O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘Integrative’ Thai Exhibit Doesn’t Mesh

“The Integrative Art of Modern Thailand,” an exhibit at the Bowers Museum through March 15, is the product of keen historical awareness, thorough research and an earnest--but misguided--decision to look at an East-West cultural hybrid strictly from an Eastern point of view.

The result is a well-documented show of visually weak and derivative art that never really addresses the problems inherent in inserting Western art styles into a Buddhist culture.

It is one thing for Westerners to attempt to understand non-Western art from the viewpoint of the culture that produced it. But when the art in question consists of imitations of Western models, the discussion is incomplete without critical analysis from a Western point of view.

Unlike exhibits of non-Western art organized by Western art experts, this exhibit--circulated by the Lowie Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley--was the brainchild of Herbert P. Phillips, a UC Berkeley anthropologist who has conducted field studies in Thailand for 30 years. He based his selections strictly on the opinions of Thai artists, collectors, critics and museum people.

Phillips makes no bones about his unique point of view. As he writes in the catalogue, the exhibit is “not an attempt to analyze (contemporary Thai art) in terms of the history or aesthetic values of Euroamerican art,” but instead “to convey to Western viewers the ways modern Thai think about their art. . . .”

Works in the exhibit, made during the past 35 years, reflect traditional religious beliefs and cultural values, enrobed in a hodgepodge of Western contemporary art styles. But although the traditional bases and biases of Thai art are succinctly described, Western aesthetic standards and styles are virtually ignored--a glaring omission.

Indigenous Thai art, with its ubiquitous circular motifs, is founded on the Buddhist belief in a constantly changing universe, in which nothing is permanent or absolute. Although life is believed to be full of suffering--caused by people’s selfish craving for pleasure--it is possible eventually to achieve enlightenment by following the Noble Eightfold Path.

Imagery in Thai art traditionally deals exclusively with the Buddha’s life and teachings. For example, the lotus blossom (the purest aspect of the lotus pond, a muddy microcosm of the real world) is a symbol of enlightenment, the bho tree recalls the Buddha’s surroundings when he suddenly perceived the Ten Great Virtues, and a huge footprint serves as a reminder of Buddha’s peregrinations as a wandering preacher.

The first Thai encounter with Western art came in the mid-19th Century through images on foreign postcards and in the homes of American missionaries. A wall mural in Temple Bovornives in Bangkok from the late 1850s shows the Buddha preaching to a congregation dressed in Victorian clothing rather than in the imagined garb of the 6th Century BC. Phillips writes that the artist intended to show “the universality of Buddhism and the modernity of the Thai of his period.”

When well-to-do Thai families sent their sons to Europe to be educated, they discovered that art could serve as interior decoration rather than strictly a means of moral education.

In 1923, when King Vajaravudh needed a batch of modish, Euro-style national monuments, he commissioned Corrado Feroci, an obscure Italian sculptor who worked in what Phillips calls an “early Fascist” style.

Feroci lobbied for a national university of fine arts, sent his students abroad for further study and taught them to substitute the Western model of the creative genius in place of the craftsman’s goal of error-free copying. In lieu of other contenders, Feroci became the Western guru of Thai artists.

Although Feroci lived until 1962, his teaching stopped with post-Impressionism. It’s possible he simply didn’t care for Surrealism or Expressionism or Abstract Expressionism. According to Phillips’ sources, however, the sculptor believed 20th-Century art forms were “too alien to the Thai aesthetic spirit.”

Whatever his own deficiencies as an artist, I think the guy may have had a point.

It comes as no surprise that contemporary Thai artists have been trying to graft contemporary European styles onto an age-old--albeit already culturally mongrelized--art form.

After all, Thai artists commonly go abroad to study, Thai culture itself has become increasingly Westernized, and--for reasons that probably have more to do with the power of money and marketing than anything else--Western art sets the international standard.

Trying to squeeze one set of cultural assumptions into an art form nurtured by entirely different cultural assumptions results in unsatisfactory compromises more often than arresting new cross-cultural variations.

One basic problem is the tension between the role of tradition in Thai art and the constant pressure to “make it new” that exists in the Western art world. While non-Western cultures tend to measure artistic greatness in terms of craftsmanship and fidelity to revered ancient models, contemporary Western artists rely on clever new approaches and challenges to received ideas.

There are also major philosophical differences between contemporary Thai and Western cultural outlooks.

You’d have to go back to the Christian theological basis of medieval and Renaissance art in the West to find a culture with a set of beliefs as tightly codified as Buddhism, with its “Four Noble Truths,” “Ten Great Virtues,” “Three Jewels” and so on.

Classic Buddhist art deals with moral precepts and ideals (heroism, loyalty, beauty) in a hieratic, unquestioning way. The provocative iconoclasm of contemporary Western art is based on a secular view of the world as a realm of frequently meaningless events, unconsciously motivated mental states and (often base and irrational) human activities rooted in primal states of existence. Visions of the afterlife no longer serve as a relief from a hell on earth.

Western art since the Renaissance also has been based on the primacy of individual human achievement; in Buddhism, the notion of ego is believed to be a delusion. Classic art is based on dutiful copying from one’s master, or from an earlier, anonymous source.

Even beyond these distinctions, however, are problems posed by the stylistic conservatism of Thai art.

What seems to happen most often when East meets West in Thailand is a stress on elaborately detailed surfaces, rigidly balanced forms, garish colors and a ponderous literalism. Alas, these are attributes of many paintings sold in American shopping malls rather than the allusive and elusive work of critically acclaimed contemporary Western artists.

During the 3 1/2 decades covered by the exhibit, Western art underwent rapid stylistic transitions, beginning with the last gasp of Abstract Expressionism and including “hard edge” painting, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism.

As if proving the truth of Feroci’s observations, however, Thai art demurely steers clear of recent styles.

When Somsak Chowtadapong ventures into abstraction in his flaccid “Atmospheric Space”--supposedly an invocation of the open-ended nature of time and space--the results are not encouraging.

Panya Vijinthanasarn’s elaborately detailed paintings were influenced by medieval illuminated manuscripts--Phillips naively calls them “illuminated painting(s)”--as well as the medieval triptych format and “the 18th-Century print-making techniques of William Blake.” (How odd that Blake’s technical skills struck Panya more forcibly than his idiosyncratic style--unless Phillips got his terms wrong again.)

Some of the work on view simply looks bland, like much Western art that lacks any other reason for being beyond a vague decorative impulse. (The Thai also have a specific genre of “decorative” art which--along with classical, folk and “tourist” art--is considered a realm apart from contemporary Westernized work and is not included in this exhibit.)

Much the same can be said for Kamol Tassananchalee’s brightly folkloric “Buddha Footprint, Nangyai (2nd Series),” an oval-shaped construction made with handmade paper (an almost forgotten Thai folk art that Kamol resurrected in the ‘70s), gold leaf, torn bits of collaged paper and brightly painted wooden dowels.

Kamol, incidentally, has lived in Los Angeles for more than two decades. According to the catalogue, he owes “deep artistic debts” to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, but a Western viewer would be hard-pressed to see the conceptual qualities of their art in the Thai artist’s work.

Stylistically, much of the work doesn’t rise above the level of routine illustration, whether the ideas embodied in it are traditional (as in Damrong Wong-Uparaj’s quiet image of “Two Boats”) or up-to-the-minute (as in Chalermchai Kositpipat’s “Mind and Technology,” in which a praying monk emerges from a boiler, symbolic of industrial pollution).

Thawan Duchanee’s elaborately overwrought pen drawings incorporate elements from Western art history, from Hieronymous Bosch to the late 19th-Century Symbolists.

Phillips calls Thawan “his nation’s most complete postmodernist,” as if postmodernism were simply a matter of using styles drawn from different periods of art.

Rather, it embodies a specifically ironic and self-conscious attitude toward the subject of style itself--an attitude none of the Thai artists in the exhibit appear to share.

A number of works in the show have a spacey look that somewhat resembles psychedelic art (not so surprising, since it was based on Eastern models) or the garishly grandiose illustrations found in Mondo 2000 magazine. Prateung Emjaroen’s “Entry to the Eternal” offers colorful imagery of sun-struck fossils and living things arrayed in concentric circles around a giant blue ocean. (Phillips writes that Thais believe colors have specific cosmological meanings.)

In Sompop Budtarad’s “Forms of the Mind,” an entire cosmology of creatures and landscapes is superimposed on what looks like streaming hair of a serene-faced person of indeterminate sex.

Both paintings, we are told, represent specific Buddhist beliefs. “Entry to the Eternal” symbolizes the eternal flux of the world; “Forms of the Mind” contrasts the infinite distractions of human thought with the repose of the meditating mind. But both intersect with Western art at a level far too literal and unself-conscious to pass critical muster from this side of the globe.

One of the few works that venture beyond this superficial stylistic level is Wattana Wattanapun’s small painting, “Black Hem,” from 1987, which comments subtly on the discrepancy between the smiling official face of tourism in Thailand and the sex market that constitutes the big unofficial attraction.

In Wattana’s meticulous rendering, a sample of Thai textile craft is shown in disarray. A second look reveals that the irregularities in the striped pattern are caused by two bodies coupling beneath the blanket. The image may also be a deliberately cheapened reference to Tantric worship, a type of sexual yoga in which female wisdom and male energy form a physical and mental union.

It’s a pity, however, that younger artists represented don’t seem to be active in installation art. This contemporary Western form seems congenial to the meditative basis of traditional Thai art and utterly removed from Thai culture’s twin lures of decoration and illustration, so anathemic to contemporary Western art ideas.

(In his catalogue essay, Phillips mentions Prawat Laocharoen--who came to New York in 1967 and has collaborated with such U.S. artists as Alex Katz, Larry Rivers and Dennis Oppenheim--but his work isn’t included in the exhibit, apparently because he works “at the margins of the Thai art scene.”)

Incidentally, Bowers has undercut the whole point of Montien Boonma’s “Concrete Construction: Hands and Stupa”--a skeletal free-standing construction of concrete and steel rebar, meant to reflect the delicate balances on which life is based. It is attached to the gallery wall by a plexiglass tube.

Perhaps it is impossible to create a genuine feeling of equipoise in a land prone to earthquakes, ruled by proscriptive safety codes and filled with potentially litigious museum-goers.

Despite its aesthetic disappointments, however, the exhibit (and the information-packed catalogue) do offer some glimpses into a cross-cultural phenomenon.

In general, Phillips writes, collectors outside Thailand prefer work that reflects “traditional Thai aesthetic standards (and) subject matter.” For Westerners who feel estranged from the contemporary art of their own culture, Thai art probably represents a soothing blend of exoticism and old-fashioned craftsmanship.

It is amusing to read that the largest collection of contemporary Thai art outside Thailand is owned by a resident of Beverly Hills, who has never been to Thailand and orders his artworks from catalogues, as if they were mail-order brides.

* “The Integrative Art of Modern Thailand” remains through March 15 at the Bowers Museum, 2002 N. Main St. in Santa Ana. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday, and Thursday nights until 9. Admission: $4.50 adults, $3 seniors and students, $1.50 children 5 to 15, free for children under 5. (714) 567-3600.