Moving In Circles
Thai artist CHAMNAN CHONGPAIBOON creates intriguing artworks that look like vibrant fashion illustrations from a distance, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be intricately textured canvases full of hypnotising patterns, bruce scott discovers
Seeing a finished painting by Chamnan Chongpaiboon is one thing, but watching him at work – applying perfectly circular dots of acrylic paint onto canvas, with a hand so steady and an eye so precise – is something else altogether. I first meet with this slightly bashful 38-year-old on a humid Tuesday afternoon at La Lanta Fine Art, the Bangkok gallery which has been representing him since 2015. During our visit he astounds both myself and our photographer by creating, on the spot, a near perfect mandala made up of five concentric rings of tiny coloured dots which are so evenly spaced it looks more like the work of a specialised machine.
This unique artistic ability, which Chamnan has been honing since he was 25, is even more captivating when viewed in the context of one of his vibrantly coloured finished canvasses. From a distance his highly stylised portraits of beautiful Asian women look more like flat silk screened prints, but upon closer inspection it’s revealed that almost all the surface colour areas are overlaid with circular patterns made up of various sized dots – even the white areas have white dots – all of which gives these artworks a hypnotic (even dizzying) 3-D texture.
Chamnan has exhibited in Thailand quite often, most recently as part of a group show of artists represented by La Lanta Fine Art which took place at the RCB Galleria at River City Bangkok. But his work has also been shown outside of his homeland, and that’s where most of his sales have come from as well. “Thais like his work but we rarely sell here,” explains Sukontip “Fon” Prahanpap, owner of La Lanta. “But I go to a lot of art fairs, in places like Singapore, London, Hong Kong, New York, and Miami, and at every fair we’ve sold some of his work.”
“ONE DAY, WHEN I WAS PAINTING, A DROP FELL ON THE CANVAS AND I NOTICED IT WAS A PERFECT CIRCLE… AND I WANTED TO MIMIC THAT DOT”
Had Chamnan’s mother and father known such international recognition awaited their youngest son, perhaps they might have accepted more easily his decision to pursue art. But coming from a rural, agricultural background – his parents have a fruit orchard in Kanchanaburi province – he says that he had difficulty convincing them that following an artistic path was a good idea, and that he had to help pay for his own tuition by doing odd jobs.
He obtained his first degree from Suphanburi College of Fine Arts, and later moved to Bangkok to attend King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, where he obtained a BFA in painting, sculpture and printmaking. And while the link to his background in printmaking is clearly evident in the bold colours and graphic patterns visible in his later works, his signature dot technique came about somewhat by accident.
“One day, when I was painting, a drop fell on the canvas and I noticed it was a perfect circle,” recalls the artist. “I was impressed by this and I wanted to mimic that dot. I then worked to develop my skill at making perfect circles.”
Mastering this technique proved very difficult at first, and
Chamnan experimented with many different methods for applying the paint. He finally settled on a somewhat simple solution, in which the paint is carefully squeezed onto the canvas from a conical plastic bag with a small hole at one end, an idea which he admits was inspired by how bakers apply frosting to cakes. This technique allows him to control the size of each dot by manipulating both the pressure and the duration of each squeeze. As a result, he can create dots the size of small coins or dots as tiny as the tip of a felt pen marker. Needless to say, it’s all a very painstaking process, especially when I comment that each of these rather large canvasses must have literally thousands of dots. “Probably more,” he answers with a chuckle.
Despite the meticulous nature of his technique, Chamnan says he finds the work meditative and adds that the seemingly endless circles he creates remind him of how the curls of hair adoring the head of the Buddha are depicted in traditional Thai art. Coincidentally, his earliest works utilising this dot technique were monochromatic Buddha images. “The original idea was based on [the wheel of dharma in] Buddhism,” he explains, “so I used white on white for purity. Colour came later.”
“When I first started, I was also influenced by Australian aboriginal art,” he goes on to say, having been exposed these dot-covered sacred images via the internet and in person at an exhibition he attended in Thailand. He was further inspired by what he had seen of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who also makes use of circular forms and eye-catching pop art colours.
Eventually, Chamnan’s pieces began to focus almost entirely on the faces of beautiful women as subject matter, with the models being celebrities taken from magazines. “I use the outline of the person, but I will simplify that on the canvas,” he says, “so you just might see a little bit of the person, but you’d hardly recognise the face immediately.”
These abstracted portraits are, in a sense, exercises in pure form, composition, and pattern. “I don’t want to put any message in the artwork,” the artist tells me as we saunter past some of his works adorning the walls of the gallery. “It’s just what the viewer sees. I start with a happy face, or an angry face, or what have you, and then I choose the colours that identify with that emotion.” He also points out how the smaller coloured dots will mix to form new colours in the eye of the beholder – an optical illusion, of sorts, used widely in Impressionism and Pointillism.
However, I notice there’s one individual dot on each of these paintings that stands apart from the rest – a single spot of black placed either to the right or left of each woman’s lips. It’s an obvious allusion to the classic “beauty marks” that Hollywood starlets like Marilyn Monroe used to sport, but it also has a more personal connection to the artist himself. As it turns out, the now mustachioed Chamnan used to have a mole in the same spot, and although he had it removed several years ago, he includes one carefully placed black dot on each of these glamour portraits. It’s a revelation that actually comes as a surprise to Fon, who confesses she never knew the true meaning behind this “secret signature”.
Looking ahead, Chamnan has no scheduled upcoming exhibits in Thailand, but he has started to create a new collection of portraits. And like many artists, he has used the recent Coronavirus lockdown period as an opportunity to focus on his art in an uninterrupted setting. During the isolation period he moved from his studio in Nonthaburi and returned, along with his wife and their child, to the family home in Kanchanaburi. He also spent some of this downtime upcountry delving into sculpture, a medium which he’s now actively exploring. Naturally, I ask him if his parents still wish he’d “stayed on the farm”.
“They miss my company,” he responds with a grin, “but they don’t want me to stop being a successful artist.”
“I DON’T WANT TO PUT ANY MESSAGE IN THE ARTWORK. IT’S JUST WHAT THE VIEWER SEES.”