Capturing the city’s neon lights

Long-time Bangkok resident and artist Chris Coles opened his latest exhibition, “Bangkok Neon”, last night. It will be on display at Check Inn 99 on Sukhumvit 33 for a month. The exhibition sees Coles capturing the gaudy, neon-splashed nightlife of Bangkok through an expressionist painting style. He said that he took the expressionist style from the German Expressionists, who painted Berlin nightlife in the 1920s and 1930s, and applied it to the unique sprawling spectacle of the Bangkok night. Coles cites early 20th-century German painters such as Emil Nolde, George Groz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann as his inspiration. The series of paintings portray signs of nocturnal establishment, their hallucinatory colours and noir-ish appearances. Coles also painted a group of expat writers, poets, artists and musicians who make use of Southeast Asia’s abundance of the “raw noir material” to fashion their work, such as Christopher G. Moore, John Burdett, Lawrence Osbourne, Jake Needham and Nick Nostitz. In the 1970s, Coles worked in the movie business, mostly on big budget international films like Superman, L.A. Story, Chaplin and others. In the early 1990s, he came to Thailand to work on Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island, which was shot in Phuket and Phangnga and he moved to Thailand and pursued painting seriously in the 2000s. “Bangkok Neon” is on display at Check Inn 99 until early December.