The interplay of the local and the global in contemporary Thai art, as
artists strive for international recognition and a new meaning of the
national.
Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved international
recognition, circulating globally by way of biennials, museums, and
commercial galleries. Many Thai artists have shed identification with
their nation; but "Thainess" remains an interpretive crutch for
understanding their work. In this book, the curator and critic David Teh
examines the tension between the global and the local in Thai
contemporary art. Writing the first serious study of Thai art since 1992
(and noting that art history and criticism have lagged behind the market
in recognizing it), he describes the competing claims to
contemporaneity, as staked in Thailand and on behalf of Thai art
elsewhere. He shows how the values of the global art world are exchanged
with local ones, how they do and don't correspond, and how these
discrepancies have been exploited.
How can we make sense of globally circulating art without forgoing the
interpretive resources of the local, national, or regional context? Teh
examines the work of artists who straddle the local and the global,
becoming willing agents of assimilation yet resisting homogenization. He
describes the transition from an artistic subjectivity couched in terms
of national community to a more qualified, postnational one, against the
backdrop of the singular but waning sovereignty of the Thai monarchy and
sustained political and economic turmoil. Among the national currencies
of Thai art that Teh identifies are an agricultural symbology, a Siamese
poetics of distance and itinerancy, and Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of
charismatic power. Each of these currencies has been converted to a
legal tender in global art--signifying sustainability, utopia, the
conceptual, and the relational--but what is lost, and what may be
gained, in such exchanges?
