Issue 42, May 2010. See the entire magazine online here.SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo
12 March – 17 April
By Cameron Allan McKean Thailand’s marquee filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is approvingly described as a ‘magical realist’, ‘cultural modernist’ and ‘hypernaturalist’ by Western commentators, but as ‘boring’ and ‘unwanted’ at home. (Thai officials went so far as to censor one of his milder works, 2006’s
Syndromes and a Century.) This exhibition, in a converted bathhouse, presents works from the larger
Primitive (2009) series. Alongside two giclee photographs, an artist’s book and supporting film, the centrepiece is the ten-minute
Phantoms of Nabua, which confirms his status as new Thai cinema’s best representative, but more interestingly generates urgency for his deeper placement within the context of contemporary Thai (and Eastern) art.
With Weerasethakul, everything begins as a story. The
Primitive series draws on his own memories: a firefly entering a room, his father’s death, a dead brother’s immolated body and a subsequent search for his reincarnated form (the identifying sign: a small black mark behind the ear). This tale is told in the opening pages of the artist’s book
Cujo, also on show. If these memories invite quick, easily shelved (and forgotten) explanations via labels like ‘Buddhism’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘Eastern philosophy’, the work itself absorbs and transcends such categorisations, presenting elemental images and abstracted actions that echo Eastern mysticism but are really adjuncts to Weerasethakul’s personal and intuitive symbology.
Phantoms of Nabua, meanwhile, is spectacularly projected onto the large wall at the back of the old bath area. The scene: it is twilight, and lightning – faked, a special effect – is projected onto a screen in a field. Young men kick a fiery ball between themselves until it connects with the screen, setting it ablaze; the projected image, with nothing to land on, becomes a raw beam of light sputtering from the projector. The beam occasionally catches the rising smoke, allowing glimpses of the lightning, but the images are more imagined than real. Ghostly projections, known but unseen: this is prototypical Weerasethakul, an adroit and moving détournement.
Beyond visual tricks and mystic imagery,
Phantoms allegorises subjective memories of a specific location: Nabua, a village in the northern Thai province of Nakhon Phanom, which supposedly harboured Communist insurgents from the 1960s to 80s and consequently faced state-initiated reprisals, often savage. Weerasethakul wants to mark these types of spaces: hidden, but rich in personal memory and mythology. His retellings and reinterpretations are often sensational and perverse, their focus on life’s embedded fictions gifting them with a profoundly romantic quality. But Weerasethakul is equally concerned with embedding fiction into lived experience and documenting that process too, as is shown by the supporting film
Sud Vikal (Vampire) (2008): here Weerasethakul and cast hunt for a mythical bloodsucking bird – which may, or may not, exist – in jungle bordering Burma.
The filmmaker’s Eastern imagery might provoke accusations of overextended self-reflexiveness or overfamiliarity with Western alterity; he seems to view his homeland through the lens of the anthropologist or with a foreigner’s gaze. But that gaze (or affected gaze) does not tarnish his accuracy, which arises because his works are situated deeply in personal space and time, making no attempts at objectivity but rather inviting rivers of memory to flow back upon themselves.
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