by Christopher G. Moore
Bangkok at midnight: streets splashed with neon, tourists feeding
bamboo to baby elephants, hookers eating at roadside tables, eyeing
those who pass by, and soldiers in combat kit, carrying automatic
weapons standing on the BTS, watching, waiting, taking in the sights. If
noir had a smell it would be jasmine on a hot tropical night in
Bangkok, the City of Angels. It is a beat that I’ve covered for more
than twenty years. The thing with black is even when you scratch the
surface, you can never find your mark. It vanishes like dreams, hope and
love.
Chris Coles likes to say there is a noir movement in Bangkok. The
quantum world has a lesson: we must choose between measuring position
and velocity of particle. Noir, for me, moves so fast, I can never nail
down exactly where it is, where it has been or where it is going. It is a
particle in motion smashing through the walls, consciousness and lives
of people living in the City of Angels.
Every artistic movement is created by a group of writers, painters,
photographers, filmmakers, and lyricists. While they mostly work in
isolation from each other, they draw from the same material, and their
creativity combines into a larger force than any one of them. In the
case of the Bangkok Noir movement, the idea of a noir community started
to take shape as these artistic individuals began to assemble in ever
larger numbers about ten years ago. A number of factors, social and
political, have come together to form a critical mass, allowing for the
noir movement to not only take hold but to gain international attention.
Mass media and mass tourism has helped to make the developmental
changes into the kind of perfect storm that feeds the instability and
insecurity that creates noir.
I think of Chris Coles as occupying Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s shoes
in Bangkok. For my money, Coles has grabbed from the nightlife hundreds
of images, vested them with vibrant, gaudy colors, his theatrical
images of faces smeared with regret, hope, boredom and hate. He catches
his subjects in the throes of navigating the night world heavily mined
with pleasure, power and money explosives.
Toulouse-Lautrec captured Montmartre nightlife. A century later,
Coles has found his Montmartre in Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong.
Coles’s passion has been a large-scale work in progress to translate the
bohemian Bangkok lifestyle into art. On the surface, the paintings are
about world of sensual pleasure where romance is manufactured in these
dream factories. Noir is hidden below the surface of these places of
work. Go behind stage and you find what you’ve long suspected, work is
about putting in time for money and workers value themselves according
to the money they earn. Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Coles’ figures are
objects of compassion and sympathy. We know that both sides of these
transactional arrangements are doomed. There is no need to leer or show
disrespect as the reality that the darkness of such lives fills us with a
deeper knowledge of hopelessness. In painting after painting, Coles
reveals bar girl and customers mental processes. The ones they carefully
hide behind a smile.
What makes Chris Coles noir vision unique is his skill to draw
powerful psychological images from inside the world of Bangkok’s
entertainment industry. His haunting faces and scenes emerge from the
darkest corners of humanity; the gangster, the prostitute, the
dispossessed, the traveler, the nice guy freshly arrived on holiday, the
people on the run—from themselves, their family, country—all of these
souls are stirred in the cauldron of Coles’ imagination. He mingles his
colors with shades of innocence and hope but we know from their
expressions and stories that disaster is a couple of minutes away.
His subjects are caught in a bubble of wonder and sensitivity,
unaware that like a condemned man, they have no idea they have mistaken
the executioner’s smile as an invitation to pleasure. I reminded of the
first time years ago (1993), when I walked through Tuol Sleng, or
Security Prison 21, a museum to the Khmer Rouge victims. The faces of
men and women in the photographs on the walls were frozen in a moment of
horror, the self-realization of what was coming next. Coles’ Bangkok
subjects are emotional kin who share the same look of incomprehension,
pleading, and worry.
Capturing the pathos of the Bangkok night is the goal of noir
creators. But this is no easy thing. What Chris Coles brings to the
table is of extra value: he delivers a hard driving narrative
description of the setting and characters, which accompany each
painting. The effect is to create an illustrated short story as a time
capsule stuffed with images and stories that magnify the haunting
illusion of reinvention through carnal pleasure. In painting after
painting, Coles shows us men—mainly but not exclusively foreigners—and
Thai women—mainly though not exclusively prostitutes. A rap sheet with
Tuol Sleng mug shots of people shedding one set of dreams for another,
their emotions and lives riding on the conveyor belt that morphs into a
roller coaster slamming a hundred miles an hour world through the
Bangkok night.
Coles guides us through his images and accompanying short vignettes,
to witness a strange ballet of men and women whose emotions are filtered
and shaped by cultural misunderstanding, language incompatibility, and
moral and ethical mismatches until all that remain are residue of mental
projections—one person’s vision and wishes as to what the other person
is and wants.
In this book, modern pop art merges with contemporary pulp story
telling. The individual narratives reinforced and enlarge our
understanding of the paintings. The language is expat English, funny,
dead pan, screaming at the top of one’s lungs prose like a machine gun
cutting down a frontal assault. Each story attached to the painting
establishes the context and perspective for what you are seeing. In the
past, for many years, Chris Coles was involved in making films. In this
collection, he has story boarded the world of the Bangkok Night from the
inside. He portrays his subjects anxiety, desires, dreams, and
delusions, and perhaps, above all their vulnerability where survival
depends on the skill to exploit the weak, the romantic, and
inexperienced.
Noir is more than paintings laced with plumes of cigarette smoke,
bottles of beer, angry tarts, and dissolute drunks, it is a world of
broken dreams, shattered lives, exploitation—that word born of noir—and
thirty word English vocabularies that must carry the full weight of
pleasure and desire, and the rundown short time hotels. This is the
opposite of the fairy tale where the orphaned girl is swept up by a
prince and given a glamorous life. Noir is the spotlight held on people
caught without escape from a pleasure-domed hell. The Bangkok nightlife
is where money is the only vocabulary worth memorizing, the only way of
measuring happiness and success. And dreams of a better world have a
long passed their expiration date.
Most of the Thai women in the Bangkok bars have traditionally come
from the Isan, the poorest region of Thailand. We find out about the
background of these women—largely peasant girls born and bred in small
villages, daughters of rice farmers, women who have had little chance of
a acquiring a formal education. These women have seen other girls
return from Bangkok with a foreign boyfriend or husband. Often the
returning woman comes back as a heroine to her classmates, who admire
her iPhone, expensive clothes, handbag, watch, and fistful of money to
buy food and drink for all. Thus starts a fresh cycle of new faces
appearing in the clubs, bars, and restaurants inside Bangkok’s scattered
nightlife. Those women who have stayed behind and married local boys,
have their children but little else. It’s not uncommon for them to have
been abandoned by their husbands without any financial support. Next
thing they are on a bus to Bangkok, children left with the grandmother
or aunt, with a promise of money to be sent back. Soon she is dancing
naked and sleeping with foreigners, and perhaps taking drugs to numb the
pain of separation from her children and the disgrace of what she is
doing.
Coles digs deep to tell their stories with compassion and
introspection. He goes inside their lives and we come away with a
greater understanding of what forces unite a bar girl from a poor region
in Thailand to a foreigner who knows little of her culture and language
inside a Bangkok bar. But this happens every night of every day of
every week of every month and year. A relentless, pounding, unstoppable
dance between men with money and power and women who understand that sex
is the easiest short cut for someone with no other marketable skills or
education. Sex in the noir world is a system that redistributes money
and power to women. It’s not about reproduction or a relationship or
marriage, though these may, now and again, happen as a freakish
by-product.
In these paintings, Coles has captured the contradiction of Bangkok,
the noir part, where at the moment of greatest relaxation is the moment
when one should be the most vigilant. The void is always waiting between
the laughter and smiles, to swallow up the outsider, consume him, hold
him, digest him and wake up the following day hungry for a new meal.
Showing posts with label Jake Needham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jake Needham. Show all posts
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Preface
by Chris Coles
The Noir side of the Bangkok Night has always been one of its most delicious ingredients, kind of like that extra special secret sauce that makes the first taste of a Thai gourmet feast so exciting and interesting. Without the Noir and the nightlife, the bargirls, punters, ladyboys, rentboys and thousands of service staff, the assorted cast of thugs, scammers, traffickers, dealers, perverts, hitmen and the endless stream of fugitives from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America, not to mention from Thailand itself, without this glorious and colorful assortment of Noir characters and faces and posturing, the Bangkok Night would no longer be so spicy, colorful and fun.
But then, as if that wasn’t enough, blend into Bangkok’s actual Noir, the delicious artistic and fictional noir found in the Bangkok novels of Christopher G. Moore, Stephen Leather, John Burdett and Jake Needham, in the Thai gangster films like the original Pang Brothers’ BANGKOK DANGEROUS (not the remake which turned out to be a marshmallow), in the edgy hip-hop soundtrack of Thaitanium and in my own series of Bangkok Noir paintings and portraits, you get an explosion of Noir, beautiful and frightening and thrilling all at once, making the Noir side of Bangkok a sparkling treasure to be savored and cherished, even if not actually consumed.
The Noir side of the Bangkok Night has always been one of its most delicious ingredients, kind of like that extra special secret sauce that makes the first taste of a Thai gourmet feast so exciting and interesting. Without the Noir and the nightlife, the bargirls, punters, ladyboys, rentboys and thousands of service staff, the assorted cast of thugs, scammers, traffickers, dealers, perverts, hitmen and the endless stream of fugitives from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America, not to mention from Thailand itself, without this glorious and colorful assortment of Noir characters and faces and posturing, the Bangkok Night would no longer be so spicy, colorful and fun.
But then, as if that wasn’t enough, blend into Bangkok’s actual Noir, the delicious artistic and fictional noir found in the Bangkok novels of Christopher G. Moore, Stephen Leather, John Burdett and Jake Needham, in the Thai gangster films like the original Pang Brothers’ BANGKOK DANGEROUS (not the remake which turned out to be a marshmallow), in the edgy hip-hop soundtrack of Thaitanium and in my own series of Bangkok Noir paintings and portraits, you get an explosion of Noir, beautiful and frightening and thrilling all at once, making the Noir side of Bangkok a sparkling treasure to be savored and cherished, even if not actually consumed.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Some Blurbs & Quotes from Writers & Critics
================================================================
“Nobody captures Bangkok’s dark side as vividly as
Chris Coles does. The shocking
degeneracy of the Bangkok night is visualized in these paintings in all its
sordid, grotesque splendor, with uncommon sensibility for the complex humanity
of its fiendish protagonists. In Chris Coles’ Bangkok, all sinners are saints.” – Federico
Ferrara, author of THAILAND UNHINGED and
the KHI KWAI blog.
================================================================
"I highly recommend this to all of my friends. The artist exactly captures the sense of Patpong, Bangkok's red light district, and the sense of the current regime and society. Very striking" - Christine Gray, author of "THAILAND - THE SETERIOLOGICAL STATE".
================================================================
"I highly recommend this to all of my friends. The artist exactly captures the sense of Patpong, Bangkok's red light district, and the sense of the current regime and society. Very striking" - Christine Gray, author of "THAILAND - THE SETERIOLOGICAL STATE".
================================================================
“Bangkok’s ‘seething underbelly’ has been desensitized
to the point that photographic reportage now feels clichéd, even banal. As an
artist-witness, Coles recaptures the profane crux of that milieu. Through lurid palette and contorted portrait,
he renders palpable the corruption, hypocrisy and denial. Such human drives can elude the camera, but
not the cariacture’s ability to nail an archetype. Coles is a neon-era Gilray” – Philip
Cornwel-Smith, Editor, author of VERY
THAI: EVERYDAY POPULAR CULTURE.
================================================================
“Chris Coles shows the other side of ‘Thainess’, the
one that’s not so rosy and pretty as the government would like to portray but
certainly reflective of the reality….but he also shows that what appears at
first glance to be ugly and dark can also be beautiful….” – Suranand
Vejjajiva, Bangkok Post columnist & TV/Radio Show host.
================================================================
“Chris Coles creates a noir world with surrealistic
beings, splashed with bright colors and drenched in atmosphere. He is one of the first artists to explore the
scenes from the Bangkok night. His portraits look behind the mask of those in
the scene. They are powerful and
haunting images” - Christopher G. Moore, author of the VINCENT CALVINO P.I. SERIES of novels
set in Bangkok & SE Asia.
================================================================
“Bangkok-based expressionist painter Chris Coles
drills deep into the psyche of the fiery Thai underworld” – Tom Plate,
author GIANTS OF ASIA series &
international columnist writing on modern Asia.
================================================================
“Chris Coles remarkable paintings from the Bangkok
night give equal billing to both predator and prey” – Liam
Ayudhkij, owner Liam’s Gallery & Thailand’s largest collection of
modern art.
================================================================
“Chris Coles beat is the Expat neon triangle, Soi
Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong, where the wildlife gathers at the waterholes in
the cool of the night” – Paul Dorsey, author of the DALI HOUSE blog.
================================================================
“Chris Coles is a Bangkok-based artist who filters the
completely surrealistic scene of the Bangkok night thru German Expressionist
eyes. He gets it right. Bangkok, the
city that never sleeps, is in line with his wild imagination and the character
sitting on the barstool next to you in Nana Plaza looks just like one of his
portraits” – Carl Parkes, author of MOON
HANDBOOKS for THAILAND, BANGKOK, SINGAPORE, PHILIPPINES & SE ASIA, NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER: THAILAND & the FRISKODUDE
blog.
================================================================
"Chris Coles' daring reflections on Bangkok's
underbelly defy the usual limited and banal representations of tourist brochure
Thailand. He captures the moody degeneration and vaudevillian gaucheness of
Thailand's very own "City of Angels" utilizing color and shadow to
devastating and fearless effect. Forget the Thai Smile - the Bangkok Noir is
where it's at." – Andrew Spooner, journalist & author
FOOTPRINT THAILAND HANDBOOK, FOOTPRINT
CAMBODIA HANDBOOK
================================================================
“Sexy and intriguing…..” – T.E.D. Klein,
GQ Magazine.
================================================================
"Whether you are a novelist or a painter, you make art by
getting beneath the surface of something and illuminating its truth. Bangkok is
not what the tourist authority tell you it is. It is what Chris Coles tells you
it is. That's really all you need to know about the place." --
Jake Needham, author of THE BIG MANGO and four
other novels of contemporary Asia.
“Chris Coles’ Bangkok Night body of work expresses the
raw power of humanity with both skill, concept and style of work. Influenced by German Expressionism, the paintings
are the essence of pure emotion” – Angela Di Bello, Editor in Chief, ArtisSpectrum Magazine.
================================================================
“I like Chris Coles’ Bangkok paintings very much. The starkness, the bold lines and vivid
colors evoke the strange appeal and tragedy of the nightlife, and its plain
weirdness” – Nick Nostitz, author & photographer RED VS. YELLOW: THAILAND’S CRISIS OF IDENTITY and PATPONG: BANGKOK’S TWILIGHT ZONE
================================================================
“Thailand’s pulsing capital hasn’t been depicted with
this much flair and vivacity since the 1980’s musical CHESS. Coles’ paintings are a neon depiction of
Bangkok’s notorious nightlife where ‘the bars are temples but the pearls ain’t
free’” – TIME OUT SINGAPORE
================================================================
“Chris Coles paintings and artwork is very striking I guess I would say. They remind me of Zappa lyrics...'gross and perverted, obsessed and deranged'. His colors are so primitive and their throbbing clash on your eyes and senses ooze a sense of darkness, of evil even. Yet, they are almost playful at times and amusing as well. His work reminds me of what I expect to see when I am fairly obliterated and moving aside the thick velvet curtain of the umpteenth 'next' gogo bar, the one I know I should not go in, but enter I do. You know, the bar with the katoey mamasan with the garish make-up that glows under the black lights that scares the bejesus out of you as his/her face looms in your drunken blurry field of vision. Coles captures the extra-dimensional feel of the Thailand nightlife. His work occupies another zone of existence. It's so ugly at times it is intriguing in a perverse way that makes one want to embrace it. If you know what I mean? Maybe not....” – ANONYMOUS BLOGGER
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
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