With its exhibition labels placed notably low beside or underneath Wittawat Tongkeaw's paintings and installations, "Prelude" forces visitors to bend over from the waist as they attempt to read the works' titles.
"Many Thais simply love to bow anyway," Wittawat quips, blending dry humour and sharp observations, the two characteristics that define his ongoing solo show at Subhashok The Arts Centre (SAC).
Since the coup of 2014, Thai visual artists have perused current political frustration for inspiration. Amid the plethora of contemporary political art exhibitions in Thailand, Wittawat's latest body of work stands out since the artist does not merely condemn a particular regime, political system or frontman. He instead holds up a mirror to Thai society, challenging dominant beliefs and ideologies as well as the way in which they came to be dominant in the first place.
Through the use of symbolism, metonymies and with meticulous attention to details and calculations -- diverse elements, from the works' dimensions to the numerals featured in the paintings, refer to numbers 9 or 112 and thereby to the country's controversial lèse-majesté law -- Wittawat, originally known as a prominent landscape painter, hints at the all-pervasive signs in our daily lives that help maintain this set of values.
Central to the exhibition is a curious plastic box holding a durian fruit stacked on top of a pizza. The motif itself is a reiteration of the artist's 2016 oil painting Durian And Pizza, but the real food items are left to rot in front of visitors' eyes throughout the show's duration.
"These two items, when placed together, only lead to decay," says Wittawat, who clearly enjoys the audience's speculations as to what each object represents. Is it Thainess versus Western beliefs? Or, more accurately, the "King of Fruits" placed on top of a fast food with a company delivery number that bears resemblance to Thai criminal code article 112?
In painting, the durian and pizza, padded with the lifelike representation of ornate, antique frames -- an optical illusion as well as a nod to the pomp and ceremony surrounding the topic -- may seem sustainable. Taken out of a two-dimensional context however, that is clearly not the case.
What keeps the illusion alive and well isn't the source material itself but its constant, thoughtless replication carried out by a group of individuals. As such, motifs of footprints or marks left by objects on diverse materials abound in Wittawat's photograph-like paintings.
In one of his earlier works in the series, Big Boots, larger-than-life combat boots are pictured marching towards the viewer's gaze, right foot forward. On the sole of the boot, a nationalistic mantra stamps the ground with every footstep.
Similarly, and with wry humour, visitors are encouraged to perpetuate the reproduction movement themselves in Discourse, an installation piece consisting of a child's chair and table placed in front of a blue board, mimicking a kindergarten's teaching room. With plastic alphabet stampers, the audience contributes to the never-ending imprinting process but can also conceal more subversive messages in the mass of letters.
Well-known for his hyper-realistic landscape paintings, Wittawat chose to explore new mediums in "Prelude" and does so with great impact. On the gallery's top floor, the Lavender Field installation is to be looked at from two levels. The top of the work is covered in Thai alphabet letters spelling "nation", extending almost as far as the eye can see. But from beneath, the glass structure on which the letters stand appears as a glass ceiling, constricting and seemingly unbreakable.
Some topics are off-limits in art as in life, as indicated by the artist's choice to include a hidden canvas, placed on the floor and facing the wall with its title blanked out. At the same time, Wittawat himself uses various imagery to signify the sensitive and the taboo, resisting the urge to conform, or rather turning the tables on the conformists, by representing a series of colours nowadays associated with political leanings.
Red, yellow, blue or green hues all have political connotations, but after the passing of King Bhumibol Adulyadej two years ago, even black -- especially black clothing -- became an unwritten but nonetheless mandatory norm. In a sometimes black-and-white manner, one set of beliefs is portrayed as a fading shadow, a static and lifeless vision belonging to the past, symbolised by smoke or a calcified rock, ready to crumble at any given moment. On the other hand, the notion of weight -- the weight of books, for instance, leaning from left to right in one of the paintings -- seems to indicate a tidal change with knowledge acting as a powerful catalyst.
"I have been on both sides of Thailand's political divide," Wittawat says. "I consider myself lucky in the sense that I can now see why one side thinks one way and the other believes the opposite. In essence, there is nothing worse than the belief in an 'absolute truth'."
While knowledge has become widely accessible to the public -- now more so than in any other era in history -- it takes courage to be willing to examine the opposite side's point of view, especially in the corseted and normative context Wittawat highlights.
"Once I stumbled on a new set of facts, I couldn't turn a blind eye anymore and needed to investigate further."
"Prelude" refers to a new beginning or an opening act. But in Thai history, a period of change never clearly indicated if what ensued was to be hopeful or sombre.
"What every artist is doing now will somehow reflect the current era. I don't want to be remembered as someone who saw regrettable events taking place but remained passive."
