach Thai children to read, turning the girl Manee into the Thai everyman and her dog Tor into

Figure 10.

Montika Kham-on, Siamese Futurism (2021). Featuring Pakhamon Hemachandra. Courtesy of the artist.

a mouthpiece of the military junta. In this cartoon, Tor tells Manee, "Wait, and the sky will change" as she crumbles to the ground in front of the ruins of her home, following a military assault.

Siamese Futurism proposes a form of waiting that is not defeated but strategic. Anthropologist Andrew Johnson discusses how the Isan people have been perpetually under-resourced and overpromised by the central government since at least the Phi Bun rebellion.¹¹⁹ They have long waited for that which never comes. According to Johnson, the interstitial temporality of waiting is not merely a passive or escapist state but one which has the potential to create "a space of fantasy—the imaginative horizon that allows a rethinking of the everyday".¹²⁰ The Phi Bun rebellion was preceded by everyday people waiting for the prophetic arrival of a holy man to manifest a new world order. The captions of Siamese Futurism, however, note that the holy men are the ones "biding their time" and "waiting for the arrival of a new day". This places the power in the Isan people to foment a changed sky, into which the holy men will reemerge. As the holy men wait, the present is a pregnant moment where everyday people can dream the future into reality.

In the climax of Siamese Futurism, the "mover" Pakhamon Hemachandra, risen from a mountain pool, performs a ritual with a gong to awaken phibun from over a century of slumber (Figure 10). Kham-on's choice to work with a "mover" as opposed to a "dancer" was critical. For Kham-on, performance is a process that "utilizes memory" to "move people".¹²¹ Hemachandra's movements not only manifest the coming of the new day through summoning phibun, they move the Isan people forward. This emotional "move" constitutes a tectonic shift in the political image of Isan people from one stuck in the past, waiting for the future to arrive, to one who create the future [through their visioning]. Hemachandra's virtuosic, explosive power and writhing tension embodies a people not passively waiting, but held back. Hemachandra conjures a haunting dream that survived the hundreds of rebels who died and killed for it at Ban Saphue: a new day for Isan, spiritual and political sovereignty, liberation from Bangkok.

The Isan people, inhabiting Thailand's underdeveloped borderlands, are located on the literal and figurative horizon of possibility. In Imaginative Horizons, anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano discusses imagination through the spatial metaphor of hinterlands—spaces that are "backward", full of possibility and uncontainable like a shadow that "slips away—to appear again just when we have thought, in relief or in despair, that we have finally done away with it".¹²² Relative to Bangkok, Isan people are of the hinterlands, in the space of Crapanzano's "imaginative horizons" or the "blurry boundaries that separate the here and now from what lies beyond". As a people whose histories and dreams unfold in the unwieldy horizon, the Isan people are positioned to see beyond that which is apparent to those at the centre. Their visions of liberation—guarded by the untamable ritual archive of mor lam and prophecy—will not be "done away with". After centuries of moving toward the ever-receding horizon of hope held out by a repressive regime, Siamese Futurism trades Bangkok's horizon of possible development for Isan's own. Phi Bun's gong of rebellion has not stopped ringing.

The final caption of the video essay reads, "looking forward / to protect the past we hold dear". Siamese Futurism describes the process of becoming into the future by way of the past—ritual rites, reincarnation, waiting and dreaming to bring forth the "not-yet". By re-imaging a future built upon past dreams, it protects these precious historical hopes. Siamese Futurism collapses the boundary between remembering the past and envisioning the future. In starting from futurism, however, it reverses the directionality of Chapakdee's merit-making ritual and Mulvilai's phibun performances. Although some elements of Kham-on's future are unprecedented in reality (the liberation of the Isan people), others are repeated visions from the holy man's prophecies. These are old hopes whose champions have waited a long time. By "looking forward to protect the past we hold dear", Siamese Futurism figures the process of re-imaging the futurism of the past as an integral component of remembrance. Through forward visioning that incorporates refrains from past prophecies, Siamese Futurism keeps the past—not only its historical outcomes but also its radical hopes—alive. The "new sky" in Siamese Futurism is imminent, just beyond the setting sun. The Isan people can move it across the horizon of held-out hope, from "not-yet" into now.

Conclusion

In Thailand, pro-democracy activists have long hoped for political change on the horizon. Veterans of these efforts have experienced innumerable sunrises and sunsets, and have good reason to grow cynical. On the ground, each new sky appears fundamentally the same as the last. From earth, it seems that the lord of Thailand's past, present and future is the immortal, inviolable sky: the monarchy, upheld by religion.

By questioning the singular holiness of the sky, artists are democratizing stewardship of the past, present and future of the nation. Whereas images of the sky directly refer to the holiness of the king, images of the Phi Bun rebellion revive and retell a historical moment in which that holiness was questioned before. Both types of images problematize the symbology of conservative political legitimacy: the relationship between Buddhism and the monarchy. They provoke questions: if the sky is not immortal and omnipotent, if monarchs have killed holy men, if ordinary people have long manifested the future, then upon what grounds is the country authoritarian?

Artists are re-imaging Thailand's political timescale as they deploy these old motifs, organizing the overlaps between past, present and future. Ernst Bloch notes that it is precisely the state of unfinish, the not-yet-realized nature of hindered past hopes, that lends them generative power to elicit new meaning in the present and become tools for building a better future.¹²³ By showing the nation's future and past to be contested, these works take up the unfinished state of the nation not as a site of cynicism, but as one of generative possibility, and of hope.

Mit Jai Inn's paintings of sunrises and sunsets image a landscape of hope in which cyclical repetition can itself be generative. Jirat Prasertsup's installation caricatures false hopes cultivated by royal propaganda, showing the constricting limitations of the sky. Nipan Oranniwesna brought the sky down to earth, showing it to be fundamentally changeable, even human, and ritualizing hope in annual photographs documenting its change. Artists who explore the imagery of the sky show it variously to be empty, an illusion, changeable and ultimately, made of the same stuff as earth. Artists who take up the Phi Bun rebellion as a subject build power in the people to rise to the horizon. Thanom Chapakdee built an evasive ritual archive owned by the people that incorporated enemies of the state into prayers for the future. Teerawat Mulvilai's performers re-imaged the haunting violence of the past as an intimate and insistent cry for justice in the future. Montika Kham-on excavated the futurism in the Isan people's century-old prophecies and hopes, in which they were at last free. These works of art, in their beauty, humour, ambiguity, anger and truth, pry apart the knot tethering spiritual and political power to one person.

These artists, under an authoritarian regime, work in abstraction and calculated ambiguity. The symbology of the sky and references to historical rather than contemporary events allow them to make visually legible but indirect comments. For Thanom Chapakdee, allusive yet legible art is politically advantageous. He noted, "If we set up our strategy well, I do believe art and culture movements would be a vital soft power tool as a spearhead for the [political] breakthrough," citing the revitalization of Phi Bun history as an example.¹²⁴ Chapakdee noted that telling the stories of Isan through art could "open up a channel to the general public for them to join without reserve" and strengthen the movement.¹²⁵ Ironically, these works of art are legible because the Thai monarchy distributed images and symbols throughout the nation-state to reify its legitimacy. In taking up the tools of the regime's legitimacy towards its critique, the artists discussed are evolving centuries-old symbols and histories. They disrupt the traditional relationships between sky and earth, king and commoner.

Delineated by the horizon, the sky is not an infinite heaven, but a reflection of how far we can see. Looking deep into time, and beyond the horizon, these artists expand the possibilities for how people in Thailand envision their own positionality and that of their rulers. They introduce history and hope as living processes within each person who stands rooted in the ground and looks to the sky.