Nigel Price & Bangkok Art Map BAM!

Bangkok is a city full of visual excitement, intriguing subject matter and an unusually lively sense of color. There are thousands of artists, designers, musicians, filmmakers and writers, both Thai and also farang, hidden away in every neighborhood and district, some working invisibly without material reward, while others are well-known, celebrated and even sometimes rich.

Every year there are more galleries, more shows and more reviews drawing more interest. The critical mass that has been achieved by Beijing with its 798 Art Zone is still missing, but the talent is here. It just needs to be left uncensored and unleashed. Still, Bangkok’s art scene is alive and kicking – as a new exhibit of Nigel Price and the wonderful new Bangkok Art Map show.

A great addition to Bangkok’s burgeoning art scene, the Bangkok Art Map aka BAM! is a wonderful little guide to almost all the art galleries worthy of note in modern Bangkok. The map has been brilliantly put together by Steven Pettifor who also wrote an insightful book which is a must-read for anyone interested in the contemporary art scene in Bangkok called Flavours: Thai Contemporary Art.

By Chris Coles

The Bangkok Art Map is causing quite a bang in Bangkok’s art scene. The map comes out every month with a mini-collection of essays and notes on what’s happening that month. It is available for free from most galleries as well as on the web. For a headstart, why don’t you download BAM!’s Bangkok Art Map!

Moving over to Nigel Price: Simultaneously whimsical and bleak, playful and deadly serious, Nigel Price’s Foreign Body paintings show at La Lanta Fine Art gallery on Sukhumvit 31; paintings embued with his twenty-plus years as a visually and socially acute Welshman living in Bangkok.

Long gone are those first days of wonder when the newly arrived farang is overwhelmed by such a culturally unique, visually chaotic and sometimes dazzling metropolis. It’s been replaced by contradiction and ambiguity, innocence and corruption, simplicity and complexity. Not as mutually exclusive opposites, but as part of the wholeness of each painting.

Working with an interesting variety of materials and techniques, charcoal and pastel on paper and canvas as well as light acrylic washes and oil, Nigel makes use of a surprisingly subdued color palette which in some sense contradicts his often harsh choice of subject matter, making calm what might in brighter, more garish colors seem more shocking.

The show’s on until March 31st @ La Lanta. Move on over! Here some of Nigel’s works:




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March 15, 2009 | Filed Under Culture & Arts, Truly Bangkok 

Comments

3 Responses to “Nigel Price & Bangkok Art Map BAM!”

  1. Bangkok Art Map | Chieng Fa on March 18th, 2009 12.46 am

    [...] to the Absolutely Bangkok blog for bringing this to my attention. Related Posts:Updated Bangkok GuideNew eGuide to Bangkok’s [...]

  2. Kraisak Choonhavan & The Wrath Of Vasan Sitthiket on April 25th, 2009 10.29 pm

    [...] in “short, raw dabs of paint,” as the exhibit’s curator Steven Pettifor, a driving force behind Bangkok’s contemporary art scene, writes in the exhibit’s [...]

  3. Kraisak Choonhavan & The Wrath Of Vasan Sitthiket « PAD’s Facts Info on April 26th, 2009 8.51 pm

    [...] the brush applied in “short, raw dabs of paint,” as the exhibit’s curator Steven Pettifor, a driving force behind Bangkok’s contemporary art scene, writes in the exhibit’s booklet. Vasan [...]

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