Dissident Photography

Collected Papers from the Symposium: Archival Turn, Taipei: Spring Foundation and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2018

***Previously published as 'The Photographic Conditions of Contemporary Thai Art', in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum Journal, no. 34, 2017.*** This paper takes as a point of departure, Rosalind Krauss’ essay ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, in which she describes the relationship between photography’s indexical function and its position as the example par excellence of Surrealist artistic practice. In the same way, this paper examines changing attitudes in Thailand towards photography’s artistic status and presumed indexicality as paradigmatic examples of a transformation from the modern to the contemporary. Photography’s crucial role in this shift is located in key alterations to the medium’s functions and perceptions of its artistic legitimacy. On the one hand, the acceptance of photography as an art form reflects developments in imbricated networks of legitimation, occurring with the rise of international education and exhibition opportunities in the post-Cold War period. On the other hand, the conditions of photography itself, or rather its ontology, produce a conceptualisation of the contemporary as manifested in a desire for proximity with difference. In examining works by a number of contemporary Thai artists, I argue that photography’s visualisation of the ‘optical unconscious’ allows one to fulfil this desire for contemporaneity, while also pointing to the limits of representation as a means of asserting coevality.

Zhuang, Wubin. “Politics and Identity: Contemporary Photography in Thailand.” Trans Asia Photography Review 1, no. 2 (Spring 2011). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0001.202. * The "Trans-Asia Photography Review" is an international refereed journal (ISSN: 2158-2025) devoted to the discussion of historic and contemporary photography from Asia. Online and free of charge, it is published by Hampshire College in collaboration with the Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library.

Based on postcolonial theory and the deconstruction of the orientalist discourse, this article sets the problem of the representation of the ‘Other’ in photographic practice. A new form of orientalism seems to be guiding a large part of the cultural production today, where East is represented as polarized between darkness and light. By taking the example of representation of India, and analyzing the work of some contemporary documentary photographers who have worked on this country, the author tries to uncover the implications of this new discourse and finally advocates for an unorthodox use of the medium.

Points of View: Defining Moments of Photography in India, edited by Gayatri Sinha. Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art., 2022

Thammasat Journal of History, 2 (1), 201-247. Photography is a recognized medium to spread information about atrocities and to raise awareness about human rights issues. Photography is also widely used by political actors and social move- ments to construct an image of themselves and their causes. The political potential of photography is closely connected to the role of the visual in the public. The language of photography is at the same time symbolic and factual, making it a problematic material in the study of history. Photography can further be sites of both per- sonal and collective memory, with the image belonging to the spec- tators and never only to the intent of the photographer, the photo- graphed or the disseminator of images. The visual media gives the spectator a sense of immediate access to different times and spaces, opening up for the possibility to connect events that in written his- tory might be disconnected. Visual tropes, such as gendered roles, dichotomy of enemy and heroes, and collective belonging, make photography a brick in the construction of comprehensive histories. This is a study of how photography from different political events in Thailand’s history is used in writing history within a human rights paradigm. The study begins in early 1970s when social movements on a broad political scale in Thailand adopted the language of human rights and also began to use photography to a larger extent than before in writing their own history.

Modern Art Asia, 2012

2015

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2017

PLEASE DOWNLOAD AT: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/673253 This article is based on a summary insight gleaned from a variety of academic, literary and popular sources: that a cultural valorization of appearances in Thailand can function to control or regulate contradiction, antagonism and disparity where such potentials can be understood as problematic. Drawing a relationship between this insight and the construct of “Thai-ness” – the general discourse and practice of Thai nationalism – the article explores questions of how a critical context may be shaped for contemporary art in the country. Here critical is understood as the means by which artists’ practices can be interpreted as reflecting or tracing fault-lines in the intimate relationship between image-culture and nationalism; that is, the avowal of other types of identity and a complexifying of the function of images against the possibility of assimilation to national interest.

University of Bucharest Review, 2020

In the context of the sensorial fatigue caused by the media’s saturation with representations of violence, Rithy Panh’s film The Missing Picture (2013) stands as a reinvigorating alternative of addressing trauma through aesthetic means that inscribe the affect within ethical dimensions. Panh’s testimony of surviving the death of his family through Pot Pol’s ‘killing fields’ is built around images of stylized clay figurines filmed in realistic dioramas. Forced labor, starvation and death make living a luxury – life fades away from the bodies of figurines that lose color and flesh, but is reaffirmed through the lush nature of dioramas and the resiliently colorful presence of the hero, the surviving storyteller. Khmer Rouge archival footage of carefully choreographed masses of people works as abstract imagery of an unreal reality. In an unmediated expression of affect, the sound mixes revolutionary choirs with electronic effects registering a fading daily life, and voice-over commentar...

Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, 2009

Two sets of images sit before me.1 One set is a pair of photographic likenesses depicting King Rama IV or Mongkut of Siam (r. 1855-68). In each of the two portraits, the king appears attired in the regal drape of his office and burdened by a veritable crust of signs, but whereas one image features the king enthroned and with his scepter in hand, the other shows him in a less monarchically theatricalized context, surrounded by objects of daily, if no less royal, existence. The former image, which was ultimately given as a gift by the Siamese ambassadors to Queen Victoria, is framed and assiduously adorned with gold leaf; the other, which returned to Scotland with its photographer, John Thomson, is flat and undecorated, although a border of scarred paper marks its exterior limit (figs. 1 and 2). The second set of images comes from a more recent period in Thai history and includes two distinct moments: the democracy protests and their aftermath in 1992, and the Thai state's crackdown on so-called southern insurgents in 2004. The photographs from 1992 depict the protest, with its swelling crowds, the violence that ensued, and the extraordinary drama of reconciliation in which the king and the leaders of both the military and the popular uprising appear together in a single frame. Those from 2004 include graphic photographs of corpses taken by journalists in the aftermath of a violent clash between protestors and state representatives in the province of Pattani, in the mainly Muslim, ethnically Malay south of Thailand. The photographs from 1992 and 2004 are perhaps most remarkable for the degree to which they depict people bearing photographs; rosalind c. Morris