LAUNCHING A
Bangkok hosts the One Young World Summit from today until Saturday, with over 1,300 delegates from around the world. We talk to the young Thai leaders who will join the conference to propose their ideas on how to make the world a better place.
‘IAUSHIM MERCHANT, 26
ON CLIMATE CHANGE f we don’t stand for something, we will fall for everything.”
Aushim Merchant, a 26-year-old delegate from Thailand, will deliver this message when he gives a speech on climate change during the One Young World summit as a Thai representative.
After travelling to many countries, Aushim realised that Thailand is actually a country blessed with uncountable bounties, and the only reason it is being held back from becoming a top destination is the lack of concern for the environment.
“We’re not the last people to live in the world and the environment is the only legacy that we can leave to the next generation,” he said.
Aushim has been a volunteer in different environmental activities. He has been on a six-week spring fellowship programme on Legislative Governance & Public Policy with an emphasis on renewable energy and environment sustainability. He has also joined various projects on water management and conservation, drip irrigation and value addition with farmers in the Asean region.
In his upcoming speech, he will focus on innovative initiatives and solutions on pressing environmental issues. But at the end of the day, what he really wants to see is stringent restrictions imposed on polluting industries responsible for greenhouse gas and carbon emissions.
Aushim is now CEO of Alphasakorn Polymer & Energy Company, which turns post-consumer/industrial plastic waste into crude oil. The company has been able to produce over 4 million litres of crude oil from 6,000 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic waste, with an impact of a reduction of approximately 7,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
“If we were able to address even 10% of the plastic waste that ends up improperly disposed, the main benefit would be job creation, reduction in imports of crude oil and a significant reduction of our carbon footprint.”
Apart from his interest in the environment, Aushim’s concerns extend to education, youth empowerment, civic society engagement and sustainable community development.
“The youth are often underestimated in terms of their potential, thoughts and ability, but they can do more than what they think they can,” he said, “and I think the change has to be brought by young people because the world belongs to us.”
‘I want to evaluate my competency by what I can give back to society, not from the money I earn,” said Kasidej Phulsuksombati, a mathematics teacher at Chumchon Moobanpattana School.
With a degree in pure mathematics and computer science from Stanford University, Kasidej had only one semester left before he got his masters in applied mathematics when the 23-yearold decided to drop out of the prestigious university and make his way to his hometown to be a teacher in the Teach for Thailand programme.
“For many years, I’ve been talking with my friends about all of the problems in our country, and we believe that the root cause is education,” said Kasidej, who will join One Young World Summit to share his experience. “Before, I couldn’t really complain about it, but I just seized the opportunity to see what I can do for Thai education.”
After two months of training, Kasidej has been teaching classes in Bangkok for a month and is contracted to do so for two years. His first hand experience in Thai education has revealed that the biggest problem is disparity in education.
“According to OECD, although 100% of Thai students have the opportunity to enter schools, only 93% of students who finish Prathom 6 pass the literacy test, meaning that they had the opportunity to learn but some schools just don’t meet the standards. From what I’ve experienced, students in those schools have knowledge that is about four to five years behind what they actually should be.”
Kasidej’s goal for this two-year-programme is for the kids to score around 25% higher than what they would have done with the standard test like O-Net.
“If that comes true at least it would show how a teacher can make certain changes to students’ futures and I believe that if a teacher can do it then other teachers would think they can do too. This way people would still have hope for education.”
By participating in One Young World, Kasidej believes that he will meet more people who share the same vision and give him more confidence that his dream is not far-fetched.
At the moment, Lynda Zycherman, the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture conservator, is in her element. She’s supervising what might be called the care and feeding of the 120 objects in the New York museum’s extraordinary “Picasso Sculpture”, an array that traces the artist’s breathtaking inventiveness in bronze, wood, clay, plaster, sheet metal and stones through six decades.
The chance to study closely — and to handle — so many sculptures by such a great master doesn’t happen very often, even to a veteran like Zycherman. At the Modern since 1984, she was conservationally in charge of the 2007 Richard Serra retrospective and the sculpture in a 2009 Matisse retrospective. Her responsibilities for the museum’s recent Bjork survey included some repair to the famous swan dress and its glove-leather beak. But the Picasso show is definitely a pinnacle, she acknowledged, in terms of variety and art history.
At that point, I didn’t realise that learning more about Zycherman’s job would be a bit of a pinnacle for me, too. It’s one thing to be interested in how artworks are made — as I very much am — and to understand that much of our non-verbal response to art is really to the artist’s use of materials. But it is entirely something else to get close to the magical thinking such intimacy can inspire, to see how a professional thinks through a work’s being, tracks physical clues and subjects them to forensic scrutiny and scientific testing, with results that potentially yield new art-historical knowledge. It’s Art “CSI”.
One thing I quickly learned is how much can be overlooked even when you think you’re looking.
I met Zycherman when the Picasso show was in the final stages of installation. The air was thick with restrained euphoria and fastidious care. Many art handlers are creative types and you could sense that they were having their own personal epiphanies. One told me how thrilled she was to see Picasso’s painted bronze Goat Skull And Bottle displayed in the round for the first time, rather than against a wall.
I was looking at Picasso’s six painted bronze Glass Of Absinthe sculptures when I found my way into one of those humbling wormholes of knowledge that makes a critic’s life shift a bit on its axis. It is one of the feats of the show to reunite these charming diminutive works for the first time since they left Picasso’s studio in 1914, the year they were made. But truth be told, I’d never given much thought to the Modern’s version or the other two I’d seen; they seemed like cute little toys.
This attitude evaporates in the show’s second gallery, where the entire complement of six Glass works greet you like a chorus. The casts are identical, but some are relatively plain, painted just two colours, while others are speckled with pointillist veils of red, blue and green dots. Two — including the Modern’s — have a prominent curl of black paint that scholars refer to as a cat tail.
Picasso made the Glass pieces just after completing his great Guitar, an assemblage of sheets of cut and welded ferrous iron (it is hanging nearby). Guitar brought the thin planes of cubist collage into three dimensions, opening sculpture to abstract space, but after this breakthrough, Picasso returned to figurative sculpture, never to be distracted again.
The Glass Of Absinthe sculptures begin this turning back. Barely nine inches high, their stacked elements form a fractured glass of alcohol, topped by an absinthe spoon — flat and perforated like a little pieserver — on which rests a painted bronze sugar cube. Made of silver-plated metal, the spoons — all different, like the paint — are an early instance of a ready-made object incorporated into a sculpture, a year after Duchamp made the first one by nailing a bicycle wheel to a stool.
Picasso’s absinthe sculptures are fantastic little puzzles. You see the rim of the glass, a plane that is the top of the liquid and also beneath it. There’s jagged flange on one side that is apparently a handle. The more you look, the more figurative they become. The flanges suggest haughty Sitwellian profiles and from certain angles a constellation of protrusions and openings resemble a droopy mouth and eyelids. With the spoon and sugar cube serving as a slouchy hat, you’ve got a face that looks amazingly like Buster Keaton’s.
I asked a passing staff member whether the bronze-coloured upper half of one Glass was exposed, unpainted bronze. Soon I was introduced to Zycherman, who quickly disabused me of that idea. No, the bronzes are all painted. The upper portion of the piece in question is covered with brown paint mixed with sand. “Of course, you idiot,” I said to myself. “What’s wrong with your eyes? Didn’t you notice the texture?”
She asked me if I would like to know more and there followed a whirlwind demonstration of the fine art of very close looking, including new discoveries that she made in the time leading up to the show (and that are footnoted in its catalogue).
Zycherman outlined the order of the casts, gave me peeks at the numbers scratched in the bottom edges and pointed out the embossed “P” on each exterior. The first bronze cast — upper half white (now yellowed), lower half rusty red, as if to mimic terracotta — was made from Picasso’s wax model, which his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler took to a foundry.
Zycherman gave me peeks at the numbers scratched in the bottom edges and pointed out the embossed ‘P’ on each exterior
There a plaster mould was made, followed by a trial bronze cast that Kahnweiler took back to the artist for approval.
Zycherman also told me that she had made actual-size models of the Glass pieces, a wax version and a version in fast-drying clay that she speckled with dots à la Pablo. All this was to better fathom the sculpture’s fine, three-part construction.
How was it held together? Performing X-ray fluorescence spectrometries on four of the pieces in the months before the show, Zycherman was the first to confirm the brilliant, invisible means: a tiny pin attached to the bronze sugar cube that passes through one of the perforations in each spoon into a tiny socket in the lip of each glass. She suspects that this solution was not devised by Picasso — who at that point didn’t know much about sculpture — but by a skilled artisan at the foundry.
I walked away dazed by the imagination at work here — and not just the artist’s.