“Everything stays the same...”

Coup leader Prayut Chan-o-cha was confirmed as Thai Prime Minister again last night, after he received a total of 500 votes from MPs and senators. Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, leader of the progressive Future Forward party, gained 244 votes. Prayut’s second term was never in any real doubt, as he could count on the votes of the 250 senators he had appointed. (The democratic 1997 constitution introduced a fully elected Senate, though it was only 50% elected following the military’s 2007 constitution. After Prayut’s 2014 coup, the latest charter allowed the junta to appoint every senator.)

Prayut was nominated as Prime Minister by the pro-military Palang Pracharath Party, though they lost the 24th March election, with 97 constituency MPs. Pheu Thai won the highest number of parliamentary seats, 136, though they lacked an overall majority. The new constitution supplemented the ‘first past the post’ system with an element of proportional representation, though incredibly the Election Commission only confirmed its seat-allocation formula after the election had taken place. Following an unprecedented delay, the official results were announced six weeks after the election.

As expected, the Commission’s calculations favoured minor parties at the expense of Pheu Thai, to prevent another landslide by Thaksin Shinawatra’s party. (The PPRP gained a further nineteen MPs, taking their total to 116.) Other attempts to bend the rules in favour of Prayut include the dissolution of the Thai Raksa Chart party and various trumped-up charges against Thanathorn. (He is currently suspended from parliament pending an investigation into his shares in V-Luck Media, though he has already provided evidence that he sold them before becoming an MP.)

Immediately after the election, Pheu Thai, Future Forward, and five smaller parties signed up for an anti-Prayut alliance of 246 MPs, just shy of a parliamentary majority. Meanwhile, the PPRP joined with ten single-seat micro-parties and others to form a pro-military group of 150 MPs. Pressure to join the PPRP coalition was intense: one Future Forward politician, for example, revealed that he had been offered ฿120 million to switch sides.

Two medium-sized parties, the Democrats and Bhumjaithai, played hard to get, declaring their support for the PPRP only one day before the prime ministerial vote. This gave the PPRP a last-minute total of 254 seats, a slim majority. Abhisit Vejjajiva, former prime minister and Democrat leader, resigned as an MP in protest at his party supporting Prayut. (During the election campaign, he had pledged to oppose Prayut’s candidacy, though after the election his party voted to break that commitment.)

Speaking to reporters today, Prayut said: “Everything stays the same.” After overthrowing a democratic government and being appointed Prime Minister by his hand-picked National Legislative Assembly, he has now been reappointed thanks to a rubber-stamp Senate and an acquiescent Election Commission. Prayut has ensured that, as so often in Thailand’s past, the military will dominate national politics for the foreseeable future.

LGBT+ Film Festival 2019

Bangkok's second annual LGBT+ Film Festival will take place next month. Mapplethorpe, Ondi Timoner’s biopic of Robert Mapplethorpe, is one of the highlights, showing on 4th and 5th July. (The film is unrated, as it includes examples of Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit photography, as seen in the recent documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures.)

The LGBT+ Film Festival 2019 opens at Bangkok Screening Room on 2nd July. It will end with a screening of the New Queer Cinema classic My Own Private Idaho on 7th July. The event is programmed by Thapanan Wichitratthakarn.

Tawan Wattuya: Works 2009-2019

Tawan Wattuya: Works 2009-2019, published this month, features selected works in watercolour by Tawan Wattuya. The monograph is organised thematically, and includes essays by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Iola Lenzi, Kong Rithdee, and Prabda Yoon, amongst others. It was edited by Myrtille Tibayrenc.

Of the hundreds of included works, Tawan’s paintings of a hanging corpse from the 6th October 1976 massacre, and a man beating the victim with a chair, are among the highlights. There are also sexually explicit paintings from his Story of the Eye exhibition. Unfortunately, his Red Faces series was excluded.

Amnesia

Tawan Wattuya’s exhibition Amnesia opened yesterday at 1Projects in Bangkok. The exhibition features his Red Faces series, painted in 2011 and previously shown at the Khonkaen Manifesto (ขอนแก่น แมนิเฟสโต้) group exhibition.

The series of eighteen portraits depicts red-shirt protesters who were shot dead by the military on 10th April 2010. A book commemorating the victims, วีรชน 10 เมษา คนที่ตายมีใบหน้าคนที่ถูกฆ่ามีชีวิต (‘heroes of 10th April: the faces of the dead live on’) by Ida Aroonwong and Warisa Kittikhunseree, was published in 2011.

The exhibition title, Amnesia, reflects the absence of the massacre from the collective memory. Like previous acts of Thai military violence against civilians - in 1973, 1976, and 1992 - the crackdowns of April and May 2010 have been whitewashed from history, with no prosecutions of army officers. The exhibition runs until 14th July.

‪มันทำร้ายเราได้แค่นี้แหละ

Prontip Mankong’s prison diary, ‪มันทำร้ายเราได้แค่นี้แหละ (‘all they could do to us’), was published earlier this year. Prontip was jailed in 2015 for lèse-majesté, after she directed a play, The Wolf Bride (เจ้าสาวหมาป่า), which was performed at Thammasat University in 2013. She was released from prison in 2016.

The book, which is almost 900 pages long, reproduces notes Prontip wrote by hand while serving her sentence. Her boyfriend was interviewed about her conviction in the documentary Homogeneous, Empty Time (สุญกาล), and ห้องเช่าหมายเลข 112 (‘room no. 112 for rent’) profiles twenty-two fellow lèse-majesté prisoners.

Suspiria

Dario Argento’s classic horror film Suspiria will be shown at Smalls, the Bangkok bar, on Sunday evening. The rooftop screening is free of charge.

11:11

Madonna is featured on Maluma’s new album, 11:11, which will be released on 17th May; she appears on one track, Soltera (‘single’). Likewise, Madonna’s forthcoming album Madame X features Maluma on two tracks: Medellín and Bitch I’m Loca.

Les deux freres et les lions

David Barclay is suing a French playwright for libel and invasion of privacy. The court case, which began yesterday, relates to the play Les deux frères et les lions (‘the two brothers and the lions’), written by Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre and first performed in 2013. The play is a thinly-veiled satire on the Barclay twins, David and Frederick, owners of The Daily Telegraph newspaper. David Barclay is seeking a ban on any future performances of the play, and on sales of its script, which was published in 2017.

The play is a two-hander, and its unnamed characters are referred to as ‘l’aîné’ (‘elder’) and ‘le cadet’ (‘younger’). The lawsuit cites two specific passages, both spoken by ‘l’aîné’, the character based on David Barclay, the older twin. In the first of the contentious lines, found on page 43 of the published script, he declares himself above the law. In the second controversial passage, on page 48, he complains that his children will suffer due to Norman inheritance laws.

Pioneer in Video Art:Thailand, Slovenia, Norway Since 1980

The Pioneer in Video Art [sic] (นิทรรศการผู้บุกเบิกศิลปะวีดีโอจากประเทศไทย ประเทศสโลวีเนีย และประเทศนอร์เวย์ ตั้งแต่ปี 1980) exhibition at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre features video art from Thailand, Slovenia, and Norway. The exhibition’s subtitle is Thailand, Slovenia, Norway Since 1980, though that date appears arbitrary, as a few pre-1980 videos are included and most works are post-2000.

One of the highlights is Arnont Nongyao’s Ghost Rabbit and the Casket Sales (กระต่ายผี กับ คนขายโลง), in which a DJ samples the Thai junta’s propaganda song Returning Happiness to the Thai Kingdom (คืนความสุขให้ประเทศไทย). Like the lead character in Baby Driver, the DJ remixes snippets of audio with a cassette recorder. Wheels with abstract patterns are shown spinning, symbolising vinyl records and evoking Marcel Duchamp’s Dada film Anaemic Cinema. The film ends with a tattered Thai flag, as in the poster for Ing K.’s Citizen Juling (พลเมืองจูหลิง).

Slovenian artist Vuk Cosić renders moving images semi-abstract by converting them to ASCII text. For his video Deep ASCII, he applied this technique to clips from two classic porn movies, The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat.

Several major Thai video artists are missing from the exhibition, most notably Apichatpong Weerasethakul. (He was also omitted from an earlier survey of Thai video art, From Message to Media.) Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is included, however, represented by A Walk, a slow-motion video in which she wanders among shrouded corpses in a morgue.

Pioneer in Video Art opened yesterday, though half of the exhibition was still under wraps on the first day. As of today, all works are now on show, though the signage is still being put up. The exhibition closes on 29th June.

Field Trip Project Asia

The Field Trip Project Asia exhibition has been on display since 9th April, though the show's highlight came yesterday evening, with a surreal piece of performance art. For Chulayarnnon Siriphol's Parade of Golden Snail (ขบวนแห่หอยทากทอง), Nuttorn Kungwanklai led a procession through the gallery with mock solemnity. Accompanied by a drummer and two Scouts (as seen in Planetarium, Chulayarnnon's segment of Ten Years Thailand), Nuttorn carried a giant snail shell.

This golden shell has been a recurring motif in Chulayarnnon's recent work. Nuttorn previously held it in Chulayarnnon's short film Golden Spiral (part of Ghost:2561). It also featured in his short film Birth of Golden Snail, which was banned from last year's Thailand Biennale. The Office of Contemporary Art and Culture's letter confirming the ban is included in the Field Trip Project Asia exhibition. The show runs until 5th May, at BACC in Bangkok.

Santikhiri Sonata

Thunska Pansittivorakul’s Santikhiri Sonata (สันติคีรี โซนาตา) was filmed in Thailand’s northernmost province, Chiang Rai, in the villages of Mae Salong and Hin Taek, whose names were changed by the government to draw a line under their sinister legacies. Mae Salong was renamed Santikhiri (‘hill of peace’), and Hin Taek became Thoet Thai (‘honour Thailand’), though they were sites of anti-Communist violence during the Cold War. Santikhiri Sonata examines this violent heritage, demonstrating that despite their new names they remain silent witnesses to their traumatic past. They are, to use Dutch artist Armando’s term, ‘guilty landscapes’.

Similarly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul made several films in and around the village of Nabua, a location with an equally loaded history to that of Santikhiri, as its inhabitants were among the first victims of the anti-Communist purge. In his short film A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (จดหมายถงลงบญม), a narrator recalls the area’s past: “Soldiers once occupied this place. They killed and tortured the villagers and forced them to flee to the jungle.”

Thailand’s suppression of Communist insurgents was a guerrilla war lasting almost two decades. Anocha Suwichakornpong’s film By the Time It Gets Dark (ดาวคะนอง) describes how suspected Communists were “thrown out of helicopters or set on fire in oil barrels.” Thunska alludes to these ‘red barrel killings’ in Santikhiri Sonata with a caption describing the elimination of subversives by “pushing them into a ‘CXII Red Suitcase’”. The Roman numerals refer to Thailand’s notorious lèse-majesté law, article 112 of the criminal code, which Thunska addressed in Homogeneous, Empty Time (สุญกาล).

Santikhiri Sonata also comments on more recent cases of state violence. Military cadet Phakhapong Tanyakan died during a training exercise in 2017, and his internal organs were removed to prevent an autopsy determining his cause of death. The central characters in Santikhiri Sonata discuss a cadet “whose insides, heart, and brain were all taken out of his body”. Similarly, a young human-rights activist, Chaiyaphum Pasae, was killed at a military checkpoint in 2017, and the film describes the circumstances of his death: “eyewitnesses say he was unarmed, and was beaten before being shot.” More provocatively, a song composed by King Rama IX, Echo (แว่ว), is repurposed as an ode to Chaiyaphum’s memory.

The director’s trademark sexual content is also present. In fact, Santikhiri Sonata is his most explicit film since Reincarnate (จุติ). It includes a montage of clips from gay porn videos, progressing from solo scenes to hardcore material, accompanied by Jaran Manopet’s folk song บ้านบนดอย (‘home on the hillside’). (The song ends with the words “overflowing kindness” as a porn star reaches his climax.) This combination of homoerotic imagery and political critique is a consistent feature of Thunska’s films, including This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน), The Terrorists (ผู้ก่อการร้าย), and Supernatural (เหนือธรรมชาติ).

Another trait in Thunska’s work is the blurring of boundaries between documentary, drama, and autobiography. His films are densely layered, their fictional narratives juxtaposed with archive footage, historical captions, and on-camera interventions by the director. Santikhiri Sonata, with its metatextual behind-the-scenes sequences, is his most structurally sophisticated film to date.

Rap Against Dictatorship

In October 2018, with the junta still in power four years after the 2014 coup, Rap Against Dictatorship released their debut single, My Country Has (ประเทศกูมี), a song condemning political corruption, military impunity, and state violence. The song’s black-and-white promo video, directed Teerawat Rujintham, ends with a battered mannequin hanging from a tree, a reference to the corpse in Neal Ulevich’s infamous photograph of the 6th October 1976 massacre.

Whereas anti-coup films and artworks disguise their messages with coded metaphors, My Country Has was uncompromising in its criticism of the junta. The lyrics included a litany of political scandals, and the rappers made no concessions to Thailand's culture of conformity, deference, and emotional restraint. This anthemic song succinctly and directly encapsulated the frustration of anti-coup protesters whose dissent was otherwise suppressed.

Comparable artistic expressions of anger towards the state—Thunska Pansittivorakul’s documentaries and Vasan Sitthiket’s paintings, for example—have not crossed over to mainstream audiences. My Country Has, on the other hand, benefitted from its popular modes of expression (rap) and distribution (online streaming): the song’s YouTube video went viral, being viewed more than ten million times in its first week of release.

Two days before the 24th March election, Rap Against Dictatorship released their second single, 250 Bootlickers (250 สอพลอ), referring to the 250 senators appointed by the junta in what is destined to be a rubber-stamp Senate. The video for 250 Bootlickers was filmed at Headache Stencil’s Thailand Casino exhibition, and the song and exhibition both show how the election was rigged in Prayut’s favour. The exhibition’s centrepiece, busts of Prayut Chan-o-cha and former PM Thaksin Shinawatra playing a high-stakes poker game for the future of Thailand, perfectly encapsulates the song’s theme.

The election was one of the most dramatic, and contentious, in Thai history. Thai Raksa Chart’s extraordinary decision to nominate Princess Ubolratana for PM was swiftly rejected by her brother, King Rama X, leading to the dissolution of the party. Since the election, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, leader of the progressive Future Forward party, has faced various trumped-up charges. A tentative anti-Prayut coalition led by Pheu Thai has a potential parliamentary majority based on unofficial results, though the Election Commission has still not yet confirmed how it will allocate seats under an ambiguous system of proportional representation.

GoodFellas

If you missed the rooftop screening of GoodFellas at Smalls earlier this year, you can catch it on the roof of The Hive tomorrow. The screening is organised by Bangkok Open Air Cinema Club.

Bangkok Screening Room

Next month, Bangkok Screening Room will show the original Star Wars trilogy on three consecutive evenings, starting on 3rd May. The cinema will also be screening Sergio Leone’s classic A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari), on 2nd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, 11th, 12th, and 14th May.

Madame X

Madame X, Madonna's fourteenth studio album, will be released on 14th June, more than four years after Rebel Heart. The album's lead single, Medellín, was released digitally this week, and its promo video will premiere on MTV on 24th April. Crave, Dark Ballet, Batuka, and God Control will also be released as digital singles. (The Madame X persona recalls the Mistress Dita character Madonna adopted for Erotica.)

The MTV premiere is a throwback to the 1980s and 1990s, when music videos were a staple of MTV's schedule and each new Madonna video was a major event. Madame X also taps into this sense of nostalgia, as the album will be released on a variety of physical formats: vinyl, CD, and cassette. There will even be a 7" single, I Rise, as part of a deluxe box set.

As with Rebel Heart, there are multiple versions of the album, each with different track listings. The standard digital and CD releases have thirteen tracks: Medellín (a duet with Maluma), Dark Ballet, God Control, Future (featuring Quavo), Batuka, Killers Who Are Partying, Crave (featuring Swae Lee), Crazy, Come Alive, a cover version of Faz Gostoso (featuring Anitta), Bitch I'm Loca (featuring Maluma), I Don't Search I Find, and I Rise. The vinyl and cassette editions feature two additional tracks: Extreme Occident and Looking for Mercy. A double CD edition includes a further three bonus tracks: Funaná, Back That Up to the Beat, and Ciao Bella.

There are also three different album covers (again, as was the case with Rebel Heart). The most striking cover shows the album title sewn onto Madonna's lips, perhaps a reference to her mother's death. (The promo video for Oh Father dramatises a flashback to her mother's open-casket funeral, showing her mouth sewn shut.) This cover, which also evokes Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, features on the vinyl, cassette, and standard CD editions. On the double CD cover, Madonna poses with a guitar. The box set cover shows her with plaited blonde hair.

"I consider the allegation...implausible and improbable"

Geoffrey Rush has won his libel case against The Daily Telegraph, and has been awarded $850,000 in damages. The newspaper, published in Sydney, alleged in 2017 that Rush had been accused of "inappropriate behaviour" by a colleague at the Sydney Theatre Company. Rush's accuser was Eryn Jean Norvill, who appeared with him in a production of King Lear; she alleged that he had groped her during a preview performance.

In a written judgement issued on 11th April, Justice Michael Wigney concluded that Norvill's claims were baseless, and that Rush was beyond reproach: "I consider the allegation and Ms Novill's [sic] evidence concerning it to be somewhat implausible and improbable. Mr Rush was a dedicated actor and consummate professional." (The judgement begins, somewhat pretentiously, by quoting several lines from the play.)

Bangkok Joyride IV

Ing K.'s epic documentary Bangkok Joyride (บางกอกจอยไรด์) continues with its fourth instalment, Becoming One (เป็นหนึ่งเดียว), playing now at Cinema Oasis in Bangkok. The series, shot on Ing's iPhone, is an exhaustive record of the PDRC campaign against Yingluck Shinawatra. In part four, a protester claims that Yingluck's brother, Thaksin, is "worse than Hitler", echoing an equally hyperbolic quote from Ing's earlier documentary, Citizen Juling (พลเมืองจูหลิง): "We talk of Hitler... But villagers, all citizens nowadays fear PM Thaksin 10 times more."

Bangkok Joyride covered the early stages of the PDRC's campaign in parts one and two, How We Became Superheroes (เมื่อเราเป็นยอดมนุษย์) and Shutdown Bangkok (ชัตดาวน์ประเทศไทย). Part three, Singing at Funerals (เพลงแห่ศพ), covered the buildup to the 2014 election. Part four covers the protests from 26th January to 8th February 2014, including the 2nd February election.

The PDRC sabotaged the election, blockading polling stations to prevent voting. (It was ultimately invalidated, and the military launched a coup before another poll could take place.) Despite this, Bangkok Joyride celebrates the protesters, and in parts three and four Ing herself appears on stage at PDRC rallies. She can also be heard from behind the camera, wishing the protesters luck; in part four, she tells a demonstrator: "We fight the exact same battle."

In part three, Ing accused the mainstream Western media of pro-Thaksin bias, and this conspiracy theory is expanded in part four when she harangues the BBC's Bangkok correspondent, Jonathan Head: "How do you sleep at night, Mr Head?" Bangkok Joyride's fetishisation of national symbols also continues in part four: protesters are filmed while standing for the national anthem, not once but five times.

Part five, Dancing with Death (รำวงพญายม), will be released later this year. Meanwhile, Neti Wichiansaen's documentary Democracy after Death (ประชาธิปไตยหลังความตาย), which highlights the PDRC's anti-democratic agenda, provides an effective counterpoint to Bangkok Joyride. The short films This Film Has Been Invalid [sic], Auntie Maam Has Never Had a Passport (ดาวอินดี้), Shut Sound, Myth of Modernity, and Here Comes the Democrat Party (ประชาธิปัตย์มาแล้ว) also include footage of PDRC demonstrations.

BBC News:“We apologise to Mr Poroshenko for any distress caused...”

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has received a financial settlement from the BBC, after he sued the broadcaster for defamation. In a report by Paul Wood broadcast on 23rd May 2018, BBC News alleged that Poroshenko had paid Michael Cohen $400,000 to secure a meeting with Donald Trump in 2017. (At the time, Cohen was Trump’s personal lawyer, though he has since been convicted of election campaign violations and other offences.) In a statement, the BBC said: “We apologise to Mr Poroshenko for any distress caused and have agreed to pay him damages”.

Psycho Legacy Collection Deluxe Edition

The Psycho Legacy Collection Deluxe Edition was released on blu-ray in Germany earlier this year. It includes an uncut version of Psycho that has been broadcast on television in Europe but has never previously been available on any video format.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il west) will be screened at Smalls, the Bangkok bar, on 24th March. The rooftop screening is free of charge.

History of Illustration

History of Illustration, edited by Susan Doyle, is the first comprehensive study of illustration from antiquity to the present day. It's also the first global history of illustration, with chapters on Indian, Chinese, Latin American, African, and Islamic illustration in addition to more familiar Western and Japanese material.

The book is structured chronologically, though it also follows three additional narratives: geographical (histories of illustration in each continent), thematic (chapters on the illustration of anatomy, fashion, and propaganda), and technical (essays on developments in printing). The bibliography includes annotated entries on comic illustration, and there are more than 900 images. The definitive history of illustration, this is a unique guide to more than 1,000 years of visual culture.

History of Illustration is a broad overview of the entire subject, though individual forms of illustration have also been comprehensively surveyed. Essential books on each field include: History of Graphic Design, by Philip B. Meggs; A History of Book Illustration, by David Bland, The Poster: A Worldwide Survey and History, by Alain Weill; The Art of the Print: Masterpieces, History, Techniques, by Fritz Eichenberg; A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, by Christopher de Hamel; and The World Encyclopedia of Comics, by Maurice Horn.

Atta

Atta (อัตตา) opened at RCB Galleria in Bangkok on 2nd March, and runs until the end of the month. The exhibition features new works by Anupong Chantorn, whose painting Perceptless (ภิกษุสันดานกา) attracted controversy for its depiction of monks as scavenging birds. His solo exhibition Hope in the Dark (ความหวังในความมืด) included Moral Boundary (ชาย-ผ้าเหลือง), a painting of a monk with an erection.

Atta includes a less graphic study for Moral Boundary (ชาย-ผ้าเหลือง), and two preparatory sketches for Perceptless: สันดานกา ('native') and The Bad Monks (ภิกษุสันดานกา). There are also several new paintings, including Double Life (คู่จิ้นจีวรหลุด) and The Undercover (ใต้ผ้ากาสาวพัสตร์). Double Life depicts two monks in an embrace, and The Undercover is a portrait of a monk exposing himself; both were painted directly onto saffron robes. The folio-sized exhibition catalogue was edited by Wanida Rujikietkumjorn.

Sunset Boulevard

Billy Wilder's masterpiece Sunset Boulevard will be shown on 17th March at Smalls, the Bangkok bar. The rooftop screening is free of charge.

“The act is deemed hostile to the constitutional monarchy...”

On 7th March, as was widely predicted, the Constitutional Court voted to dissolve the Thai Raksa Chart party and ban its executives from political office for ten years. The party had caused a sensation on 8th February by nominating Princess Ubolratana as its candidate for prime minister in the election to be held on 24th March. The nomination was followed by another unprecedented bombshell later that day, when King Rama X issued a statement condemning his elder sister’s involvement in politics. On 13th February, the Election Commission ruled that the nomination was invalid, and recommended the party’s dissolution to the Constitutional Court.

In the court’s verdict, announced on live television, judge Taweekiat Meenakanit severely criticised Ubolratana’s nomination: “The act is deemed hostile to the constitutional monarchy.” He also described it as a “devious scheme”. Thai Raksa Chart is the third party affiliated with Thaksin Shinawatra to be disbanded by the Constitutional Court, after Thai Rak Thai in 2006 and the People Power Party in 2008.

ความจริงวันนั้น

ความจริงวันนั้น (‘the truth about that day’), compiled by the Daily World Today (โลกวันนี้) newspaper, was published in 2010. It includes articles and colour photographs documenting the 2010 red-shirt protests and massacre in Bangkok. The book also includes a VCD, ความจริงประเทศไทย (‘the truth about Thailand’).

สมุดภาพแห่งความทรงจำ

สมุดภาพแห่งความทรงจำ จารึกประวัติศาสตร์ ๑๔ ตุลา ในวาระครบร ๓๖ ปี ๑๔ ตุลา ('photobook of memories thirty-six years after 14th October') was published in 2009. The book includes more than 1,000 images (including newspaper front pages), providing a comprehensive visual archive of the 14th October 1973 demonstration and massacre in Bangkok. It also includes บันทึกไว้ในประวัติศาสตร์ ('recorded in history'), a CD with five songs inspired by the event, which was first released as a 7" EP in 1973.

Several other albums and singles have been recorded in commemoration of the 14th October incident. Phanom Suksaeng's single 14 ตุลาคม เลือดไทยสามัคคี ('14th October: Thai blood and unity') was released shortly after the event. The band Caravan contributed to the album รวมบทเพลงเพื่อชีวิต 14 ตุลาคม 16 ('compilation of songs for life: 14th October '73'), which included two Caravan songs—and one by another band, กรรมาชน (‘workers’)—that were banned by the Interior Ministry in 1975 for potentially inciting anti-government protests. Caravan's albums ตุลา-คม ('sharp October') and 30 ปี คีตนุกรม 14 ตุลา ('30 years: collection of 14th October songs') mark the twenty-fifth and thirtieth anniversaries of the protests, respectively. The album ตุลาธาร ๑๔ คน ๑๔ เพลง ต้องห้าม ('October: 14 people, 14 forbidden songs') also commemorates 14th October, though it includes one song—6 ตุลา ('6th October') by Pongsit Kampee—about the 6th October 1976 massacre. Euthana Mukdasanit adapted Kiss of the Spider Woman (จุมพิตนางพญาแมงมุม) as a stage musical in 2001, during which he projected archive footage of 14th October followed by a list of the victims.

Artists have also been inspired by the massacre. An exhibition of art inspired by the incident, 14 ตุลา ผ่านสายตาศิลปิน ('14th October through artists' eyes', 2003), included Tang Chang's self-portrait depicting the artist's bloodstained face and chest. Pratuang Emjaroen's painting Dhama and Adhama (ธรรมะ-อธรรม) (1974) depicts bullet holes on the Buddha's face. Amnard Yensabye's painting ภาพคนเดือนตุลาคม 2516 (picture of October 1973) is a semi-abstract depiction of the massacre's chaotic aftermath. Sanya Wongaram's woodcut The Ten Days, which depicts soldiers and students, was inspired by press photographs of the massacre.

The United Artists’ Front of Thailand (แนวร่วมศิลปินแห่งประเทศไทย), formed in the aftermath of 14th October, organised an outdoor exhibition of political billboards along Bangkok’s Ratchadamnoen Avenue in 1975. The group promoted socially-conscious ‘art for life’ (‘ศิลปะเพื่อชีวิต’), in parallel with the ‘songs for life’ (‘เพลงเพื่อชีวิต’) movement of bands such as Caravan. (The ‘art for life’ slogan was inspired by Chit Phumisak’s book ศิลปะเพื่อชีวิต ศิลปะเพื่อประชาชน/‘art for life and art for the people’.) Two Artists’ Front retrospective exhibitions have been held at the Pridi Banomyong Institute, both featuring newly commissioned replicas of the 1975 billboards: Political Cut-out Artworks of the October Event (ภาพศิลปะคัทเอาท์การเมืองเดือนตุลา) in 2003 (curated by Nonglak Laowor) and ภาพคัตเอาท์การเมืองเดือนตุลา (‘October political billboard artworks’) from 3rd–20th October 2009.