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Buddhist art is created since centuries and the
outcome is mostly really beautiful painting and sculpturing.
Tattoo art and tattoo body art pls. check our
tattoo section.
Thais are very creative in visual arts and erotic
arts, just go in some galleries along the main streets in
Patong Beach or
maybe around the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, plenty of galleries offer everything
on this theme.
Art Photography, sometimes is shown in some
shopping centers like the world trade center in Bangkok and others, consult the
daily English newspaper like The Nation and Bangkok Post or maybe the in-flight
magazine of Thai International Airways
Art
in Thailand, Thai art is a piece of beauty.
Mindful living: on view in traveling retrospective
organized by New York's Asia Society, the sculptures and installations of the
late Thai artist Montien Boonma use Buddhist forms and medicinal herbs to create
peaceful reflective environments, Art in America, by Janet Koplos
Montien Boonma's art is inseparable from certain
facts of his life. The herbs that make his retrospective exhibition "Montien
Boonma: Temple of the Mind," so remarkably multisensory are medicinal, and
that's a major part of their significance. The forms he uses--prayer beads,
bells alms bowls and iconic busts--are even more specific in their reference to
Buddhism. But they are simultaneously abstract and timeless. They speak less of
Boonma's identity as a Thai than of a reflective person seeking serenity.
Boonma (1953-2000) was the first Thai artist to become a regular on the
international exhibition circuit. Ills work was previously shown at the Asia
Society in New York as part of its "Tensions and Traditions" show in 1996 and in
the most recent Asia Pacific Triennale [see A/A., July '03] in Brisbane, as well
as in France, Korea, Japan, Germany, Norway and elsewhere. But this
retrospective organized by the Asia Society is the first opportunity to see his
work hl quantity in the U.S. In this well-selected exhibition, perfectly sized
for its New York venue, curated by Apinan Poshyananda, the Thai curator and
critic who also organized "Tensions and Traditions," there was enough space for
individual contemplation, and yet the works played off each other with an almost
bell-like reverberation. Forms and textures repeat in this show, and Poshyananda
includes drawings of installations not shown as well as those physically
realized in the galleries, which seems to erase the temporal and physical limits
of the exhibition.
Boonma was apparently always a spiritual person; his early works usually had an
environmental or social consciousness consistent with Buddhist "mindful living."
I But the trials of his life turned him more deeply in that direction. In 1991,
two years after the birth of their first child, Boonma's wife was found to have
breast cancer. She survived until 1994. Boonma himself developed a brain tumor
and then lung cancer, which killed him at the age of 47. Nearly all the work in
the show was made in the fertile but painful last decade of his life.
The earliest, however, was Self-Portrait: A Man Who Admires Thai Art. (1982), a
photograph of his own face that he decorated with the complex patterning of Thai
dance masks, including the stereotypical "Siamese Smile" of a people known for
their grace and graciousness. This work suggests his search for a personal
subject matter and is more successful--that is, more readable--than a Buddha
drawing of the same year motivated by his dismay at the pillaging of artifacts
and the debasing of Buddha images through reproduction. One must be told of
these implications. With Bowls, Candles and Matches (1990), he was clearly
moving into the abstracted symbolism that became his mature expression. In the
three drawings that bear this title, he melted candle wax onto paper, texturing
and burning through the surfaces.
Among the pieces stylistically related to this work are Benediction (1991), in
which candle wax and gold foil are melted onto photos of television screens in a
collision of two worlds, meditation and entertainment. Boonma also made several
works between '89 and '98 that he called "stupas" or "pagodas." These are glazed
and framed panels containing tactile surfaces. They include such materials as
soil, sand, rice flour, ash, white cement, charcoal or pigment, rubbed onto
paper or canvas. The panels are stacked in graduated piles to suggest the
architectural referent, both hung and leaning against the wall, raised off the
floor on bricks. The panel arrangement of alternating rows of horizontal and
vertical rectangles alludes to the bricklaying method used in pagodas, and the
frame and glass of the panels themselves to skyscrapers (which Boonma, quoted in
a wall label, calls "the modern pagodas of Newly Industrializing Countries").
His Charcoal Pagoda and Pots (1994) was the largest of this type, and the first
work viewers saw at the Asia Society as they climbed the stairs to the second
floor galleries. It rose 16 1/2 feet on the stairwell wall. It's a stack of
framed charcoal drawings of alms bowls used by Buddhist monks to receive food
offerings from the lay community every morning. The ellipses emerging from the
darkness on the pages evoke mouths or eyes as well, especially because the
images are stacked in pairs (which are increasingly smaller above the "base" of
four large drawings). The work refers, a wall label explains, to the Buddhist
ritual of placing vessels with cremated human remains inside the walls when
stupas are constructed.
As evocative as these works are, Boonma goes further in his three-dimensional
installations. These were introduced to viewers with House of Hope (1996-97), an
installation surrounded by painted walls meant to evoke smoke-stained temple
walls. Red-painted stairs---in a casual-looking assembly of sections reminiscent
of children's step stools--lead to a rectangular platform almost concealed by
hundreds of dangling ropes of prayer beads (recalling Felix Gonzalez-Torres's
bead curtains). The entire installation is fragrant because the beads are made
of herbal medicine balls. (2) Red, tan and gray-tinged, they hang in various
lengths. Outside the installation room was a drawing for this project dated
1996, labeled with Boonma's explanation that for him the medicinal herbs
symbolize hope, and the work is "about possibilities and acceptance." Boonma's
words, used on many of the exhibition labels to point out and explain, seem
never to constrain the viewer's response to the works.
You circumambulate House of Hope, wishing to enter; but with the three huge
figure fragments called Melting Void (1999), you are, unexpectedly, encouraged
to enter. Melting Void consists of seamed molds for large Buddha heads or busts,
which are raised on pointed steel-pipe legs, surrounded with a bristling "aura"
of metal rods and casting tools, and rubbed inside with herbs of red or yellow.
Yon can duck under the rims and stand inside the heads, where tiny holes admit
filigreed light, and the heads register as negative space expanded from your own
positive head form, as if you could miraculously see the inner surfaces of your
own features.
Two other installations are tall structures made of wooden boxes, with small
central spaces that can be entered. Another installation, Lotus Sound (1992),
allows a glimpse of an ideal you cannot reach. Behind a tall, curving,
perforated wall made of alternately stacked black bell forms, which is set about
10 feet away from a corner of the gallery, you can see gold-foil lotus petals
and pods strewn across the white wall in a wash of warm light. The barrier,
precarious and fragile, imprisons symbols of purity and condemns us to the
profane world. The piece is both plaintive and soothing, and it focuses
meditatively on a sound heard only in the attentive viewer's mind.
The abstract qualities of Boonma's chosen forms are perhaps most moving in
installations involving alms bowls. Drawing of the Mind Training and the Bowls
of the Mind (1992) entices viewers to project their vision or their thoughts
into simple bowl shapes represented in two and three dimensions. The label
quotes Boonma calling the bowl form "organic and geometric and ambiguous" and
adding, "I prefer to be inside the space which is separated from the outside
world. I would like to place my mind inside the bowl."
Pages torn from a large drawing tablet hang on the wall in four rows of 14, each
tacked with two pins at the top corners so it flutters and curls. The treatment
of each page is individualistic in color or detail. They were made as part of a
daily practice of "drawing meditation" conducted before daybreak, Poshyananda
explains in the catalogue, as "a form of mind training for confronting death."
(3) On the floor before the drawings are eight bowl-like objects on a shallow
raw-wood plinth. All are round-bottomed, five are flat-topped and solid, two are
cone-shaped and closed. Only one is a conventional volumetric form. They are
white, gray, earth tans and black; four sit up straight and four lean. This
piece, in total, involves both grid and idiosyncrasy, both illusion and
construction. The forms are literally associated with real-world things, yet
they are austerely ideal. They occupy some intermediate space, open to the
imagination. They recall functional objects yet pull the mind toward reverie
through their repetition, their modesty and their unending circular form.
Poshyananda writes, "For him, the space inside these vessels was not confined,
but opened to infinity," and he notes that Boonma thought the fragility of
pottery made the bowls symbolic "containers of the self: like humans, they are
easily broken." (4)
This piece was like a warm-up for a work of the same year with which Poshyananda
closed the show. Alm (the label notes that the title plays on the similar sounds
of alm and om) consists of 15 black pots with rounded bases, lined with varying
amounts and configurations of gold leaf. Each has two, three or four grips
around the rim; these are actually gobs of clay squeezed in a hand, in other
words, solidifications of the void within a fist. The shape conveys a quality of
tension and at the same time suggests the identifying mature of a palm print.
The forms also vaguely recall skulls, (5) while the wide, open bowls, with their
inner glow, convey an entirely different headlike volume.
The bowls are arranged in a triangle on a triangular wooden platform: at the end
pointing toward the center of the room, one bowl has no grips and is fully lined
with gold that wraps over the lip, as if it's full or as if it has reached
nirvana. The darkness of the exteriors certainly seems grave, while the gold on
the interior of a bowl meant to collect alms provokes questions of the nature of
riches. Boonma presents the form itself as philosophical, in an exhibition that
reaches across cultural boundaries to share meaning and to maintain hope.
"Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind," organized by the Asia Society, New York,
and curated by Apinan Poshyananda, debuted at the Asia Society [Feb. 4-May 11,
2003] and travels to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco [Feb. 27-May 23, 2004],
the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra [July 16-Sept. 5] and the National
Gallery of Art, Bangkok [2004-2005]. It is accompanied by a 152-page catalogue.
(1.) "Buddhist teachings speak as reverently of nature as they do of the Buddha;
in Buddhism, mindful living cultivates a fundamentally ecological awareness of
the fragility and interdependence of human beings and nature," Apinan
Poshyananda, "Montien Boonma: Paths of Suffering (dukkha)" in Montien Boonma:
Temple of the Mind, New York, Asia Society, 2003, p. 15.
(2.) While symbolic fragrance is not frequently a part of contemporary art,
other artists working with aroma include Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen, Wolfgang Laib
and Ernesto Neto.
(3.) Poshyananda, p. 22.
(4.) Poshyananda, p. 20.
(5.) The exhibition included drawings depicting skeleton arms, hands or heads,
while other works employed the pregnant symbolism of the question mark.
COPYRIGHT Brant Publications, Inc. COPYRIGHT Gale Group
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There are plenty of unique painting creations of
beautiful flower composition art, maybe with some lotus flowers, orchids, native
landscape and quite a lot of Chinese art painting themes.
