Outdoor

Patthakarn Sadubtham released his new photobook Outdoor (เอาท์ดอร์) today. The book is limited to 100 numbered copies (mine being no. 10).

Patthakarn uses the pseudonym Shotbyly, and his large-format photozine Auey Kaab (เอื้อยค้าบบบ˜) was published a few months ago, also in an edition of 100. The zine features photographs shot during the filming of his short film of the same name, which was screened at the Thailand International LGBTQ+ Film and TV Festival 2026.

He has also produced a series of four Shotbyly Vintage magazines, each limited to fifty copies. After the softcore vol. 1, subsequent issues have been more explicit. Vol. 2, Tum, was a portfolio of photos of model Theeraphat Khajornsuwan. The theme of vol. 3 was Paradiso, and vol. 4’s was The Secret Room (ห้องหฤหรรษ์).

Outdoor was designed by Patthakarn’s regular collaborator Oat Montien, who will show the Auey Kaab short film at his second Porn lecture at Sala Saneha in Bangkok tomorrow. Oat also produced The Secret Room and curated Patthakarn’s Boy x Therapy photography exhibition.

Light and Magic:The Birth of Art Photography

Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography opened today at Tate Modern in London, and the gallery’s website describes it as “the first major exhibition to explore pictorialism as a global movement.” The exhibition catalogue is edited by Charmaine Toh.

Pictorialism was the first ‘ism’ associated with photography. The style can be traced back to Henry Peach Robinson’s term “pictorial effect” in his 1869 book Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers.

Robinson’s photographs were produced from a composite of multiple negatives in a process known as combination printing. Later pictorialists used other techniques (such as soft focus and multiple exposure), though their common goal was to manipulate their photographs to simulate the traditional aesthetics of painting.

Light and Magic features photographers from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia. In China in the 1940s, for example, Lang Jingshan produced photographs that closely resemble ink-wash paintings (using a composite process similar to Robinson’s).

This expands the geographical boundaries of Pictorialism, a movement more often associated with western groups such as the Photo-Secession. (An earlier book on the subject, Truth Beauty edited by Thomas Padon, was the first to discuss Pictorialism from an international perspective.)

Happy Boy

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the bloodbath at Thammasat University on 6th October 1976. An iconic photograph, taken by Neal Ulevich, has come to represent the entire event, and this single image has been analysed and reproduced so much that even its background details have inspired dozens of artists.

Amongst the goulish onlookers captured by Ulevich, a young boy with a broad smile stands out from the crowd. This child, who would now be a middle-aged man, has never been identified, though he has been portrayed in paintings, graphics, films, and even as a mini sculpture. Krit Chantranet’s recent painting Smile is an etereal portrait of the boy. A colourised version of the boy appears on a bookmark sold with a new book marking the fiftieth anniversary, edited by Kasidit Ananthanathorn.

Khai Maew created a miniature plastic model of the child, called Happy Boy, in 2016. A drawing of the boy appears on the cover of เด็กดีของประเทศที่ไร้อนาคต (‘good children in a country with no future’), vol. 7 of the journal ชายคาเรื่องสั้น (‘roof short stories’), published in 2016. Matichon Weekly (มติชนสุดสัปดาห์) created a graphic of the boy wearing 3D glasses to illustrate an article by its columnist Kam Phaka. (The column appeared in the 7th October 2016 issue, though the graphic only appeared on the magazine’s website.) The boy also appears in The Forest of Recurrence, a 2015 painting by Kampanart Sangsorn. Ing K. painted the boy in watercolour for her series Where Are They Now? (ไทยมุง) in 2008, and the portrait appeared on the cover of the Flashback ’76 (อดีตหลอน) exhibition catalogue.

Ukrit Sa-nguanhai’s short film The Pob’s House (บ้านผีปอบ) is a powerful reminder of the persistence of mob violence, and features a little boy turning to the camera and grinning, in a reference to the smiling boy in Ulevich’s photo. Chookiat Sakveerakul’s science-fiction epic Taklee Genesis (ตาคลี เจเนซิส) dramatised the events of 6th October, and in one shot, a young boy stands alone on a balcony laughing at the carnage.

50 ปี 6 ตุลา(‘50 years of 6th Oct.’)

50 ปี 6 ตุลา
(‘50 years of 6th Oct.’), an exhibition at Flow Coffee Amnat in Amnat Charoen, features artworks created by students at Amnatcharoen School. The exhibition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 6th October 1976 coup.

The exhibition opens today and runs until 14th October. It features a collage of reproductions of newspaper clippings that includes the notorious Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) headline published the day before the coup. (The photograph that Dao Siam printed below the headline is not included.) Another exhibit modifies the famous Neal Ulevich photograph of the events with a comic “Pop” graphic.

Impression of Arnon

Yesterday, to mark the third year of lawyer and activist Arnon Nampa’s jail sentence, the Pridi Banomyong Institute in Bangkok held a live painting session, Impression of Arnon, during which six artists produced artworks inspired by Arnon.

The participating artists were Charinthorn Rachurutchata, MM.Kosum, Setthawuth Komarakul Na Nakorn, Wittawat Tongkeaw, Madeaw Srilarnyaiprik, and Tanis Werasakwong. The event was organised by iLaw, and was part of a series of activities about Arnon titled Unforgotten.

Madeaw painted a portrait of Arnon surrounded by the word ‘fight’, based on a message Arnon had written to the artist during his court case. The iLaw website notes that Madeaw’s art became more political in solidarity with the three-finger protest movement that began in 2020 (“มะเดี่ยวยังเล่าด้วยว่า แรงบันดาลใจสำคัญที่ทำให้สร้างงานศิลปะที่เกี่ยวกับการเมืองคือ เมื่อเห็นการชุมนุมของผู้คนในปี 2563”). This political awakening is known in Thai as ta sawang.

For her collaborative work Draw Together, MM.Kosum created a tall stack of paper on which visitors could draw anything related to freedom of expression. The artwork was displayed in a column, like a tree trunk, as the artist views activists as having the potential to grow like trees.

Setthawuth Komarakul Na Nakorn produced a work inspired by Shepard Fairey’s Obey stencil. Setthawuth’s Disobey features a portrait of Arnon painted onto a collage of photographs of him.

Tanis Werasakwong painted Arnon on a beach with his children, an experience that Arnon is deprived of due to his jail sentence. iLaw quotes Tanis as saying of Arnon and the painting: “เป็นเรื่องธรรมดาๆ เพราะนี่คือชีวิตปกติที่เขาควรจะได้” (‘it’s normal, and he should have a normal life’).

Arnon’s graduation gown was on display at the event, and Wittawat’s painting เชื่อมั่นและศรัทธา (‘belief and faith’) shows the gown against a blue background (a symbolic colour that the artist has used in many other works). It also features dots whose colour is a combination of red and orange, symbolising for the artist the hope that red-shirt and ‘orange movement’ pro-democracy supporters will join together. Wittawat’s previous paintings Blues Square and Captain Justice (ทนายอานนท์) are also portraits of Arnon.

Scene of Oct.จากรอยแผลสู่อนาคต

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the violent and tragic events that took place on 6th October 1976 at Thammasat University, when forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. An exhibition organised by Thai PBS, Scene of Oct. จากรอยแผลสู่อนาคต (‘from scars to the future’), will examine the incident from multiple perspectives.

Scene of Oct. will feature poetry, music, and art inspired by 1976, and quotes from films that depict the events at Thammasat. It will even include a board game based on the incident.

The exhibition is part of the VIPA International Film Festival 2026. VIFF runs from 11th to 25th September, and Scene of Oct. is on show from 21st September to 16th October, at the Thai PBS offices in Bangkok.

VIFF’s closing film, on 25th September, is Since That Wednesday... Fifty Years Caught Between Memory and Forgetting (เช้านั้นวันพุธ), a new ninety-minute documentary about 1976 by Kowit Phothisan, the editor of the Isaan Record (เดอะอีสานเรคคอร์ด) news website. (It also discusses the Tak Bai incident of 2004.) Since That Wednesday’s original English title was The Unforgetting Wednesday. An hour-long version of the film will be broadcast on Thai PBS on 5th October.

The film’s poster image has been revised, after complaints that the original version used AI to insert elements that were not present at the scene. The original poster showed a black-and-white image of a student’s body being dragged away, with a red folding chair nearby, in reference to an infamous Neal Ulevich photograph from 6th October.

In reality, the folding chair was not at the location in the photograph, and it transpired that generative AI had been used to create it. Kowit posted an apology online, and created a new poster with minimal use of AI to show an aerial view of an existing photo. While the new poster uses AI to change the vantage point of the viewer, it doesn’t add any inaccurate elements to the image.

Pattanapong Khongsak’s short film 8 (๘) also uses AI to augment historical photographs. Chatchawan Thongchan’s short film From Forest to City (อรัญนคร) also features a red folding chair in an otherwise black-and-white scene. Bhandevanov Devakula’s film Whatever, I Don’t Care (ช่างมันฉันไม่แคร์) also represents the events of 6th October via gunshots heard on its soundtrack.

On the same day, the festival will screen the short student drama The Echo Remembered of Souls [sic] (เสียงสะท้อนจากความทรงจำ), directed by Sassawat Kanayat. The film features a group of students planning an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 6th October, though they disagree on how confrontational it should be. After a rather earnest discussion, they finally compromise and plan a display that acknowledges the victims but doesn’t show the violence of the event. The Echo Remembered of Souls was first shown at Mahidol University’s Prince Mahidol Hall in Salaya on 17th August, as part of Peace Festival Week 2026 (เทศกาลสันติภาพ 2569). It will also be screened at Thammasat’s Sri Burapha Auditorium on 5th October.

Of course, the scripted debate among the exhibition organisers is similar to the dilemma faced by the real-life organisers of 6th October exhibitions. For the first such event, at Thammasat in 1996, for example, plans to include the Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper that sparked the raid on the campus were dropped, as the front page was considered too incendiary. In contrast, an exhibition at Mahasarakham University’s College of Politics and Governance on the fiftieth anniversary of 6th October will include a photocopy of every page from that issue of Dao Siam.

Another short film by Kassawat, The Empty Page (บันทึกหน้าสุดท้าย), will be shown on 24th September. This film also features a group of students planning an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 6th October, though in a flashback scene they also play Thammasat students hiding from gunfire on the day of the attack. They tend to one injured student, though no blood is visible. Shots are heard on the soundtrack, though the attackers are not shown. The Empty Page will also be shown at the Sri Burapha Auditorium on 4th October.

The festival will also screen Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope on 12th September. (Rope was previously shown at the Pridi Banomyong Institute in 2015, and at Bangkok Screening Room in 2018.)

Old Path in the Deep Dark ForestBlinding Flash and Echo Fire

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the violent and tragic events that took place on 6th October 1976 at Thammasat University, when forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. The incident remains one of the most shocking moments in Thailand’s modern history.

There are more than seventy films and videos that refer to 6th October. To commemorate this year’s anniversary, MAIIAM in Chiang Mai will show a trio of these films every weekend this month.

The screening programme, Old Path in the Deep Dark Forest: Blinding Flash and Echo Fire (รอยทางเก่าในป่าลึก: แสงวาบและเสียงก้อง), features a documentary, a short film, and a music video. The screenings are part of MAIIAM’s exhibition A Reconfigured Archive (จดหมายเหตุนอกบรรทัด).

ชวนอ่านภาพ 6 ตุลา
(‘invitation to read images of 6th Oct.’)

In Chulayarnnon Siriphon’s documentary ชวนอ่านภาพ 6 ตุลา (‘invitation to read images of 6th Oct.’), viewers from different generations interpret a series of photographs of the incident. The images, many of which were previously unpublished, were shown at the Facing Demons (เผชิญหน้าปิศาจ) exhibition at Kinjai Contemporary in 2022.

The documentary was originally commissioned for Facing Demons. It has since been shown at the Doc Club Festival and Doc Club Festival Selections in 2024, and at Chulayarnnon’s I a Pixel, We the People (ข้าพเจ้าคือพิกเซล, พวกเราคือประชาชน) exhibition at Bangkok CityCity last year.

Don’t Forget Me

In Manussak Dokmai’s short film Don’t Forget Me (อย่าลืมฉัน), archive footage of 6th October is accompanied by narration from a documentary on the Mlabri tribe. The narrator describes the tribe’s traditional rituals and customs, providing a blackly comic counterpoint to the violent imagery from 1976.

Don’t Forget Me has been screened numerous times since its original release in 2003, and was shown most recently at Thammasat in 2024. It was part of the Histoire(s) du thai cinéma [sic] (‘histories of Thai cinema’) programme of short films at Dam’n Cineclub in 2018, and the Chiang Mai Now! (เชียงใหม่นาว!) exhibition at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2011.

ยูงทอง 6 ตุลา
(‘golden peacock 6th Oct.’)

The music video ยูงทอง 6 ตุลา (‘golden peacock 6th Oct.’) features photographs of the 1976 massacre and right-wing newspaper reports demonising the students. These brutal images are accompanied by ยูงทอง (‘golden peacock’), a song written by King Rama IX in 1962 that became Thammasat’s official anthem.

As in Don’t Forget Me, the visuals and soundtrack are a deliberate and bitterly ironic contrast: the anthem’s lyrics espouse love, unity, and serenity, while the images on screen depict extreme intolerance, hatred, and division. The video was produced by United Front of Thammasat and Demonstration, one of the key protest groups that instigated the student-led rallies calling for institutional reform in 2020.

Auey Kaab

Patthakarn Sadubtham will launch a large-format photozine, Auey Kaab (เอื้อยค้าบบบ˜), on 16th August at The Independent Print Club at One Bangkok. The zine features photographs shot during the filming of his short film of the same name, which was screened at the Thailand International LGBTQ+ Film and TV Festival 2026 in June.

The zine and film show young Isan men in Songkran costumes celebrating the water festival. (Of course, their costumes soon come off.) In his introduction to the zine, Patthakarn admits that he has a thing for Isan men, who ‘make his heart flutter like a broken flute’.

The film was shot on Super 8mm. It has a comical narration about the stereotype of Isan men who elicit money from people who fall for them by pretending that their buffalo is sick. Readers of the zine can view an online video of behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the film.

Patthakarn uses the pseudonym Shotbyly, and has also produced a series of four Shotbyly Vintage magazines over the past two years, each limited to fifty copies. After the softcore first issue, he switched to a different printer (the one that printed Vichai Imsuksom Eros Reinterpretation catalogue), and later issues have been more explicit.

Shotbyly Vintage Magazine vol. 2, Tum, was a portfolio of photos of model Theeraphat Khajornsuwan. The theme of vol. 3 was Paradiso, and vol. 4’s was The Secret Room (ห้องหฤหรรษ์).

Shotbyly often collaborates with Oat Montien, who has also made Super 8mm short films and a photozine, The Exquisite Fall (อัสดง). Oat curated Patthakarn’s Boy x Therapy exhibition in 2023, and produced the new Auey Kaab zine, which is limited to 100 copies.

Sarit Thanarat

Sarit Thanarat, military prime minister during the Cold War, died in December 1963. After his death, the floodgates opened, and exposés of his love life were rushed into print. His lovenest was a private residence nicknamed the ‘pink palace’ (วิมานสีชมพู; also the title of an unauthorised posthumous Sarit biography), and เมียน้อย 108 (‘108 mistresses’) printed a list of the concubines he entertained there.

Several other books — including อัลบั้มภาพชุดสีชมพู (‘pink album’), วิมานสวาท หลังกองพล ๑ (‘the palace of love behind the 1st infantry regiment’) and the similarly titled รังสวาทหลังพล 1, จอมพลของคุณหนูๆ (‘young ladies of the general’), แม่ม่ายผ้าขะม้าแดง (‘the widow in the red sarong’), and สาวม่ายในวิมานสีชมพู (‘widows in the pink palace’) — featured dossiers of photographs of his alleged lovers. The Daily News (เดลินิวส์) cartoon booklet การ์ตูนชุดแม่ม่ายผ้าขาวม้าแดง (‘the widows in the red sarong cartoon series’) also featured thinly-veiled portrayals of Sarit’s mistresses.

Almost fifty years later, the phrase ‘pink palace’ was censored by Channel 3 when it broadcast the lakorn คุณชายพุฒิภัทร (‘khun Chai Puttipat’) on 5th May 2013. In the third episode, a former military general played by Montree Jenuksorn (who slightly resembles Sarit) discussed his ‘pink palace’, though the sound was muted, presumably to avoid any possibility of a libel suit from Sarit’s descendents. (The novel on which the drama was based refers to Sarit more obliquely.)

Potential defamation also prevented director Banjong Kosallawat from making a semi-fictionalised Sarit biopic in 2002, which was to have been titled จอมพล (‘marshal’). Sarit did feature briefly in the horror movie Zee Oui (ซี-อุย), ordering the swift execution of the murderous title character for political expediency. And Sarit’s statue looms ominously over the characters in Song of the City, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s segment of the portmanteau film Ten Years Thailand.

The newsreel การปฏิบัติหน้าที่เพื่อประเทศชาติในตำแหน่งหัวหน้ารัฐบาลและผู้นำทางทหาร จนถึงล้มป่วยและอสัญกรรมของ ฯพณฯ จอมพลสฤษดิ์ ธนะรัชต์ (‘Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat performing duties for the country as the head of government and military leader until his illness and death’) is a fascinating example of Cold War state propaganda. Screened shortly after Sarit’s death, it provided a counter-narrative to the books that exposed his decadence and corruption. The film depicts Sarit as a tireless and selfless leader, to the extent that he became ill through overwork. Thunska Pansittivorakul’s recent documentary Isan Odyssey (อีสานอำพราง) gives the other side of the story, in a voiceover describing how suspected communists were “brutally murdered” during Sarit’s regime.

After Sarit led a coup in 1957, he was portrayed as a hero by pliant newspaper cartoonists. One example of such propaganda showed Sarit cradling a rescued child in his arms, returning the boy (who represents the Thai people) to his grateful mother. In contrast, a July 1958 cartoon in the liberal ประชาชน (‘people’) newspaper depicted Sarit as a monkey wrapping his tail possessively around Democracy Monument.

In the wake of the 2014 coup, Sarit satire was too sensitive, and the Guerrilla Boys self-censored their mural Junta Connection (วิ่งผลัดเผด็จการ), which originally depicted Sarit passing his (literal) baton of dictatorship to Prayut Chan-o-cha. Junta Connection was shown in 2018 as part of Khon Kaen Manifesto (ขอนแก่น แมนิเฟสโต้), a group exhibition that directly addressed Sarit’s contested legacy.

Art and Culture (ศิลปวัฒนธรรม) magazine analysed cartoonists’ caricatures of Sarit (vol. 43, no. 1), and the journal Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน) examined the lurid books published shortly after his death (vol. 20, no. 2). Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the portrayal of Sarit in Thai films.

October 6th: A Reconfigured Archive

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the violent and tragic events that took place on 6th October 1976 at Thammasat University, when forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. The bodies of the victims were desecrated by baying mobs, and the incident remains one of the most shocking moments in Thailand’s modern history.

MAIIAM in Chiang Mai is commemorating the anniversary with a group exhibition devoted to the incident, October 6th: A Reconfigured Archive (จดหมายเหตุนอกบรรทัด 6 ตุลาคม 2519), which opened on 10th July and runs until 30th November. The exhibition features artworks commenting on the Thammasat massacre alongside books and other archival materials documenting the event.

The exhibition includes Nutdanai Jitbunjong’s installation A Massacre: a folding chair suspended from the ceiling. The chair is an iconic signifier of the massacre, thanks to Neal Ulevich’s photograph of a man preparing to hit a corpse with a folding chair. Nutdanai’s chair is made from tamarind wood, as the dead man in Ulevich’s photo was hanged from a tamarind tree. A Massacre was previously shown in the Status in Statu (รัฐพิลึก) and Khon Kaen Manifesto (ขอนแก่น แมนิเฟสโต้) exhibitions.

Several works from Taiki Sakpisit’s exhibition Dark Was the Night (ผีพุ่งไต้) are included, notably his video installation of the same title and his photograph Half Day Closing, an image of the notorious ‘red elevator’, which — according to legend — is haunted by victims of the 1976 attack. The lift was discussed in the documentary Ghosts, and it inspired the horror film Haunted Universities (มหาลัยสยองขวัญ).

Thasnai Sethaseree has produced numerous paintings that refer to 1976. The exhibition features three of his untitled collages: news photos of the incident heavily obscured by colourful overpainting. They were also shown in a previous MAIIAM exhibition, Errata.

Other paintings in the exhbition include Patcharapa Inchang’s Father, Lawan Upa-In’s ก่อน ๖ ตุลา ๒๕๑๙ (‘before 6th Oct. 1976’), and Ronagorn Kerdchot’s 16 19 35 (๑๖ ๑๙ ๓๕). The title of Ronagorn’s work refers to the years 1973, 1976, and 1992 according to the Buddhist Era calendar, and all three periods are associated with episodes of state violence.

Thanavi Chotpradit and Kornkrit Jianpinidnan’s book Prism of Photography is on display, alongside a photograph from Kornkrit’s Damage series. The book is a visual archive of the massacre, featuring dozens of Thai newspaper front pages and news photographs. ฟ้าใหม่ ใกล้มา (‘dawn of victory’), a ‘museum in a box’ featuring meticulously reproduced artefacts from 1976, is also on show.

To contextualise the events of 1976, the exhibition also features Arin Rungjang’s And Then There Were None, a series of paintings based on news photographs from 14th October 1973, a date almost as infamous as 6th October 1976, when a mass protest led to the (temporary) collapse of a military dictatorship. Her video of the same title, an interview with singer Boonchuang Denduang that begins with archive footage from 1973, is also included. Arin’s paintings were shown alongside Thasnai’s in Errata.

Gentle Ghosts with Eyes as Fair

Sirawit Chatu’s exhbition Gentle Ghosts with Eyes as Fair opens on 25th July at Fazal Unlimited in Bangkok, and runs until 6th September. The exhibition includes photographs from 6th October 1976 and the 2004 Tak Bai tragedy, converted to negatives and overlaid with small details from classical Thai artworks.

Thailand’s Democracy

Almost 100 people were killed in 2010 when the government authorised the military to use live ammunition against red-shirt protesters. Nevertheless, artists such as Somsak Raksuwan focus only on the destruction of buildings and property, ignoring the suffering of the casualties and even demonising the victims themselves.

Somsak’s painting Event at Ratchaprasong (เหตุเกิดที่ราชประสงค์) has a euphemistic title that minimises the magnitude of the massacre that took place there. The painting depicts a firefighter in front of the ruins of the Zen department store, which was burnt on the evening of the army’s final crackdown against the protesters. Somsak seems to suggest that Zen was the real victim of the tragic event.

Similarly, another of his paintings, Who Did Burn Thai Bus? (รถเมล์ไทย ใครเผา), shows the burnt chassis of a public bus in Bangkok, and the title explicitly seeks to apportion blame for this act of arson. While, of course, setting fire to a bus is a crime, a more pertinent question might be: who did kill the protesters?

Somsak’s paintings were shown at his Thailand’s Democracy (ประชาธิปไตย ไทยแลนด์) exhibition at the PSG Gallery in Bangkok. Significantly, the exhibition was held from 20th November to 16th December 2013, coinciding with the start of the disruptive street protests against Yingluck Shinawatra’s government.

Somsak is not the only artist whose work in response to the 2010 massacre focuses only on the arson and property damage. The Rupture (หมายเหตุ ๕/๒๕๕๓) exhibition featured photographs by Olivier Pin-Fat, Wolfgang Bellwinkel, Piyatat Hemmatat, and Manit Sriwanichpoom showing burnt buildings, plumes of smoke, and barricades of tyres. This created the false impression that the event had been a destructive riot perpetrated by the red-shirts. (All images of red-shirt victims, taken by Agnes Dherbeys, were removed from the exhibition by Bangkok Art and Culture Centre management.)

Right-wing publications have also whitewashed the deaths of the victims. For example, พฤษภาอำมหิต (‘savage May’), published by Kom Chad Luek (คมชัดลึก), focused almost entirely on the arson committed after the massacre. Likewise, the subtitle of a book by Suthep Thaugsuban, อย่าให้ใครเผาอีก (‘don’t let anyone burn [Thailand] down again’), presents the red-shirts as arsonists and terrorists.

Kornkrit Jianpinidan’s 2024 photographic series Damage features photos of buildings looted and vandalised after a previous massacre on 6th October 1976, though the damage was caused by the perpetrators of the violence, not by the victims. (Damage will be shown at MAIIAM in Chiang Mai later this month, as part of an exhibition about the 1976 massacre.)

Parodical Exhibition

Parodical Exhibition (เกรียนบ้าน เกรียนเมือง), an exhibition of satirical political art organised by the Museum of Popular History, opened today at Kinjai Contemporary in Bangkok. It runs until 26th July (extended from the original closing date, 19th July).

There are several iconic photographs of the events at Thammasat University that led to the 6th October 1976 coup, including a photo taken by Kraipit Phanvut that shows police colonel Watcharin Niamvanichkul aiming his pistol while nonchalantly smoking a cigarette. Parodical Exhibition features a 2023 image by Lucky Leg that manipulates Kraipat’s photo, replacing the pistol with a petrol pump nozzle.

Similarly, on the poster for a seminar to be held on 4th October at Thammasat University, Watcharin’s hand was enlarged and the gun was airbrushed out of the photograph, to symbolise the pacifist aims of the event. The seminar, จากอาชญากรรมรัฐ 6 ตุลา ถึงอนาคตสังคมนิยม (‘from the 6th Oct. state crime to a socialist future’) was organised by Socialist Worker Thai.

Kraipat’s photograph has been parodied by numerous other Thai artists over the years, and — including Lucky Leg’s petrol pump — there are at least a dozen different versions of it. These include photomontages, paintings, and recreations in films and videos.

Manit Sriwanichpoom inserted his Pink Man character into the image for Horror in Pink (ปีศาจสีชมพู), a technique parodied by Anuwat Apimukmongkon. Spanky Studio superimposed a clown’s head over Watcharin’s face. In Déjà vu (เดจาวู), Headache Stencil replaced the pistol with a futuristic ray gun. For his Selfie Series (เซลฟี่ ซีรีย์), Chumpol Kamwanna depicted himself taking a selfie while adopting the same pose as Watcharin. The pose was also restaged in Anocha Suwichakornpong’s film By the Time It Gets Dark (ดาวคะนอง), Naphat Khunlam’s short film A Sleepless Entity, and View from the Bus Tour’s music video Sun Rises When Day Breaks (ลิ่วล้อ). Pornpimon Pokha’s Hidden Agenda No. 5 (วาระซ่อนเร้น หมายเลข 5) recreated the image in watercolour. The image also featured, alongside a drawing of a hanged student, on a large banner first displayed at red-shirt protests in 2010. Wana Wanlayongkoon’s painting The Gate of Hell (นรก 6 ตุลา) depicts the scene surrounded by flames.

Parodical Exhibition also features two posters that refer to Thammasat, both of which were previously shown at the Bangkok Through Poster exhibition. One is for a spoof horror film titled Cursed Siam (สาปสยาม) by Canyouhearcloud from 2024, and the other is The End of Pinocchio and His Friends from last year.

The exhibition also includes a timeline charting the history of political satire, and a selection of newspaper cartoons depicting the ‘three tyrants’ who fled the country after 14th October 1973. Its centrepiece is a room dedicated to online memes relating to recent Thai prime ministers.