Asiaweek.com | An Artist at War

OCTOBER 20, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 41 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK

Markus Gortz for Asiaweek.
Vasan's art is inextricable from his activism. Art is for society, he says.

An Artist at War
Thai iconoclast Vasan Sitthiket is rude, crude and proud of it
By LEKHA J. SHANKAR Bangkok

Love him. Hate him. No one in Thailand's art world is indifferent to Vasan Sitthiket. It's easy to understand why. His in-your-face approach can be tough to swallow. Consider the phrases that pepper Vasan's conversation — and art. Bullshit government, bastard military, rapist politicians. There is little that Vasan wouldn't use to convey his disgust with the Thai elite, including foul language and semi-pornographic images.

As for democracy in Thailand, he says that's just "demon-crazy." Anti-establishment? You bet. In fact, the artist's feelings about the rich and powerful would be more accurately described as venomous. All his creativity is directed toward rattling the system — and many love him for it.

Since staging his first exhibition in 1984, Vasan has experimented with various mediums — oil and tempera painting, sculpture, wood-cut, video and installations. But he seems to have found his metier in performance art. His shows are events that combine his brushwork songs, angry speeches and often poetry. (Vasan usually pens a few lines for the occasion, and has published eight books of poems.)

The 43-year-old may not seem like much of a threat to the powers that be. In faded T-shirt, trousers and rubber sandals, Vasan looks more like one of the poor and downtrodden that he champions. Yet his phone has been tapped, he says. There have even been a couple of anonymous death threats issued, he suspects, by powerful political figures he offended. Vasan is unfazed. His work makes him strong, he says. "My art and my spirit cannot be banned. The fight will go on."

That indomitable attitude is just what it took to mount a display of his work at the Chulalangkorn University Art Center last month. Just five days before a new collection was to be unveiled on Sept. 4, the university pulled the plug on the show. "Banned," Vasan says. The work was just too provocative. Although this exhibition included several busts in ceramic (a new medium for Vasan), it was dominated by 50 paintings featuring politicians and military officers in sexually compromising poses.

Asiaweek Pictures.
The artist's replacement exhitbition, What's In our Head, featured wooden figures ritually hung from nooses.

Apipan Osayanam, art historian and chief curator at the center, was given the unhappy job of asking the artist to replace the entire display — or not hold an exhibition at all. "Vasan has always been a political artist, but we respect him. In fact, we own many of his works, including some on the [1976] student massacre," says Apipan. Nonetheless, the art center is a liberal subunit within a conservative institution. University authorities felt that Vasan's new paintings took the form of "personalized attacks on many leaders," he explains. To put these on display during a period of political uncertainty in the country, he suggests, would heighten fears of reprisal.

As it turned out, the challenge set by Chulalongkorn inspired Vasan to new heights. With the help of friends in his Ukkabat, or Fireball, art commune, he worked day and night to put together a replacement. The result, What's In Our Head, is a much more powerful body of work, perhaps Vasan's most radical so far. At the core of the piece are 49 enormous wooden puppet figures representing Thailand's political establishment. "That's what our art movement is about — to destroy the dinosaurs that rule the country," he says."

So at a spine-tingling opening, the audience walked into the exhibition space to find the puppets slowly lifted from supine positions on the floor — and ritually strung up from nooses on the roof. All the figures bar one had dead, blank faces. The exception, which wore a tortured expression, was "hung" with even greater fanfare while Vasan and his band circled the hall, shouting slogans, shaking their fists and bleating like sheep. And watching from the walls were other "witnesses" to the proceedings — more than 1,000 expressive portraits of ordinary folks. "Yes, they are mere sacrificial sheep in front of these politicians," declares Vasan. No prizes for guessing who the 49 dummies are meant to be — Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai and his Cabinet ministers. It was yet another virtuoso, no-holds-barred performance from the activist artist.

Word spread quickly and the month-long exhibition attracted plenty of visitors, foreign and local. Apipan declares himself delighted by the response. Thailand is considering legislative changes on censorship. And Vasan's show with the wooden dummies has caught the mood of the people, the curator says. Artistically, too, Vasan is on a new plane: The piece is admirably "tactile and interactive," Apipan says. For in taking up the entire exhibition space, the artist forces audiences to venture into the midst of the wooden figures, and, therefore, involve themselves in the political conflict. Vasan makes them witnesses, participants and judges to the process.

That's not how local art critic See Soon sees it. "Vasan's show says nothing new — he still walks the same road," he says. "His style has not really developed over the years. That's because his art is event-based. His work is not for himself but for others."

Vasan couldn't agree more. Born to a poor farming family, the artist takes pride in his roots in the central province of Nakhon Sawan. "Every time I return to my village, I realize that the lot of the farmers has not changed at all. Our politicians have done nothing," he declares. How can his concepts change when nothing has altered in the country? "As long as the poor remain poor, my art will not change."

Six years at a local art school had taught him line and colour. But in his hands, technique is something to be wielded as a "weapon" to wake up the middle class and confront an indifferent administration. For the most part, it is a blunt instrument. Fellow artists like Sawasdi Tantisuk have scoffed at his crude, trenchant style. "All the artists thought my work was shit," Vasan laughs. But after the mid-1990s, that chorus of derision grew more muted as invitations came in for him to exhibit abroad — in Europe, Australia, Japan and Singapore.

Asiaweek Pictures.
A tempera on wood panel from Vasan's banned collection, titled Beaurocrazy; idiot power still there.

Still, controversy is never far away since his activism is inextricable from his art. An earlier exhibition entitled No Future, Nature Is Dying, Chaos featured an image of Mother Earth being violated by a penis-like atom bomb. Other paintings showed soldiers and politicians in orgiastic frenzy. Monks are not spared either. In Buddha Visited Thailand (1992), he depicted monks as rapists and womanizers. The show caused an uproar and the Department of Religious Affairs threatened blasphemy charges, though these did not materialize in the end.

The controversies have boosted his popularity. Nowadays, the iconoclastic Vasan is almost an icon and his material is sometimes snapped up even before the paint is dry. Not that he is cashing in. In a buoyant art market, critic See Soon points to Vasan as one of the few artists who maintains reasonable prices. "Money has not really bothered me," the straggly bearded artist explains between swigs of Mekong whisky. "If I have no materials, I will draw on the sand. If I run out of money, I will go back to my village and grow rice, vegetables, and fish in the lake," he says.

What really bothers him is his fellow Thais resigning themselves to injustice, to a miserable existence. People should be more questioning, he feels. Although the theme is constantly alluded to in previous exhibitions, it is only in last month's show that he has put the issue front and center: What is in our heads — the witnesses and the public? Does Vasan hope the people will rebel and make revolution? "Yes," he says, "at least in their heads." That's what his exhibition is all about — "to make people question." A little subversion is good for the soul.

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