Chris Coles’ Bangkok Vanilla Sky

The man, an ardent reader of absolutely Bangkok by the way, needs no introduction if you’re familiar with Bangkok’s art scene: Bangkok noir artist Chris Coles, known for his darkish Bangkok portraits, yearns for the Bangkok the glossy tourism brochures avoid.

The bare, completely apolitical human is the centerpiece of Chris’ Bangkok work. Chris grasps a world of delusional desire, with loners and dreamers wallowing in the Bangkok mire of ever tempting guilt and atonement and misery and pleasures and pain – and the beauties of Thai visual design.

Chris Coles recently got interviewed by Suranand Vejjajiva on TTN 2 (Thai TV). Here’s an edited transcript. For an starter/initiation into Chris’ art read our Chris Coles’ Expressionist Bangkok and Looking @ Bangkok Through A Noir Lens. And even if you’re an old Bangkok hand, Chris may reopen your eyes, offering other theses for the Thai mind – and nightlife for that:

How did it start with you and art in Bangkok.

I started doing shows, 14 years ago. I was kind of going back and forth a lot and go around Asia a lot.

But you spend most of the time here.

I would say all of my visual ideas, certainly the more interesting ones, are coming from Bangkok. And some visual ideas come from other places. But the really strong paintings, the ones that get a lot of attention, are the Bangkok paintings.

And that’s what we are going to talk about because you have certainly been expressing yourself on what you see through farang eyes, if I may say that, of what nightlife or what life in Bangkok is. What do you see?

I think there is a tremendous advantage actually for an artist to be an outsider because you are not inside the kind of bubble of received opinion of an education that each country has, including the U.S. So coming into Bangkok, my first week here working on a movie was just total chaos and disorientation. We just have no idea as an outsider what’s going on. Gradually I learned better to see some of the stuff that is behind the scene and very interesting and idiosyncratic stuff which only exist in Thailand.

So things you see is not things I see.

Right, I see when I go to a place in Bangkok, I might stop in front of a spirit house and my Thai friends would say we are trying to get to a restaurant, why are you stopping? I would say this is a very interesting spirit house why would they have Batman, a little plastic Batman over there with a little cup of Coca Cola in front of them. And they say it’s just a spirit house, there are millions of them. I say no, no, no, why is Batman here, why did someone think he has to put a Batman inside a spirit house. That’s a very interesting idea.

But Thais don’t ask why, they just put it there?

So I will make a painting of the spirit house which has a lot of little figures. And because I am kind of an Irish-American and we believe in leprechauns. I think of the little spirits house sort of the Thai version of leprechauns. And leprechauns could be very good and they could be very bad. They could make mischief just for fun. So I think, oh well, the Thais put Coke and a little whiskey and a little banana, so that every spirit kind of stay happy and he stays in the spirit house and he doesn’t come outside to make mischief or make bad things happen.

When you see that and you interpreted it, do you think Thais, the people who did that painting or that sign, subconsciously or consciously put it in. Is that what you think? Or you are interpreting it in a Western way.

I think Thais and many things Thai people do in their everyday life they don’t know why they do them actually. They just do them because Thai people do that. There is a very interesting book called Very Thai which explains to farang many very small Thai things and why they are done exactly that way. And farang people like myself, who are very interested in getting behind the surface in Thailand, not just looking at the wai and the smiles (and the TAT kind of tourist things). We love this book Very Thai because it explains to us how the motorcycle taxi guys are organized and many other everyday Thai things.

What kind of stickers they put on.

Why the taxi dashboards have all that stuff on them. And we find that kind of thing very interesting and very revealing of Thai cultural characteristics and Thai people.

A lot of people might not be familiar with your work on my show. The paintings here are just examples. I saw your website and on YouTube, you put your work on the screen for people who are interested to look at. But how do your characterize your art?

Well the art is every much in the expressionist style of paintings. The expressionist style began in Paris around 1890-1900, a lot of artists painting Paris nightlife scenes, like the Moulin Rouge scenes by Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin and some of the Paris artists at that time they started distorting people and colors in Paris nightlife to make them more dramatic and more interesting. Toulouse-Lautrec was a little bit representational but Gauguin and Picasso painted some Paris nightlife started doing unrealistic colors and unrealistic people’s faces. Then the Germans picked up on that around 1910-1920 especially the German artists in WWI saw a lot of killing, destruction and chaos. They came into Berlin after the war and started painting the nightlife of Berlin to use not as nightlife itself but as a dramatic stage for their visual imagery. They wanted to reveal the true nature of mankind in their view which was not “Oh, I want to help you, I want to have good intentions, I want to be happy,” but a mankind that has been set loose in WWI which was very destructive, chaotic.

I read in your website that when Hitler came to power, he ordered a lot of them destroyed.

Actually in most authoritarian rulers, Hitler, Stalin, etc., their art of choice is happy art, sunsets, blond people who look very strong who have a wife and a baby that they are very proud of, sun shining over behind them. They get very upset when they see art which shows mankind at a disturbed and a distorted negative way.

Your paintings, you think it reflects the real Bangkok or real life?

I think so. Especially, one of my favorites is Soi Dog No. 1 and I think Soi Dog No. 1 as you can see is a very beat up and battered soi dog. He probably has a one leg broken from a car running him over, he has teeth missing. You are not sure what he actually can see maybe he just can’t see anything any more.

I can get this up right, yeah I am sure.

He has what I call a fighting spirit. You know he lives in the street. He got a favorite food cart that feeds him everyday. He got 3 or 4 girlfriends he likes to visit everyday.

When Thais see this, in Thai ma kang thanon, they see stray dogs.

I noticed Thais are very kind to soi dogs.

Of course.

They feed them and they take care of them, probably because that it gives them good karma.

But it’s not an object of art, but for you it is.

Thai artists when he sees a soi dog he doesn’t think “Oh, I should paint that soi dog.” Whereas I see the soi dog, I say, you know, he is kind of a symbol of Thai people tremendous resiliency, their tremendous ability to deal with adversity, and still keep going. And look forward to the next day. And soi dog has no bank account, he has no credit cards. He has no Mercedes.

But he gets fed.

Everyday he eats pretty good food. You know it’s never too cold. His girlfriends look pretty good, at least as far as he is concerned. One in the corner over there is one of his favorites. And he has a pretty good day everyday and he is not too worried about the future.

So it’s not all dark, although the image is.

No, I think what’s interesting in my paintings, although they are sort of dark in one way they are very hopeful in another way because they show people struggling with adversity and somehow find a way to survive. And they also show in an interesting way. For instance, my nightlife paintings never glamorize the nightlife.

Like this one.

For instance, this is a very famous neon sign among certain people, perhaps not the hi-so people, of the Obsession bar. It’s probably the most famous katoey bar in Bangkok. And this sign which is quite a beautiful sign with the color scheme and the way it blinks also has a lot of implications of the choice of the word Obsession, which is also fits with the German expressionist idea of people who are very obsessed with things not in a healthy way.

Many Thais are probably familiar with the sunshine artist. Why are you painting neon signs?

One reason I paint the neon signs because I think Bangkok during the day is kind of a very flat lighting and not a glamorous or a pretty city on a hot day. But as soon as the sun goes down and everything gets dark, millions of signs and millions of lights and probably billions of those small twinkling lights all light up. And suddenly Bangkok became this magical place where you don’t see any cracks in the sidewalks. All you see are these signs, well dressed people going around here and there. You hear a lot of music and it becomes a different kind of city, almost a fantasy night time city, which is quite different from the daytime setting.

It’s a different point of view that you are seeing.

Right. In a lot of the magic of the Bangkok night which creates the magic which exists in the minds of people all over the world that Bangkok is somehow exciting, whether that’s just an illusion or not I don’t know, but they think it is. The neon signage in Bangkok is very interesting. There are millions of neon signs everywhere and artists who made the neon signs although they are anonymous working artists; actually are very clever Thai artists.

So you are now taking this to express that there is, I don’t know, another way of life?

I like to show that the Thai visual imagination is everywhere. It’s in the taxis, it’s in the signs, in how people dress, in how people do their make up, in how they decorate their restaurants, their clubs. You know, the visual imagination in Thailand is probably one of the highest levels of any country in the world.

I saw you start taking video clips of neon signs and put on YouTube.

The neon signs are very good but also the spirit houses are very visually skilled. The royal barges that exist are very interesting visually. You go all the way back to Sukhothai Buddhas, which are in the leading art museums in the world. There are pieces from Sukhothai in museums all over the world. That’s because the visual talent that existed even a thousand years ago was a very advanced visual talent.

So it’s coming out.

It comes out in everything. It comes out even when you go to Thai boxing, the colors, the costumes, what they wear around their arms, around their heads. Everywhere you look in Bangkok, Isaan music show, for instance. Everywhere you go in Bangkok, especially if you are an outsider, you see very strong visual images everywhere, and they are created by Thai people not because that they are artists in the conscious sense but just because they think that this would be good and they make it that way.

Speak about your katoey paintings.

I painted quite a few ladyboys actually. And you noticed that when I paint a ladyboy, there is no or very little erotic or sexual implication. It’s basically painting the visual presentation of the ladyboy as she likes to present herself in the world of Bangkok, which is as a woman. And I got the idea actually from my daughter who is now in a university in the U.S., who came home from school one day and said “Oh daddy, did you realize that Leonardo, his studio in Italy was on a street where there were a lot of ladyboy hookers. And sometimes when he needed a model, he would go out on the street and pull one off the street to use as a model. And some people even say that the Mona Lisa was a ladyboy. That is why the Mona Lisa is so ambiguous.” And I said, “Wow, that’s a very interesting idea,” because Bangkok has got thousands and thousands of ladyboys. And the ambiguity is extreme because some times it’s really difficult to perceive whether she is a lady or a ladyboy. Maybe I should start painting some, what I should do with them is try to paint the ambiguity, which I find the most interesting aspect.

Are you seeing things different from Thais because you are a farang?

I think being a farang in Bangkok is as though I got sent in from Mars on an interplanetary space vehicle. And everything I see I see from eyes of a Martian from another planet.

But not every farang does.

Some farangs are less alive visually. Farangs who have been here more than once and have a curiosity for actual Thai friends, how they live and how their culture comes about, like to go deeper into the Thai system and they are able to deal with the reality of Thailand without developing a negative point of view towards Thailand.

This is not negative.

I don’t think so. I think it shows Thailand to be a colorful, interesting, complex society where people can deal with ambiguity. They can deal with personal tragedy and triumph and function more or less of the same level as people do in all societies that are large and complex.

Do you see the conflict between the day life and night life and whether they can exist together in the long run?

Well I think every city in the world, London, Paris, New York, Shanghai, or Bangkok; any large complex city has a day life and a nightlife. And a lot of times, the cities are measured by their nightlife. People go to Paris for the night life. People go to New York City for the night life. People go to Las Vegas for the night life. And often it’s seen as a sign of a highly developed civilization, to have a very complex and developed night life. By that I mean not just the model night life, but a night life that has a very broad range of activities, restaurants to music places to bars.

They are part of our society.

It is part of the diversity of a society and it’s also a very sophisticated complex outlook of a society’s problems and tensions. It’s a way of dealing with things in a fairly harmless non-violent way as oppose to blowing stuff up, killing people, and the other ways people deal with problems and tensions.

When you paint something like this, how is it received in the States, you have a gallery in the U.S.

I have had shows in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Boston, and people are very attracted to the colors, the very vibrant colors, which are really coming out of the Bangkok color palette. I think Bangkok has a lot of really interesting color usage. They are interested in the idea of a whole world that exist that they don’t actually know themselves which they can come and look in the paintings.

Do they ask you whether “Oh! I saw this commercial of Thai society, it’s so different.” You don’t see Thai dancing in your paintings.

The people who go to art shows are already more highly educated group of people than the normal group of people and when they travel, they prefer to travel in a more complex manner than just the surface. And what they find interesting is getting below the surface so getting back to Very Thai, for instance, my friends who come here who are interested in learning about Bangkok, the first book I give them to read is not normal a tourist book but Very Thai.

When I go to other countries, I don’t read normal tourist books.

They go in a Bangkok taxi not to go anywhere but to look at the dashboard, and then another taxi to look at another dashboard. And they will go to Jatujak market in the morning or they will go to an Isaan music show in some obscure part of Bangkok because they want to see the stuff that’s revealing of the society. They want to get to know the society a little bit better.

There are a lot more art galleries open in Bangkok or Thailand.

Bangkok has a very lively art scene. It’s not as big as Beijing which has a huge art scene now with a thousand galleries, and very interesting artists. It’s not as big as Hong Kong perhaps I think it’s in a way more interesting than Hong Kong. The Thai imagination, you know the Thai culture and society is a very unique and idiosyncratic society because it combines so many different influences from India, from China, from Europe, from Malaysia, Indonesia.

We are like a junction here.

Chris: It’s always absorbed other cultures and transformed some bits into Thai things. So it’s a very unique society, unique culture, and it has the potential to be a leading culture in terms of artistic production, design. I think a lot of the fashion designers here are doing very well. A lot of the interior decorators in Bangkok are famous in Singapore, are famous in Shanghai.

What about Thai artists; have you met them?

I meet Thai artists and go to shows almost every weekend. There are a few farang artists but there are a lot of Thai artists. I was at a show recently at HOF Art which is down in an industrial building off Ratchada, and there were maybe 20 Thai artists being shown. There was a rock band playing and maybe 400-500 people, a very exciting night for an art show. And there was a lot of interesting stuff there. There are a lot of Thai artists who are not famous. A favorite of mine is Nantana Phonak. She does very similar expressionist style paintings of Bangkok night life. And her paintings reveal the stress and tension in her own life.

And the skills?

Very bright colors, very interesting images she chooses to paint.

How long are you going to keep painting?

I think my goal is to be like Matisse, not that I am as good as Matisse, who painted up to the day he died. There is a picture of him in his bed, he can’t even get up, and someone has put a stick in his hand with a pencil at the end of it. They put a big piece of paper on the wall. And he is sitting there drawing something with his stick up until the day he died. And some of his best work is his last work.

Well, I hope to see around.

I hope I am not going to die soon.

No, no, no you gonna paint more and reflect the Thai life which other people don’t see. Thank you for being on our show.




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April 21, 2009 | Filed Under Being Farang, Culture & Arts, Nightlife & Entertainment, The Interview, Truly Bangkok 

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One Response to “Chris Coles’ Bangkok Vanilla Sky”

  1. Calvino’s Back on December 2nd, 2009 11.50 am

    [...] book’s cover art is a painting by Chris Coles*, an inner circle mentor of the Bangkok Noir movement who is no stranger to the fascination of the city’s never tiring multiple levels of [...]

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