Indian Thai artist signals new direction in comic art show

BANGKOK: Modern art is exploding across Thailand s capital Bangkok, supplanting the sober, self-contemplative style it had been known for with a riot of color and more worldly themes.One artist at the forefront of this change is Thai Indian artist Navin Rawanchaikul, who spends most of his time in Japan.Navin s retrospective exhibition on Bangkok s riverside covers his 15-year career, using colorful and humorous stories to poke fun at elitism and nationalism. Life needs some kind of humor and fantasy and imagination, Navin told AFP. In Thai life, Indian life, we live with color and humor, people always laughing, smiling. It s very important to me, we can critique something quite seriously but it should also be fun, he said.Navin s exhibition is a visual kaleidoscope mixing massive murals with short documentary films, sculptures and even a Volkswagen Beetle car hand-painted with characters from one of Navin s fictional love stories.Chinese communist-style memorabilia fills one section of Navin s exhibition, but Chairman Mao s familiar features have been replaced by the artist himself, substituting a national symbol with one celebrating his name, Navin. My identity is Navin. For me, I don t want to define myself in any one particular national identity. If people ask me who I am, I say I m a Thai citizen but my background is Indian, Navin said. If you look at my comics, in more than half I m also one of the characters. My mixed culture can be beyond the nation. This pan-Asian identity has become Navin s signature style, said Bangkok-based author and art critic, Brian Mertens. Navin is a kind of lifelong outsider who wants you to love him, so he tells you jokes and entertains you with comic books, movie billboards, music videos, you name it, Mertens said. It s more fun than some of the Thai art five or 10 years ago, which was a bit sober, often about spiritual or philosophical themes, he said.A colorful mural hanging in the main gallery is painted with the faces of cross-continental characters whom Navin has followed over the years – including Inson Wongsam, a struggling Thai artist who rode a Lambretta scooter to Europe in 1962, funding his trip by selling woodcut prints that he had packed into the bike s sidebags.Another section celebrates a Japanese taxi driver who befriended Navin in Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu, 10 years ago, showing him pictures of the city he had taken from his car over the past 50 years. I found it interesting, the idea that the taxi had become a kind of mobile classroom in which you could talk about the city, history of the place, so I decided to make a comic book and poster of his life, Navin said.In fact the taxi encounter spawned a whole taxi-themed exhibition which has included Bangkok taxis doubling up as mobile art galleries.Besides the need to define an identity beyond national borders, Navin rails against art treating national culture as a commercial commodity. I kind of disagree with that, he said. What does it really mean? Maoism can be very commercial, socialism has already become like capitalism, Navin cites Japan as an example of art s commercialization going too far. For Japanese art I m getting bored, it s not really exciting recently; it s been reproduced from the early 90s when low art became high art. Artists feel trapped. The national identity becomes a commodity and I play with that. Mertens, the critic, said that in contrast to Japanese art, Thai art is broadening and changing to encompass global themes. It s not exploding like art in China and India, but Thai art is steadily diversifying and meshing with the global scene, he said. Things like new venues, affordable video technology, and more resourceful curating are giving artists here a real boost. Navin s voluminous body of work is put together in a book documenting his career which can be purchased at the art exhibition, running until August 10 at The River Promenade condominiums. -AFP