Vasan Sitthiket’s
exhibition, I AM YOU

Vasan Sitthiket: I AM YOU
Bangkok Art and Culture Centre
23.03.18 – 27.05.18

Joint Second Prize
Entry in English

Although the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre is independently run by the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre Foundation, the venue receives partial annual financial support from the Thai government. It seems rather startling that the BACC decided to curate Vasan Sitthiket’s highly political works earlier this year, many of which fiercely criticise the corrupt government and politicians in Thailand. The exhibition called I AM YOU therefore shows BACC’s respectable adherence to its ideology – to give artists complete freedom of expression, despite the message of these exhibited works strongly attacking their own sponsor.

Vasan Sitthiket’s I AM YOU is a retrospective exposition of the artist’s politically-charged oeuvre over the past decades. These works collectively express the artist’s dismay with the depravation of the Thai government, both under the ministries of the Democrat Party’s Abhisit Vejjajiva and the Pheu Thai Party’s Shinawatra family, where notorious corruption and abuses of power miserably became the norm, regardless of the ruler’s political leaning. Sitthiket’s flashy, colourful and confrontational artistic style may expose him to accusations of exploiting art as a channel to express his personal political views. Yet, close study reveals how he also approaches these deeply demoralising phenomena in a genuinely humanistic spirit. His so-called ‘social art’ in fact entails interesting interplays between the individual, personal and artistic views of the artist, the debauched politics in Thailand as a social phenomenon, and the personal desires of individual politicians themselves, outlining the often neglected, close ties between individuals and social spheres.

Triumphantly occupying the entire eighth floor of the BACC, I AM YOU welcomes spectators with a comical display of Sitthiket’s ‘Artist Party’ publicity material. The Artist Party is a genuine Thai political party, officially registered in October 2007 by Sitthiket, the party leader, himself. The party is an outcome of Sitthiket’s conceptual art project. He took the opportunity of Thai democratic freedom to establish a real political party, emphasising the importance of humanist morals through artistic ideology often absent in other power-greedy parties. The party was symbolised by a white pigeon and its political philosophy advocated the idea of ‘ruling by NOT ruling’. Members of the party include Sitthiket’s fellow artists, famous folk-music singers and bands, as well as poets and writers. The party was disqualified in 2009 when it failed to attract the required number of members and regional sectors. Yet Sitthiket and his members did everything a political party could possibly do to promote their idealistic policy. The Artist Party section of the I AM YOU exhibition displays the legacy of this political involvement with a collection of political campaign billboards, posters and banners declaring the party’s absurdly utopian policies, posing Sitthiket as a candidate for the position of prime minister. This seemingly playful prank on the incompetency of Thai political parties pointedly examines what they unpardonably lack in terms of volunteers to run the country, leaving room for the Artist Party to offer itself, with its strong personal ideals, as an alternative to the desperate political choices available in Thailand. The colourful painting section attacks the political circumstances in Thailand even more bluntly and savagely, with such works as The Scene from the Meeting in Parliament, The Scene of Revising the Constitution 2010, You Must Be Poor and an Idiot Forever – acrylic-on-canvas pieces adopting the flattened perspective of Buddhist mural style to criticise the endless greed of politicians in power. In these works, Sitthiket cleverly uses the didactic manners of Buddhist ancient murals found in certain temples – depicting how greed ruthlessly dehumanises individuals when they are punished in hell – to illustrate the parallels with Thai politics. In The Scene from the Meeting in Parliament and The Scene of Revising the Constitution 2010, Sitthiket portrays the parliamentary members in action as monitor lizards, the most repulsively ill-behaved beasts in Thailand, dressed in Western suits. They selfishly make personal demands, raising their hands to devour every natural right, while others indolently doze off during the meeting. The constitutional revision scene is rendered as an explicit oral-sex orgy among the long-tongued monitor lizards, where naked women give fellatio to these beasts in uniform, transforming the semen into futile faeces, as a metaphor for the secretive, undisclosed alteration of the constitution in order to favour themselves.

In You Must Be Poor and an Idiot Forever, the orgy is depicted yet again. The high officials are transformed into monitor lizards as well as a mischievous fox receiving fellatio from a male governor and his naked wife, leaving the human citizen wishing to seek their fortune through gambling and superstition, as the only way to escape poverty. The unsophisticated mural style of these works subtly reminds viewers of how the Buddhist philosophy accentuates individual greed as a major trigger of human misconduct. The uninhibited sexual desires also lead to immoral sins, driving an individual perpetually to indulge their own personal needs, in wilful disregard for the suffering of others. The heavy use of sexual acts in Sitthiket’s works identifies how the personal biological desires of politicians and people in power lead to their corruptive misconduct. The images clearly show that the broader social deterioration of Thai politics stems from the endless individual cravings of just a few.

The reference to Buddhist philosophy is also apparent in a series of paintings called Preta, featuring a tall, skinny Buddhist demon, who suffers from eternal starving as his mouth is shrunk to the size of a pinhead, severely limiting food consumption, as a result of unforgivable sins committed in a past life. In this series, Sitthiket paints five monochrome tableaux in the manner of Henri Matisse’s The Dance, showing the circles of karma among the Pretas in hell, devouring, burning, slashing, punishing and raping each other. The five colours of the monochrome tableaux form the red-white-blue-white-red of the Thai national flag, condemning the state as a kingdom of sinners, even though the country claims itself to be a devoted Buddhist nation. Preta symbolises a being who suffers from their own incapacity to suppress indecent lust, allowing selfishness to overcome moral integrity. The tableaux illustrate human beings in their future life in the most dehumanised form, as an alarming warning that greed may easily overthrow the nation, when one is selfishly wrapped up in one’s own needs.

Another series of acrylic-and-mud on rice-paper paintings, called We Came from the Same Way, underscores our shared biological make-up, regardless of how great the individual mind. These show drawings of the heads of Vincent van Gogh, Pope John Paul II, Friedrich Engels, Chitr Bumisak ( a famous Thai political activist ) and the artist himself as grown-ups, each popping out downwards from a woman’s womb. The series intentionally shows the carnal origins of these great minds which are, indeed, indistinguishable from our own. The work again reminds us of our biological nature, as a driving force for behaviour as organisms, but also as civilised individuals, who are well aware of this and will find a way to manage our personal drives, to maintain order in society. This becomes the general theme of this exhibition, in which, consciously to overcome one’s own carnal desires, success and failure are vividly depicted, laced with Buddhist traits that chiefly focus on the process of suppressing one’s own yearnings within the individual sphere.

I AM YOU mischievously closes with four daring, life-sized monochrome fibreglass sculptures of Sitthiket himself, standing completely naked with a fully erect penis. He unabashedly declares that the driving power behind all this creativity actually comes from his libido, which may also be the case with all the politicians, governors and men in power portrayed in this exhibition.

This Freudian conclusion also reflects the Buddhist’s observation that carnal desire is one of the most powerfully destructive drivers. Although sexual drive is essential for the preservation of the human race, at the personal level it lets our innate savagery go wild and strongly draws us into selfishness. Taming one’s own libido is, therefore, one of the Buddhist exercises in self-discipline, enabling sexual activity to be reserved strictly for the sake of reproduction.

This seemingly bold and outrageous art exhibition, especially for a religious and culturally sensitive society such as Thailand, in fact offers a subtle and intricate analysis of Thai political corruption. The clear connection to Buddhist philosophy also highlights the failure of that religion to underpin the social mores. I AM YOU distinctly exposes the struggle between strong personal ideology and inevitable personal desires, where a draw is not a possible result. The exhibition title, ‘I AM YOU’, also highlights the personal aspect of the overall discussion, which is at the root of all social and political problems. This exhibition undoubtedly merits public exposure, to generate a dialogue within Thai society. The official BACC has proved to be a perfect, yet very surprising, venue for this uncompromisingly free display of artistic expression, although several questions remain for the authorities in charge of all these creative activities.