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.
