Sculpting the urban landscape
New exhibition at Thavibu Gallery finds beauty in unlikely Bangkok settings
Rattana Salee and Therdkiat Wangwatchakul walk the streets of Bangkok, recording what they see with a camera, imprinting images in their minds. Their Bangkok is personal, one that transforms frantically on the surface, and even more tumultuously below. “Representing Localities: Memory And Experience” at Thavibu Gallery presents their lives in the city, where urban development is the setting for sober contemplation.
“Bangkok is a city of complex architecture, limitless in its corners and turns,” said Rattana. For years, she has been witnessing its growth on her commute from On Nut into town. She sees old structures that are no longer there superimposed over new building forms — taller, more intrusive. Her sculptures breathe melancholy and alienation. She inscribes in them the lives lived within and around the structures of the city. Her cityscapes are at once in the process of forming and disintegrating, a city made for and by the human figures created by Alberto Giacometti. The skeletons, made from steel, epoxy and paint, reminiscent of the shell of the abandoned Sathorn Unique building.
Rattana’s sculptures have always been a study of urban living — the city as a construction site. They exist in her created illusion of spatial distance. She herself stands distant from the moments that inspire the work and what is left is memory of a perceived instant. Ratchadamnoen Road, for instance, is a flat low-relief sculpture in a rectangular frame, scaled and abstracted from an old photograph of the road.
“I started with line impressions. I was impressed by the contrast of Ratchadamnoen that I see all the time,” she said. The shadows take on a life and add on a concrete layer. It is haunting. In Torn Bridge, the frayed bridge casts a slanted web of shadows, a city held together by strings, growing out of nowhere, suspended over an abyss. The story of the city contained in the slender sculpture like lines on a hand.
Therdkiat’s Bangkok is the imprint of views from the streets.
“I’m not showing something special about Bangkok, just a perspective of someone who lives in it,” he said. He often drives around Bangkok, parks his car and wanders the streets. In the series “Sleep Well”, he saw stray dogs sleeping on the streets and he was taken by the weight of the shadows cast on and around them. He was taken by the posture of sleep. He took pictures of them, and then he drove around Bangkok looking to capture more variations of these particular images.
“I didn’t have specific emotions about it,” he said. “I wasn’t pitying them. I just like the composition.” The careful scrutiny of his subject is apparent. Dogs deep in slumber. At first glance, they seem dead. The background is concrete, but the perception of dimensional space is obscured. In his paintings on canvas, movement is conveyed as if the subjects are looked at by strangers in passing.
Therdkiat’s major pieces in the show are of anchored boats, including Memory Of The River (9). He travelled to Ayutthaya and rented a boat to explore, but the present day city was too commercialised for his vision. He found the boats he wanted in Koh Kret.
In this series, he paints on aluminium sheets, a practice he started 15 years ago. At that time he was renting a dorm room located at the end of the hall of the building. In the room was a window, and pigeons rested on the windowsill near to where he slept.
“One day, I was in a construction stop and I bought an aluminium sheet so it would reflect light but would also be flexible enough that the birds wouldn’t land on it,” he said. He had the leftover aluminium lying in his room and one day randomly started using it as a canvas.
“I painted and wiped, painted and wiped, and it worked out,” he added. The aluminium sheet gives out an alluring sheen, a mysterious sepia tone, as if the process of decay and neglect has been frozen. The paintings hold within themselves a sense of organised complexity.
The works of the artists engage in a dialogue about a city marked by change and alienation. Timeless but weighted down by the passing of time. Here, Bangkok lives in memories.
Her cityscapes are at once in the process of forming and disintegrating