The entire wall is covered with faces -- a zoo of faces, if you will, each of them caged by a square frame. Naturally, upon entering Artist+Run Gallery visitors engage in a guess-who game: these are familiar faces of politicians, celebrities, athletes, monks and coupmakers, and yet some of them aren't instantly identifiable. Is that the government spokesman? From which coup? Who's that pretty face? Is that reddish thing Thaksin Shinawatra? That's easy -- it's Aung San Suu Kyi.
The gallery of 70 newsmakers -- in the exhibition called "Out Of the Frying Pan Into The Fire" -- has been painted by Tawan Wattuya. From the 70 visages occupying the wall, about 30 of them were painted in 2005; the rest he just finished recently. In any case, old is often new in Thailand, or perhaps the old never goes anywhere, and "Out Of the Frying Pan Into The Fire" is telling us that these are the faces that we're unfortunately stuck with, the faces of power that we've seen every day in the news and that refuse still, even after over a decade, to go away.
The reproduction of stories are mirrored by the reproduction of images, and the reproduction of images mirror the reproduction of history. In 2005, Tawan painted those faces by looking at pictures in newspapers, picking the mugs that caught his attention and putting them on a canvas. In 2018, newspapers are still here (barely), and now he consumes news, like everyone else, mainly from the computer or phone screen, so the new batch of paintings has been created based on photos the artist has seen on social media.
In most cases, the names in the news remain the same. The faces of power, too, have changed very little in the past decade.
"In those days I read newspapers every day. I flipped through the pages and picked out the faces," said Tawan. "I paid attention to the frequency of the news stories and painted the persons who always appeared on the pages.
"Then the curator [Angkrit Ajchariyasophon] came to my house and saw these paintings, so he asked me to paint more faces. I realised the media landscape has changed from the mid-2000s. I no longer read newspapers, but I looked at the phone screens, so I painted from that."
The paintings from 2005 have a dark or reddish background; the style is more phantasmagoric, the faces more distorted and even devilish. The new paintings appear on white background, and while some of them are almost realistic (the face of internet idol of the moment, Cherprang Areekul of the band BNK48; Jaturat "Pai Dao Din" Boonpattararaksa, and the most surprising, that of Field Marshall Plaek Pibulsonggram, former prime minister and strongman of the post-revolution years), many also have a caricatured, meme-like quality -- supposedly it's because Tawan painted them from the image he found on the internet.
"These people have the power, political and cultural power," he said. "When I painted from newspapers, I had to go through every page, every section, so I painted politicians as well as athletes and celebrities. Now we aren't confronted by physical newspapers, but we choose what we want to look at or which news we want to receive, and somehow the pictures became more political."
The full impact of the show is felt when all 70 paintings are lined up on the wall -- a hall of fame, or shame, or game -- where the faces of those who control our newsfeed mingle with one another, vibrant, disturbing, ridiculous, sad. In a playful and subtly political note (a soldier paid a visit to the gallery prior to the opening of the show -- soldiers pay a visit to nearly every public event these days) Tawan reproduces the mass culture of images that overwhelm our minds.
"Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire" is on show at Artist+Run, Narathiwat 22, until March 25.
