Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (The MIT Press)

The interplay of the local and the global in contemporary Thai art, as artists strive for international recognition and a new meaning of the national.Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved international recognition, circulating globally by way of biennials, museums, and commercial galleries. Many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation; but “Thainess” remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In this book, the curator and critic David Teh examines the tension between the global and the local in Thai contemporary art. Writing the first serious study of Thai art since 1992 (and noting that art history and criticism have lagged behind the market in recognizing it), he describes the competing claims to contemporaneity, as staked in Thailand and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere. He shows how the values of the global art world are exchanged with local ones, how they do and don't correspond, and how these discrepancies have been exploited. How can we make sense of globally circulating art without forgoing the interpretive resources of the local, national, or regional context? Teh examines the work of artists who straddle the local and the global, becoming willing agents of assimilation yet resisting homogenization. He describes the transition from an artistic subjectivity couched in terms of national community to a more qualified, postnational one, against the backdrop of the singular but waning sovereignty of the Thai monarchy and sustained political and economic turmoil. Among the national currencies of Thai art that Teh identifies are an agricultural symbology, a Siamese poetics of distance and itinerancy, and Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of charismatic power. Each of these currencies has been converted to a legal tender in global art—signifying sustainability, utopia, the conceptual, and the relational—but what is lost, and what may be gained, in such exchanges? The interplay of the local and the global in contemporary Thai art, as artists strive for international recognition and a new meaning of the national. Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved international recognition, circulating globally by way of biennials, museums, and commercial galleries. Many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation; but Thainess remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In this book, the curator and critic David Teh examines the tension between the global and the local in Thai contemporary art. Writing the first serious study of Thai art since 1992 (and noting that art history and criticism have lagged behind the market in recognizing it), he describes the competing claims to contemporaneity, as staked in Thailand and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere. He shows how the values of the global art world are exchanged with local ones, how they do and don't correspond, and how these discrepancies have been exploited. How can we make sense of globally circulating art without forgoing the interpretive resources of the local, national, or regional context? Teh examines the work of artists who straddle the local and the global, becoming willing agents of assimilation yet resisting homogenization. He describes the transition from an artistic subjectivity couched in terms of national community to a more qualified, postnational one, against the backdrop of the singular but waning sovereignty of the Thai monarchy and sustained political and economic turmoil. Among the national currencies of Thai art that Teh identifies are an agricultural symbology, a Siamese poetics of distance and itinerancy, and Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of charismatic power. Each of these currencies has been converted to a legal tender in global artsignifying sustainability, utopia, the conceptual, and the relationalbut what is lost, and what may be gained, in such exchanges? "This book fills a resounding silence: it tells a story, as yet unknown, of great significance to the understanding of non-Western contemporary art in global circulation. Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved remarkable international visibility, with a host of Thai artists winning critical acclaim and recognition at leading institutions. For the past 25 years, not a single art historical monograph on the subject has been published, nor even a volume of essays. Not since 1992, when Apinan Poshyananda's Modern Art in Thailand was published, has there been any serious study of Thai art. This book is not only a long overdue update on Thai art since that time, but it is the first book to identify new vectors for its historicisation in cultural and media histories, anthropology, and the growing discourses of exhibition-making and contemporaneity. It affords rare critical purchase on the awkwardly overlapping frames through which Thai contemporary art has been exhibited, understood, and valued"-- Provided by publisher Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Prefatory Note 14 Notes on Thai Phrases and Spelling 16 Introduction 18 1 Traveling Without Moving 36 2 Unstable Currencies 66 3 Nirat 98 4 Baramee 126 5 Unframing the Nation 162 6 The Preternational 190 Notes 216 Bibliography 260 Index 280