Girl from Chiang Mai

Girl from Chiang Mai, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

As the eldest daughter to a mother born near Kumming, China, she’s working the high-end of the Bangkok Night.  Already, she owns a condo and drives her own Toyota, pays the school fees for her sisters and brothers and bought her mother a shop.

Beautiful, stylish and sexy, highly intelligent and very ambitious, within the generations of her ancestors and family, she is the one who will enable them to finally reach their destination.

Pegasus Girl

Pegasus Club, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

The girls at Pegasus Club are a confident bunch, secure in their place at the hi-end apex of the Bangkok Night.  All the guys are dollar millionaires and above, from all over the world, Asia and the West as well as the Middle-East, Russia and Thailand itself. Brand names, celebrities, movie stars and tycoons.  They fly into Bangkok first class or in their private jets, stay at the top hotels and meet their pals at Pegasus, for drinks, dinner, music and the two hundred constantly changing girls, every one beautifully dressed, perfect skin, a face that could be on the cover of a fashion magazine.  Stylish, smiling and clever enough to know what to do and how to be, to end up with a condo, a beach house in Phuket, a bank account in Singapore, a lifetime of income to raise their kids and put them through school, even send them to university in Australia or the U.S.

Blond Gogo Girl

Blond Gogo Girl, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

                                       

She has a power beyond herself, a dancer in the Bangkok Night…..dark brown skin, dyed blond hair, blue lenses in her eyes, she’s more mythic than real and the guys are there to worship and adore………..

Number 26

Number 26, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

Number 26 has a magic about her as she floats through the Bangkok Night.  A commodity for sale, holding onto her pole, she retains her smile and sense of humor as she constantly examines her world.  She likes the men who understand her distance, her value beyond herself, who know that knowing her for a night or two can change their lives and point of view.  No matter who and where we are in life, we are all holding onto a pole and we are all for sale and we must all examine our lives.  And we must still be able to smile.

Dancer Agogo

Dancer Agogo, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

For a thousand nights, she’s danced in a daze of smoke, sparkling disco balls and the thumping beat from gigantic Bose woofers.  She has seen the faces of a hundred thousand men, their eyes caressing every inch of her flesh.  Tall, short, handsome, ugly, dark, tan, yellow and white, obese and thin, some of them in wheelchairs, others with stutters,  old and young, every kind of man, from every country on earth.  What are they thinking and what do they want, why are they there, in the Bangkok bar where she works and lives and dreams?

The Corruptionist

The Corruptionist, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

He’s a predator in the world of the Bangkok Night, constantly on the lookout for weakness, vulnerability and greed, ready to rip apart and devour whatever he wants and needs…..

Ronnie at Nana Plaza

Ronnie at Nana Plaza, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

His first year in Bangkok, a great job, big salary, living allowance, penthouse condo, even a driver……and the excitement of Nana Plaza and the Bangkok Night still alive and fresh…..

German Sex Tourists

German Sex Tourists, water color on paper, 18x24 inch

Three German sex tourists, in Thailand on a two week package that will take them to Nana, Pattaya, Chiang Mai and Phuket.  One or two girls a night for fourteen nights, plenty of beer and Fuck You to anyone who cares.  It’s a long cold winter in Berlin and party time in the hot Bangkok night.

Lover's Quarrel

Lovers’ Quarrel, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

He’s still young and naïve, learning how to live.  She’s spent the last five years working in a Bangkok bar, at least three lifetimes compared to him.  Both twenty-three, they’re not from different planets but separate solar systems, intersecting in the heat of a Bangkok night

Peter

Peter, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

In Amsterdam where Peter lives, things are pretty quiet and usually nice, plenty of beer, drugs, girls, good jobs and high pay.  He arrived in Bangkok this evening, non-stop from Europe, his first visit, his brain very busy trying to process the overwhelming and unfamiliar density spread out before him in the hot and humid Bangkok night.  Food stalls with fried bugs, sexy girls and ladyboys,  baby elephants, 300 pound Expats, multiple layers of music, millions of Thais, infinite piles of counterfeit goods and an apocalyptic level of non-stop noise and confusion. Pretty soon, Peter’s brain is going to stop.

Ron from California

Ron from California, water color on paper, 18x24 inch

Straight out of a California community property divorce, Ron has come to Bangkok to forget, the girl he loved and married, the home he had to sell, the future pension lost.  His kids have been turned into magnets for monthly payments until they’re eighteen, the income from his business split in half.  He feels like he’s been put into a harness and told to trudge forward for fifteen years, up to his knees in mud.  No wonder he’s come to Bangkok.

Neon Soi Dog

Neon Soi Dog, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

On every street of the Bangkok Night, there are soi dogs, kind of like India and sacred cows.  Covered with mange, broken limbs and tails healed at strange angles, living in packs on chaotic streets, they sleep all day and roam all night, even around the bars.  Thais constantly give scraps to eat, from the food stalls, the shop houses, restaurants and bars.  Almost no one chases them or is mean.  The soi dogs wander around in every direction, wagging their tails, urinating, sniffing each other and a city full of interesting smells.  They are often trying to have sex and always raising their young.  Some like to find a little nook, hang out and watch the action. 

If reincarnation is part of life, then who were they in their previous lives and what did they do in order to become Bangkok soi dogs?

Pom

Pom, water color on paper, 18x24 inch

Pom, the manager of a Patpong bar, has worked the Bangkok Night for 30 years, never as as a dancer but as a cashier and manager.  She has seen every kind of man and every kind of woman, great, good, bad, horrible and in between.  Every situation in the ongoing drama of man woman relations.  All the distortions and variations of human behavior.  A hundred thousand customers a year, three million in all. Each customer, drawn in by the power of the Bangkok Night, to be obliterated or revealed, triumphant or defeated, passing from one lifetime to the next in the endless cycle of their being.

Keen-Eyed Observer of the Bangkok Night

Keen-Eyed Observer of the Bangkok Night, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

Curled up in a corner of the bar, the keen-eyed observer of the Bangkok Night.

Bangkok After Hours

 

Bangkok After Hours, water color on paper, 18x24 inch

It’s four AM and even in the After Hours Club, another blurry Bangkok night is reaching its final end.  A sad Thai song, empty bottles of whiskey, a heavy layer of smoke mixed with stale sweat and perfume, sultry ladies and horny guys, they’re all ready to give up the hunt, say goodnight and finally go to sleep.

Afterword

Beyond the Expat version of the Bangkok Night, throughout this vast swirling metropolis of uncounted millions, are an almost infinite number of other versions.  Thai coffee shops, lady barber shops, massages places from tiny holes in the wall to palatial structures with five hundred rooms, as large and luxurious as a major hotel, beauty salons, spas, snooker rooms, restaurants with special menus, telephone and internet escort services, beer gardens, giant discos, intimate member clubs, hostess bars, short-time hotels, drive-in curtain hotels, Isan music halls and numerous other venues visible and invisible, with and without names and constantly being re-invented, mainly for Thais, both ladies and men.

As large and varied as the Expat version of the Bangkok Night might be, it is only one world of many, less than ten percent of what is there.  The Japanese version has signs only in Japanese and sometimes no signs at all.  The Arab version is rough and full of shame.  The Indian version submerged, hidden and silent.  The Chinese version, mainly in Bangkok’s Chinatown, beyond the knowledge of even the Bangkok police and populated with Chinese from every country in Asia and every province in China.  For the Nigerians, another version known only to them.

And then there are the various gay, lesbian and ladyboy versions, some small and dark, others as glitzy as Las Vegas.  All of these worlds make up the universe of the Bangkok Night, one of the largest shows presently on earth and ever invented, an entertainment venue on a scale never before equaled in the history of mankind.

Whatever one might think and however one might judge, what’s there reflects the full range of mankind’s wishes and desires, weakness and strength, dreams and nightmares.  It is a spectacle invented in the human imagination and staged night after night, week after week, year after year, for an audience of millions.  To pretend it’s not there or that it shouldn’t exist is to overlook an essential element of the human spirit and struggle that reveals who we really are, down deep, not just who we pretend to be.

It is a universe full of clashing colors, dramatic contrasts, jagged lines, extremes of behavior and personality, mankind tilted on a primitive edge.  If the Fauvists or Expressionists were re-incarnated and alive today, the Bangkok Night is where they would be, watching, absorbing and painting.

Chris Coles Bio

Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who divides his time between Bangkok and the coast of Maine.  He is one of the first artists to explore the world of the Bangkok Night.  His paintings, in the Expressionist style, are jagged emotional portraits, revealing a raw and primitive layer of the human experience. 

Chris grew up on the coast of Maine and after graduating from Brown University, received a Watson Fellowship to spend a year living in the Bajuni Islands off the coast of East Africa where he made a series of voyages up and down the coast in Swahili trading dhows.  He has also lived and worked in Europe, North America, Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Greenland.  Chris is also a graduate of the British National Film School and has taken art courses at the Otis School in Los Angeles.  Among the films he has worked on are CHAPLIN, L.A. STORY, RAINBOW WAR, SIRENS, CUTTHROAT ISLAND, SUPERMAN and many more.