The Thai capital's long-awaited new contemporary art institution, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) opened discreetly in July 2008 with a display of royal photography and is currently holding its first big contemporary art exhibition. Traces of Siamese Smile: Art + Faith + Politics + Love, which opened on 23 September, though technically the Centre's second show, has all the trappings of an inaugural manifestation given its size, breadth and concentration of exhibited Thai contemporary art and indeed has been billed in the local press as "commemorating the opening of BACC".
The new visual art space is Bangkok's first large international-standard public art museum. Located in one of the city's busiest commercial districts known as Siam Square, BACC is effectively integrated into a cluster of up-market shopping malls (including Siam Discovery and Paragon), all connected by the National Stadium BTS skytrain station. Designed by Bangkok architectural firm Robert Boughey & Associates, the new Centre is housed in a twelve-floor atrium-style edifice. Its corkscrew ascending ramp is frequently compared to New York's Guggenheim Museum. The comparison stops at the ramp however because BACC, unlike the Guggenheim, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and undoubtedly one of modernist architecture's most distinguished mid-20 th century architectural icons, does not pack much visual punch from the exterior and lacks the New York landmark's commandingly rational interior elegance.
Comparing BACC to the former misses the point however. Whereas Western art institutions of the 1950s still adhered to a purist vision of art - the museum functioning exclusively as a temple of high culture - public state-sponsored visual art spaces built nowadays in Southeast Asia pursue an altogether different agenda. In order to survive financially and secure a steady stream of visitors, they often operate simultaneously as meeting place, cultural venue and retail destination. Thus BACC, with its mall-land location, shopping centre architecture, underground multi-storey car park, and several dozen food and commercial outlets occupying the building's lower and more accessible floors (still untenanted at the time of writing), epitomizes Southeast Asia's current taste for hybrid, entertainment-oriented public spaces.
Reaction to the Centre has been mixed. Much argued about and fought for since the idea of it was mooted in 1996, the new institution has pitted bureaucrats of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration against Thailand's art community. And while its location and design have changed repeatedly over the course of the last decade, so too have the institution's direction and mission. Generally welcomed by Thailand's cultural professionals for its over 4000 sq meters of exhibition space, there are nonetheless many who criticize the BACC's lack of vision as much as its architectural compromise. These voices, generally originating in the artists'community that has spent years and much energy pushing for the new museum, feel the end result is weak. After the inaugural contemporary show and the grand royal opening ceremony of September, they question BACC's lack of programming as well as its so-far unarticulated long-term vision. Indeed, no team of professionals appears to be in place for the time being, nor has a full-time curator been appointed. Commentators worry that with so much money at stake and Thai contemporary art to be championed, BACC's current ad hoc approach will undermine the institution. Of the several Thai practitioners who have been connected with the art space since it was first predicated, Vasan Sitthiket and Manit Sriwanichpoom are probably the most vocal and dynamic. Many hope that with Sriwanichpoom on the BACC's executive board, the institution will fulfill its role as a meaningful and well-run platform for contemporary art in Thailand.
Traces of Siamese Smile: Art + Faith + Politics + Love , curated by a team of Thai art professionals lead by Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, the BACC chairman and internationally recognized Thai curator and theorist who currently heads the Thai Ministry of Culture's Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, is one of the largest and broadest exhibitions of Thai modern and contemporary art ever staged. The curatorial brief informs us that the exhibition presents 300 works - mainly Thai art but also with a smattering of international pieces - that all relate to the Siamese smile. The latter, embodying a particularly Thai paradox, is a well chosen motif for an all-encompassing survey. Indeed, the Thai smile, operating as an emblem of Thai people's attitude of humility and surrender vis a vis life's trials, has become a modern cliché. As well as its implicit meaning, as a benign sign of welcome-bordering-on-subservience directed to foreigners, the Siamese smile has also become a totem of critique used by contemporary visual art practitioners to comment upon Thailand's specific insider/outsider vision of itself. Though not all works that are part of Traces of Siamese Smile decorticate this particular issue, many do in more or less direct ways.
As well as the ‘brand-name' international art included for the sake of wider popular appeal – Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Pierre et Gilles, Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun amongst others - and nominally relating to Thailand (Louise Bourgeois' monumental 1996 steel Spider is a real coup for the Centre and gloriously beautiful despite being of dubious thematic relevance), Traces of Siamese Smile assembles Thai painting, sculpture, site-specific installation, video and photographic work spanning the first quarter of the 20 th century to the present. As such, the show provides insight into the extraordinary development and diversity of Thai visual practices of the last decades and as a survey, will probably go down as historically seminal. Including iconic Thai works such as Montien Boonma's 1999 Melting Void: Molds for the Mind (uncatalogued presumably due to late inclusion) and Chatchai Puipia's Siamese Smiles of 1995, the show provides some art-historically enlightening surprises. One such revelatory piece is Chalood Nimsamer's Rural Sculpture (1982), a strikingly early conceptual exploration of the urban/rural dichotomy and place of the hand-made that figure amongst a handful of shared concerns in Southeast Asian visual arts discourse. Another is Kanya Chareonsupkul's precocious Flag: 17-20 May 1992 (1992) that in today's political context can be read as a cryptic critique of nationalist excess.
Though dominated by contemporary art, the exhibition also presents a number of key Thai modernists. An larger than life size sculpture of a walking Buddha by the revered Silpa Bhirasri, (Italian by birth but considered the father of Thai modernism) is one, noted for its naturalistic human features. An abstract work by modern master Fua Haribhitak is another. Thawan Duchanee, who sits on the modern/contemporary divide, puts up a thoroughly contemporary-looking Battle of Mara from 1989.
Since the early twentieth century, the overpowering cult of nationalism—the mythologising of the nation state—has dominated Thai public life and the Thai imagination. In modern times, nothing has had more impact on the way we think and live. Pink Man belongs to this new generation of Thai patriots. In ‘Pink, White & Blue’, he is expressing great pride and love for his own professed patriotism. As a New Thai Patriot, he wants Thai children to be smart and technologically savvy, but to still listen blindly to everything that adults tell them. The educational system is manufacturing a new generation of devoted consumers---children who are loyal to the Neo-Thai brand, products and vision, hook, line and sinker. Pink Man, icon of consumerism that he is, wants capitalism, not democracy. Pink Man is a leader with a modern image. In his pink satin suit, he is bright and friendly, unlike the grim and scary generals of the past. But this display of modernity belies the reality and contradicts the quaint and disquieting picture of obedient Thai children in their boy scout’s uniforms. The children are stuck in a time warp, generation after generation, trapped and cannibalised by official Thai society’s fascistic mindframe forever.