1 July 2015

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In 1995, Chatchai Puipia painted a luridly hued, maniacally grimacing visage, Siamese Smile, which soon became the foremost icon of Southeast Asian contemporary art. Since then, Chatchai has become known for his mocking self-portraits, numbering among the dozen or so artists of his generation to pioneer Thailand’s cultural transition from modernist to contemporary art. By Brian Mertens

Lesser known is the part of his practice devoted to still-life flower paintings, often interpretations of iconic works by modern masters such as Van Gogh, Redon and Cezanne. Done between 1996 and 2011, these paintings were at the center of “Chatchai Puipia: Sites of Solitude – Still-Life, Self-Portraiture and the Living Archive”—a curatorially ambitious show produced in a collaboration between Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Gallery and the Thai Art Archives.

Eight of the 14 canvases exhibited are from Chatchai’s still-life series painted “after modern masters.” As curator Gregory Galligan explains in the exhibition catalog, Chatchai began this series with Sunflowers (1996), a rendition of Van Gogh’s 1888 masterpiece of the same subject. Painting the blossoms in a monochrome silhouette, using ash against a gold-leaf background and layering wax onto the canvas, the artist’s intent was to question what happens to art in the marketplace: he transformed the richly aesthetic original into something like a Byzantine icon, shorn of color gradations and depth.

From 2005 onward, Chatchai produced more of these interpretive paintings, but with the added purpose of exploring the aesthetic qualities of light and shadow, inspired by Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1935 essay, “In Praise of Shadows.” An example is Hollyhocks in Red Pot (2006–09), done after Van Gogh’s 1886 painting Vase of Hollyhocks.

 

Read more: http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/94/ChatchaiPuipia

SOURCE: Art Asia Pacific