Thai Film Archive

An impressive new library and cinema will open at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya next month. The Archive has always maintained an extensive collection of Thai and English film books, though it was previously housed in a Portakabin. Screenings at the new cinema include A Streetcar Named Desire (featuring one of Marlon Brando’s greatest performances) on 15th March, and the Thai New Wave classic Dang Bireley’s and Young Gangsters [sic] (2499 อันธพาลครองเมือง) on 7th and 20th March. All screenings are free, and the cinema and Cherd Songsri Library are both located in the new Sanbhasatra Building.

Cult of Identity

Nathee Monthonwit’s exhibition Cult of Identity opened at BACC on 6th February, and runs until 1st March. Nathee’s cartoon-style digital prints satirise society, politics, and the military. One picture, World of Wrestling (โลกมวยปล้ำ), combines references to the 6th October 1976 massacre and the 2014 coup. The painting shows the folding chair from Neal Ulevich’s infamous photograph of the massacre, with the hanging corpse as a wrestler defeated by a figure representing the military junta.

World Class Cinema

After The Wizard of Oz and Annie Hall, the Thai Film Archive has announced the next batch of films in this year’s World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) programme. Highlights over the next few months include Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining (showing on 15th March), the ‘New Hollywood’ classic The Graduate (19th April), Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws (17th May), and the South Korean ‘golden age’ melodrama The Housemaid (하녀; 16th August).

The Shining was originally scheduled for last year’s World Class Cinema season, though Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was shown instead. All screenings will take place at the Scala cinema in Bangkok.

A Man Called Tone

Next month will be a rare opportunity to see one of the Thai film industry’s greatest classics on the big screen. A Man Called Tone (โทน) represents a turning point in Thai cinema: before its release, almost all Thai films were formulaic quickies, shot on 16mm without sound. The success of A Man Called Tone led to a creative and technical evolution in the film industry, making it Thailand’s first truly modern film.

A Man Called Tone will be shown at Bangkok’s Scala cinema on 22nd March. Scala is the perfect venue for the film’s revival, as A Man Called Tone was originally released in 1970, only a few months after Scala first opened.

In her essay in Film in Southeast Asia, Chalida Uabumrungjit writes that A Man Called Tone “changed the way of thinking in Thai filmmaking.” In another essay in the same book (the most authoritative history of Thai film), Anchalee Chaiworaporn describes it as “a key transitional point in the history of the Thai movie.” It has an equally laudatory review in Thai Cinema: “The significance of Tone as a milestone in the development of Thai cinema cannot be underestimated.”

“The struggle will continue...”

This afternoon, Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolved the opposition Future Forward party, ruling that it had violated party funding rules by accepting ฿191 million from its founder, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. The money was seized by the court, and Thanathorn and other Future Forward executives were banned from politics for ten years. (Thanathorn was disqualified as an MP last year.)

In fact, Thanathorn had loaned the money to Future Forward, as he explained in an interview with Southeast Asia Globe last week: “The loan has a clear contract—I’m not giving this money for free to the party.” (Party fundraising to repay the loan had already begun.) Despite this, the court ruled that the money constituted a donation, therefore exceeding the ฿10 million limit on donations to political parties.

The ruling against Future Forward was practically a foregone conclusion, given that the Constitutional Court has previously dissolved three other parties: Thai Rak Thai in 2006, the People Power Party in 2008, and Thai Raksa Chart last year. The court also dismissed Yingluck Shinawatra as prime pinister in 2014. In each of these cases, the court’s judgements went against parties opposed to the military establishment.

Future Forward contested its first election last year, and quickly built up support among young Thais frustrated by the country’s perpetual cycle of military coups. Today’s verdict could lead to a significant increase in anti-military activism from this politically-engaged generation of Future Forward supporters.

In his Southeast Asia Globe interview, Thanathorn announced that the party would be renamed following its dissolution, and that he would lead a protest movement to campaign against the influence of the military: “If we’re found guilty of this and our party is dissolved, the struggle will continue... there will be two paths running in parallel—one is a new party in parliament, running under a new name but the same ideology, and the second is a social movement run by me”.

A Better Tomorrow

This weekend, Bangkok’s House cinema will be screening a 4k restoration of John Woo’s classic A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色). The film set the template for the ‘heroic bloodshed’ sub-genre of Hong Kong action films, which also included Woo’s The Killer (喋血雙雄). A Better Tomorrow will be shown tomorrow and on 23rd February.

Sonic Cinema

Bangkok Screening Room begins a new season of music and movies next month, with its Sonic Cinema programme of film screenings with live, experimental soundtracks. The season begins on 1st March with Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Бронено́сец «Потёмкин»), and this silent classic will be shown with live music by Viveka (Pakorn Musikaboonlert and Pachara Chirathivat).

Battleship Potemkin is an agitprop dramatisation of the 1905 Russian Revolution, though it also demonstrates Eisenstein’s revolutionary montage editing. The Odessa Steps massacre is arguably the most famous sequence in silent cinema. It was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2018, with a soundtrack by the Pet Shop Boys, and I saw it in 2011 at the Thai Film Archive with live music by Nipat Chaisap.

Sonic Cinema builds on a previous one-off screening of Suspiria, which also featured live accompaniment by Pakorn. (The season was originally scheduled to begin on 6th March with a different silent film, The Lodger.)

The Amazing Thai-Land III

The third issue of Chalermpol Junrayab’s The Amazing Thai-Land comic was published last month, in a limited edition of 100 copies. Chalermpol creates parodies of Marvel and DC comic-book covers on his iPad; The Amazing Thai-Land is an ironic reappropriation of the Tourist Authority of Thailand’s slogan ‘Amazing Thailand’.

The book includes material from Chalermpol’s debut solo exhibition, and each work is a parody of contemporary Thai politics. Targets include the late Prem Tinsulanonda—portrayed as a Mafia godfather, representing his position in the so-called ‘network monarchy’ patronage system—and the public shaming of a student who painted the Buddha as Ultraman.

Fulfill

Thanathorn Suppakijjumnong’s exhibition of typewriter art, Fulfill (เติมเต็ม), opened on 6th February at BACC. The show is dominated by portraits—the Family (ครอบครัว) and Secret of Love (ความลับของความรัก) series—and What’s in Hide [sic] (มีอะไรซ่อนอยู่), a series of abstract compositions. Another picture, Mother’s Love (ความรักของแม่), shows the artist’s mother guiding his hand onto a typewriter keyboard.

Each work was meticulously typed onto paper using a manual typewriter (two of which are on display at the exhibition), and Thanathorn achieves an almost photorealistic level of detail in the Family portraits. The other pictures incorporate folded paper, resembling the childrens’ fortune-telling origami game. The history of typewriter art is covered in the books Typewriter Art and The Art of Typewriting, and the exhibition runs until 1st March.

Spirited Away

Tomorrow evening, the Baan Dusit Thani hotel in Bangkok will be showing Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し). The open-air screening is free of charge.

A Very Stable Genius

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America (its title taken from a typically braggadocious Trump quote) provides “a chronological account of Trump’s vainglorious pursuit of power in his first term,” based on more than 200 interviews with current and former senior administration officials. Sources are quoted ‘on background’, though they can frequently be identified from phrases such as “[Steve] Bannon thought to himself” and “Putin confided to [Rex] Tillerson”.

As is often the case, sources’ recollections tend to be self-serving. Chris Christie, for example, warns Trump with remarkable foresight that Michael Flynn is “going to get you in trouble... Take my word for it.” Then, after Trump fires Flynn and declares that “the whole Russia thing is over,” Christie’s crystal ball reappears: he apparently told Trump, “we’re going to be sitting here a year from now talking about Russia”.

This is the third major account of Trump’s presidency, after Michael Wolff’s gossipy Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward’s authoritative Fear. All three books feature reconstructed quotes from private meetings and conversations, though only A Very Stable Genius acknowledges that such quotations are not verbatim: “Dialogue cannot always be exact but is based here on multiple people’s memories of events,” a clarification missing from Wolff and Woodward.

Trump initially agreed to be interviewed for the book, as the authors explain: “In a phone call, Trump told Rucker he would like to sit for an interview.” In the same call, the president said: “I’ll do it. I’d like to have a proper book done. You’re a serious person.” But he subsequently changed his mind, and dismissed the book on Twitter as a “Fake Book from two third rate Washington Post reporters”. (In contrast, Trump has cooperated with various hagiographic books on his presidency, such as Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, Inside Trump’s White House, and The United States of Trump.)

Fear recounted an especially acrimonious 2017 meeting between Trump and his military leaders, an event also covered in A Very Stable Genius. In Fear, Woodward writes: “Just before 10 a.m. on July 20, a stifling, cloudless summer Thursday six months into his presidency, Donald Trump crossed the Potomac River to the Pentagon.” A Very Stable Genius has a very similar description—“On July 20, just before 10:00 a.m. on a scorching summer Thursday, Trump arrived at the Pentagon”—though it also includes additional material, notably Trump mocking the assembled top brass as “a bunch of dopes and babies.”

Similarly, Fear included the first account of negotiations between Trump’s legal team and Robert Mueller, though A Very Stable Genius builds on this with quotes from an awkward phone call between Mueller and William Barr. The book also provides more details on the firing of Rex Tillerson, with a meticulous two-page account expanding on Fear’s two-paragraph summary. On the other hand, whereas Fear devoted six pages to Trump’s disgraceful comments on neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, the episode (“one of the lowest points of his presidency”) is covered in less than a page in A Very Stable Genius.

Neo Thaiism

After Carnivalism, Gagasmicism, and Roboticlism, Thai art has a new ‘ism’: Neo Thaiism. A new exhibition brings together three young Thai artists—Subannakrit Krikum, Terdtanwa Kanama, and Teerapon Sisung—positioning them as the vanguard of a new artistic wave.

Subannakrit’s exquisite paintings resemble miniature temple murals, though on closer inspection they reveal unexpected elements: Siam 2020, for example, features modern artworks placed incongruously among traditional décor. Terdtanwa’s large canvases depict apocalyptic imagery with a dystopian environmental message. Teerapon creates delicate sculptures from woven copper thread.

The Neo Thaiism exhibition opened at Bangkok’s Joyman Gallery on 7th January, and runs until 29th February. The exhibition booklet by curator Witchakorn Tangklangkunlachorn features impressive photography though fairly superficial text.

Almost Fiction

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s photography exhibition Almost Fiction opened on 21st December 2019. The exhibition is divided into two halves: in one room are works from Apichatpong’s Insomnia series, with larger images from his Soldier series in an adjacent room.

The Insomnia series includes several shots taken on the set of Apichatpong’s short video Blue (ตะวันดับ). The most startling work is a diptych titled Bullet, showing a bullet emerging from an elderly woman’s mouth. (The woman in question is Jenjira Pongpas, who has appeared in many of Apichatpong’s films and videos.)

For the Soldier series, Apichatpong photographed young soldiers and obscured their faces with white light. Soldiers have featured as characters in several of Apichatpong’s films, perhaps indicating the military’s persistent influence over Thai society and politics. The Soldier series includes three large photographs (Group Portrait, A Young Man at Twilight, and Embrace) and a smaller image displayed in a lightbox (Mirage Boy).

Almost Fiction runs until 21st February at Gallery Seescape in Chiang Mai. The popular café next door, SS1254372, is also highly recommended.

Nam June Paik

The current Nam June Paik exhibition at Tate Modern in London features more than 200 artworks, making it arguably as significant as the Paik retrospective held twenty years ago at the Guggenheim in New York. The Tate’s exhibition catalogue was edited by curators Sook-Kyung Lee and Rudolf Frieling.

The catalogue includes fascinating essays on key Paik works, such as TV Buddha. There are also chapters on the roles of music and television in Paik’s work. However, the Guggenheim exhibition catalogue, The Worlds of Nam June Paik, remains the most comprehensive book on Paik, with a detailed bibliography and exhibition history.

The Film Photonovel

The Film Photonovel, by Jan Baetens, is the first English-language book on the film photonovel and, indeed, on the photonovel itself. As the author explains, and as the book’s subtitle (A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations) suggests, the photonovel is a somewhat neglected medium, and—unlike other ‘lowbrow’ media, such as comics and pulp fiction—has yet to be rediscovered by critics or academics. (Baetens is a notable exception, and his journal articles on the subject are invaluable.)

Photonovels (fotoromanzo in Italian) were first published in Italian and French women’s magazines after World War II. (The closest contemporary equivalent is probably Deidre’s Photo Casebook, a photographic agony-aunt column in the UK tabloid The Sun.) Baetens traces the format back to the Italian magazine Grand Hôtel, whose photorealistic drawings he defines as the “drawn novel” genre. Grand Hôtel soon switched from photorealistic drawings to photographs, giving birth to the photonovel.

Like the photonovel itself, the film photonovel (cineromanzo) subgenre also has antecedents. Baetens cites the Italian film magazine Cinevita, which reproduced film stills accompanied by captions providing each film’s complete dialogue. (In the 1970s, Richard J. Anobile edited a series of books with a similar format, including Psycho; and Stanley Kubrick published his A Clockwork Orange screenplay illustrated with hundreds of frame enlargements.)

The first film photonovels appeared in Italy in the 1950s, and they enjoyed significant popularity until their eventual decline in the 1960s. The most successful title, an adaptation of the 1954 film Ulysses, sold half a million copies at the height of Italy’s ‘peplum’ craze. Baetens provides a history of the film photonovel and a detailed analysis of the format’s layout, imagery, and captions.

World Class Cinema

After The Wizard of Oz, the second film in this year’s World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) season is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Arguably the greatest comedy ever made, it’s hilarious and stylistically inventive, though it’s also a realistic and bittersweet portrait of romance and relationships. Annie Hall will be screened at Bangkok’s Scala cinema on 16th February.

Propaganda Children’s Day

Yesterday was Children’s Day in Thailand. This annual event sees various institutions organise fun activities for children and families. One of those institutions, the military, allows toddlers to sit in tanks and pose with guns on Children’s Day, instilling positive feelings towards the armed forces from a very young age. To highlight the military’s disturbing grooming of kids, Headache Stencil held an alternative Children’s Day event this weekend at the Jam Factory in Bangkok.

His subversive Propaganda Children’s Day (วันเด็กชั่งชาติ), which took place yesterday and today, featured a life-sized tank decorated with anti-military graffiti. Inside the tank was a mini gallery with paintings such as Uncle Red Panda, depicting Prayut Chan-o-cha’s face with footprints over it (also available on t-shirts and stickers). Other paintings on display included The Sound of Elite, a collage featuring the background from Neal Ulevich’s famous photograph of the 6th October 1976 massacre and a publicity still from The Sound of Music.

Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s documentary 100 Times Reproduction of Democracy (การผลิตซ้ำประชาธิปไตยให้กลายเป็นของแท้) also highlights the military’s exploitation of Children’s Day. Headache Stencil organised a similar exhibition of political art, Uncensored, at the same venue last year, and his Thailand Casino exhibition was equally satirical.

Insects in the Backyard

Tanwarin Sukkhapisit’s Insects in the Backyard (อินเซค อินเดอะ แบ็คยาร์ด) will have two screenings this month at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya. It will be shown tomorrow and on 28th January, and both screenings are free.

The film was banned in 2010 and finally released—with a three-second cut—in 2017. Tanwarin was elected to parliament in last year’s election, and serves as Thailand’s first transgender MP.

The Wizard of Oz

The annual World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) season, organised by the Thai Film Archive, continues in 2020. The classic Hollywood musical The Wizard of Oz will be shown at Bangkok’s Scala cinema on 19th January. The first World Class Cinema screenings took place in 2017, with a second round in 2018. Last year’s event concluded only a few days ago.

The United States of Trump

“If you despise Donald Trump, this book may frustrate you.” This warning, in the foreword to The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America, is pretty accurate. The book, by disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly—fired after multiple sexual-harassment allegations—is a Trump biography whose only sources are Trump himself (from an interview aboard Air Force One) and his eldest son, Don Jnr.

The first paragraph of chapter one is worth quoting in full: “The president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is not happy. Sitting behind a large wooden desk in his spacious airborne office, he asks that his wife, Melania, be brought into the room immediately. In less than a minute, she appears, immaculately groomed and flashing her bright smile.” In just a couple of sentences, that’s a pretty revealing portrait of a marriage.

O’Reilly spends most of the book burnishing Trump’s image and defending him against his critics. Thus, the racist ‘birther’ conspiracy theory was, apparently, about “divisive politics, not skin color.” And, although President Trump has lied more than 10,000 times (according to The Washington Post), O’Reilly describes him euphemistically as “not a precise orator”. O’Reilly repeatedly returns to these two accusations, racism and dishonesty, giving the same defence several times. The author doth protest too much, methinks.

The book is also an opportunity for O’Reilly to attempt a rehabilitation of his own reputation. He humblebrags about his glory days in cable news: “Putting together a mega-hit television program is an arduous task. I know; I’ve experienced it—twice.” He also takes credit for Trump’s planned 2020 election campaign slogan, quoting himself telling Trump: “I’d say “keep.” You should move it forward.” Trump replies: ”My new phrase would be “Keep America Great”? You like that better?” That exchange, however, took place two years after Trump began using ‘Keep America Great’.

Amidst the pro-Trump spin, The United States of Trump also includes some surprisingly embarrassing trivia. O’Reilly notes that Trump “has gained a considerable amount of weight. However, he does not diet or exercise much,” and the book even reprints side-by-side photographs of the Obama and Trump inauguration crowds: “it appears that President Obama’s First Inaugural Address had more in-person attendees than President Trump had.”

The account of Trump’s daily routine is also quite revealing. He spends his mornings “turning on the television set and watching news in his private residence on the second floor of the White House. He is usually by himself at this point.” He doesn’t start work until late in the morning: “At eleven, President Trump strolls into the West Wing of the White House to begin his official day,” and there is frequent down time: he likes to “watch the news when he is not otherwise occupied.” In the evenings—surprise, surprise—it’s TV time again: “After dinner, Mr Trump often watches the cable news opinion shows.”

Prince Theatre

This month, Bangkok’s Prince Theatre hotel will be screening an eclectic mix of classic films. A different movie will be shown almost every evening, free of charge, in the hotel bar. Highlights include: the propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) on 4th January, the epic Lawrence of Arabia on 8th January, the silent comedy The General on 13th January, the Soviet silent drama Earth (Земля) on 20th January, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons on 27th January, and the Neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) on 29th January.

Inside Trump's White House

Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House began life as an authorised record of Donald Trump’s presidency. After initially giving the book his tacit approval, Trump later tried to sue the publisher for libel. Now, almost two years later, comes another author with his own offically sanctioned account. “I was being given the nod to write an official history of a presidency,” boasts Doug Wead, writer of Inside Trump’s White House. (The US subtitle is The Real Story of His Presidency, while in the UK it’s The Authorized Story.)

The book is a response to Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward’s equally critical Fear, both of which depended on well-placed though unidentified sources. Wead disparages this “secondhand testimony, which was usually anonymous” though he later admits that he also relied on “a long list of anonymous sources inside the Trump White House and the government”.

His sources were apparently selected for him by Trump’s team: “White House staffers sent me names and phone numbers of people to contact.” These contacts include Dan Scavino and Keith Schiller—recognisable to anyone familiar with Trump’s background—who Wead admits are “names that I had never heard before”. In another example of Wead’s naivety, he boasts that Trump showed him a top-secret letter from Kim Jong-un—“My people don’t want me to give these to you”—though Trump had tweeted the entire text months earlier.

Two previous (and similarly hagiographic) books have claimed unique access to Trump. Corey R. Lewandowski and David N. Bossie wrote that Trump’s Enemies contained "the only formal book interview President Trump has sat for since being elected to office," and Ronald Kessler maintained that The Trump White House featured “the only interview for a book Trump said he has given or will give as president”. Presumably, Trump co-operated with Inside Trump’s White House because of Wead’s equally dependable loyalty: Trump tells him, “Doug, I think you and I have good chemistry. That’s going to be a good thing for this book.”

The result is a flattering portrait of the Trump administration, not quite as fawning as Trump’s Enemies though devoid of any brickbats. Whereas The Trump White House was surprisingly critical of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Wead lavishes praise on both of them, and refers to Kushner as ”the president’s brilliant son-in-law”. In fact, Wead devotes a chapter to each of Trump’s adult children, making this essentially a Trump vanity project.

Nam June Paik

A major Nam June Paik retrospective is currently on show at Tate Modern in London. The exhibition features more than 200 works, including Button Happening, Paik’s earliest extant video piece and, therefore, arguably the first example of video art. (Paik purchased a video camera in 1965. Legend has it that he filmed Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York on 4th October of that year, though the footage no longer exists. Button Happening was shot at around the same time.) The show also features numerous artefacts from Paik’s Fluxus period, including Zen for Film, a projection of unexposed 16mm film.

The exhibition opens with Paik’s masterpiece, TV Buddha. This installation—in which a Buddha statue contemplates its own image via CCTV—exists in numerous variations, though the Tate retrospective has the original 1974 version (with an 18th-century Buddha and a white JVC Videosphere TV), on loan from Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The exhibition runs from 17th October until 9th February next year.

2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke

2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke: The Genesis, Making and Authorship of a Masterpiece, by Filippo Ulivieri and Simone Odino, now sits alongside eleven other books about 2001: A Space Odyssey on my bookshelves. (The others are 2001: Filming The Future, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2001 Memories, Moonwatcher’s Memoir, Are We Alone?, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2001: The Lost Science, The 2001 File, The Making Of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Space Odyssey.)

Despite being the latest of at least a dozen books on the subject, 2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke offers a surprisingly original analysis of the making of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece and his collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. It provides “for the first time a complete account of the creative odyssey undertaken by Kubrick and Clarke,” including previously-unseen material from both the Kubrick Archive and, especially, Clarke’s papers at the Smithsonian.

Most accounts of the production of 2001 are largely anecdotal, relying on decades-old recollections, though 2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke takes a reassuringly systematic approach, verifying every fact via contemporaneous press reports and production documents. The book’s most substantial section offers a unique chronology of 2001’s production, meticulously researched and thoroughly detailed. There is also an in-depth examination of the often-overlooked period following Dr Strangelove, when Kubrick was formulating his plans for 2001.

2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke was first published in Italian, as 2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke: Genesi, realizzazione e paternità di un capolavoro. Co-author Filippo Ulivieri also wrote the excellent Stanley Kubrick and Me, the memoir of Kubrick’s personal assistant.

The Fabulists

Michael Peel, formerly based in the Financial Times’ Bangkok bureau, is now an FT Brussels correspondent. Once free of the tacit censorship familiar to all Bangkok-based journalists, he wrote of his “sense of alarm about the stifling atmosphere” surrounding discussion of the monarchy, in a cathartic FT Weekend Magazine feature (published on 14th October 2017).

In The Fabulists: The World’s New Rulers, Their Myths and the Struggle Against Them, Peel analyses the rise of authoritarianism in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In a chapter on post-coup Thailand, he reflects on the paradox of the country’s adulation for the monarchy and its severe lèse-majesté law: “The longer I spent in Thailand, the harder I found it to reconcile this”.

Peel interviewed an imprisoned lèse-majesté suspect, and an ultra-royalist who snitches on anti-monarchists to the police. Peel describes his meeting with the shackled prisoner as “one of the more bizarre interviews I have conducted.” Tentative cracks appeared in the royalist’s over-zealous attitude, as he was faced with a moral dilemma: “He had fallen out with his son over his alleged disrespect for the monarchy. I asked gently about this. He replied elliptically.”

Peel also spoke to Sulak Sivaraksa, who has faced numerous lèse-majesté charges, all of which—thanks to behind-the-scenes interventions—resulted in acquittal. Sulak’s latest narrow escape came in 2014, when he challenged a national myth, questioning the historical accuracy of King Naresuan’s legendary elephant duel: “even this semi-licensed gadfly found he could not avoid the official swat.” Like the recent Sulak biography Roar, The Fabulists is on sale in Thailand only because it has somehow slipped under the government’s radar.

Spectrosynthesis II

Spectrosynthesis II - Exposure of Tolerance: LGBTQ in Southeast Asia (สนทนาสัปตสนธิ ๒: ไตร่ถาม ความหลากหลายในอุษาคเนย์) opened at Bangkok’s BACC on 23rd November. This major group exhibition features more than fifty artists, and is on show until 1st March next year. The substantial catalogue includes an essay by curator Chatvichai Promadhattavedi.

Highlights include Michael Shaowanasai’s Portrait of a Man in Habits, in which the artist poses as a monk wearing female make-up. When it was first shown, at the Chulalongkorn Art Center’s Alien {Gener}ation exhibition in 2000, it was condemned by the Thai Rath (ไทยรัฐ) newspaper. This led to complaints from Buddhist groups, and the photograph was withdrawn from display.

Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê’s collages Gay Mixed II and Gay Mixed IV are also included. They are constructed from photographic strips woven together like traditional Vietnamese mats, though they include images from gay pornography censored in Vietnam.

Ohm Phanphiroj’s short video Underage, in which he interviews young boys forced into prostitution in Bangkok, was removed from the exhibition less than a month after it opened, following a high-level complaint. Thus, although Thailand is becoming increasingly accepting of gay culture, it remains hypersensitive to any material that exposes the country’s extreme social inequality. Rather than addressing the underlying problem, the official policy seems to be: shoot the messenger.