Ok, it’s really not that hard to grok.

I’ve had some time here to look over old photos in my iPhone and realized that there were a few photos I took during fits of annoyance, that I never ended up posting.

Now before I get accused of being anti-Thailand, I’ll preface this with the fact that my home country (USA) annoys me all the time. Sarah Palin’s book (honestly, I cringe when I call it a book, kindling is a much better option) is topping book charts, we still don’t have national health care, education is getting more and more expensive, etc … but this isn’t about the mess of USA, this is about things in Thailand that pissed me off during the last year.

This first photo is of a poster at my University (Ram) urging people to speak correct Thai.

This one pisses me off the least, as I think that their intentions were good in writing it. Teenagers pepper their spoken Thai with English words, people are forgetting how to spell and sometimes get confused about Thai numerals (Arabic numerals are more common). The thing is, the poster ends with the statement “You read Thai, You write Thai, Because you are Thai”. It is true that Thailand does have a national language (unlike the USA), but it also has 76 other languages which are used. There are huge problems in the south which have a long history, but we can’t ignore the fact that there are Thai people living down there who don’t speak Thai in their day-to-day life.

The other dangerous thing about this poster, is that it attempts to bring a Nationalistic stance to the Thai language using now as an arbitrary cut-off point. The poster authors are very much against the use of English words in the Thai language, but I don’t see them advocating removing words of Sanskrit, Pali, French or Cambodian origin. Languages are evolving creatures, and the addition of loan-words is a very important part of that evolution. Historians have looked at the movement of loan-words between languages in an attempt to date population migrations, stone engravings, etc ….

This second thing that pissed me off was a campaign at Chula Uni to encourage girls to wear longer skirts.

It goes hand-in-hand with this government propaganda poster encouraging people to report websites thought to be damaging to society to the government censors (yes we still have censorship).

Anyone paying attention to news over the past few years knows that Thailand has faced endless political problems. Divided along red and yellow color lines, people have brought the country to a stand-still many times. The thing is, many people who I spoke with didn’t fully understand what their color actually represented. Most actually believed that the yellow faction supported democracy, which aside from name they never did (read this excellent essay by Thongchai Winichakul).

Instead of launching education campaigns and teaching people to be critical thinkers, pay attention to politics, read enough to be fully informed before making a decision, exercising their right to vote and understanding the long-term damage of selling their vote, Chula (one of Thailand’s top universities) is telling girls to dress in long skirts and our trains are peppered with messages telling people to stomp out subversion. The biggest problem facing all societies (not just Thailand) is a lack of thinking, not thigh-skin or porn websites.

This last picture comes from the JJ weekend market, the text at the top says “Foreigners who steal purses and bags”. What follows are mug shots of various thieves along with their country of origin (Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc ….). My assumption is that the poster authors want us to watch out for thieves and to call the police if we spot any of these people. What also happens with posters like this is that it feeds into the (already present) culture of xenophobia that we have. The poster highlights only thieves from neighboring developing counties, not Thai thieves and not white pickpockets.

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Ok, that’s it … four things that pissed me off. Now before anyone starts jumping up and down and telling me that if I hate Thailand so much, why don’t I just leave … I’ll say that there are zillions of things that I love about the place. Pointing out problems in society should be the duty of its citizens, with the goal of having rational discussion about them.

I’ve been sorting through some of my film from the last year, and figured that I would post these two photos from something that might turn into a project. I usually am juggling a bunch of different ideas all at once, hoping that one will eventually turn into something interesting enough to actually make a project out of.

These two photos were shot outside of Bangkok, where the population is 99% Thai, 99% brown-skinned, and yet the ads use white people to sell their products, services, lifestyles.

Click the links to download the images in Jpeg format, or here to get it in PDF format.

Ogilvy and Mather (the advertising firm) invited me to give a talk to their creative dept tomorrow (Wed) about my show and on my thoughts relating to using photography and language as communication tools. I also plan on talking a bit about what art is, what an artist is, etc ….

The poster they put together to advertise the talk is above, a rough translation is as follows:

“A Picture Says Only Some words.
Pictures, Words
Luke Cassidy-Dorion (sic)
A foreigner who speaks Thai will come speak on the subject of words in photographs and photographs that surround words.
The rest just tells the location, time, etc ….”

There is definitely one aspect of the poster that makes me feel like a circus monkey … “yup, time to pull out that white blond guy and make him rattle off some Thai” … that aside, I am looking forward to the talk. It should be interesting to hear what everyone thinks about the work.

Anyway, if you work there, please do come. If you’re interested in something similar at your place of work or university, feel free to contact me.

(click image to view full-size version)

This little tidbit was front-page above-the-fold news in the Bangkok Post on Monday. I’m not sure what stands out more: that these people have zero understanding of the Buddha’s message, or that the post reports gives black magic than weather reports. If they were reporting on the possibility of rain tomorrow, the headline would read something like “80% chance of rain reported”. However in the instance of some villagers cursing some thieves to die (Is a Buddha image worth more than human life? Would the Buddha have really approved of worshiping these statues as idols? Would the Buddha have said guffawed if someone claimed that a statue can have magical powers?), the headline reports on it as if the outcome were guaranteed 100%.

The week before my opening, I did an interview on a Thai TV program called artscenetv.net about my show … here are the youtube clips.

Talk about putting the carriage before the horse … we get a swimming sign at Ram 2 inside a building full of pingpong tables, badminton nets and strange stage props.

“I think art works best in people’s memories. For me, it’s not just the act of going to see it on the wall. I’m not saying it’s bad to do that, although very often it can be disappointing, you know? But in the memory, with all the things you’ve heard about it, all the stories, art becomes this great, rich, flexible, thing.”

- Urs Fischer

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