The exhibition will feature 25 photographs taken over a 20-year period beginning in 1999 to the present.

“For the first time, my photography of Asian men will reach a wider international audience,” Yip said. “The images tell of my search for acceptance, identity and beauty. They reveal my desires and longings as a man finding one’s self in the other.”

Yip has long been an avid pioneer in the development of fine art Asian male photography. He established the Asian Male Project which, through his lens, presents artistic images and thought-provoking messages. Light and shadow, combine with his love for the classical form, culminating in a superb collection of artistically photographic masterpieces. Yip’s fresh outlook has captivated both Asians and Westerners alike.

The Thai Government’s cabinet in December 2018 approved the civil partnership bill, and next it will go to the National Legislative Assembly (NLA). If passed, this would pave the way for Thailand to become the first country in Asia to endorse same-sex marriage. Bangkok is regarded as one of the most LGBT-friendly cities in Asia and hosts the exhibition ahead of New York in June, where it is timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the gay civil rights movement, Stonewall.

The exhibition is supported by James Tong, a contemporary art collector who has relationships with many contemporary galleries and artists around the world. Tong founded 37Tong in 2017 to sponsor and curate art projects related to LGBT diversity and inclusion. He believes leveraging the soft power that the art industry offers will further this social movement for understanding and inclusion of the LGBT community.

Ten percent of the purchase price from each photograph sold during the exhibition will be donated to APCOM Foundation, Thailand. APCOM advocate for issues on HIV particularly amongst gay men, and also to advance the rights, health and well-being of people of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics in Asia Pacific.

Call (02) 237 0077-8, or visit http://www.RiverCityBangkok.com.

Finding a collaborator when making art is like going on a date, and not necessarily a blind one. You know something of each other’s background, think that it looks like a good match. As time goes by, your relationship develops, you know more about and learn from each other, adjusting yourself to make it work without losing your identity or standpoint. Of course, along the way you need some supporters who, to a certain extent, take risks with you, but at the same time you also know there are those who might be opposed. You do your best, hoping that it will last, no matter how long.

Contemporary Thai dancer and choreographer Pichet Klunchun has been meeting with his Taiwanese counterpart Chen Wu-Kang, founder and artistic director of Taiwan’s first all-male dance company Horse, for more than three years now. And unlike many artistic relationships that put forward a work or a product, from the start, their first collaboration “Behalf” was only seen by the dance-going public last May.

The Silpathorn Award artist recalls how it all began.

“About four years ago, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture (MoC) invited me to give a talk at Taipei National University of the Arts [TNUA] and at our meeting they proposed a long list of Taiwanese artists, from many disciplines, and suggested I collaborate with some, for which they, of course, pledged their full support. I remember performing in the same festival [“Men Dancing” at Novel Hall] as Chen more than 10 years ago [Pichet was performing his solo “I Am a Demon” while Chen was in a duet “TeteBech”].

“Our first meeting was at his studio, which is between a temple and a recycling shop. My first impression was that he’s a very happy person, despite the fights and struggles he’s had in his artistic career. In the first year, we took turns travelling to each other’s studios and presenting small showcases of the progress of our work, without any deadline for an actual production. And then when we decided to have one, we asked Tang Fu-Kuen [dramaturg for “Pichet Klunchun and Myself” and artistic director of the Taipei Arts Festival] to come on board.”

 Pichet Klunchun in a collaborative project “Behalf” this weekend at Chang Theatre./Igaki Photo Studio

Pichet explains how they developed the collaboration, saying: “It started from his interest in tradition [hence the working title ‘Body Tradition’], while at the same time questioning his identity. He’s also fascinated by my strong traditional arts background. I already have it but the question is how can I find a way for its further development?

“What’s interesting, though, is that in the first year we talked more about fatherhood – I had a daughter and he was about to have his first child –, artists as fathers and also how we would, or could, pass on traditions to our children,” Pichet continues.

The recipient of John D Rockefeller III award has taken part in many intercultural collaborations throughout his illustrious career. This one, though, he says is different. “We’re more like friends than collaborators and so it’s much less stressful,” he grins.

Chen concurs. “Maybe it’s because we share more than a stage collaboration: we also include family in the process. It’s hard for me to tell the differences between living, working and experiencing: they are all mixed altogether, and so what happens in this working process seems natural.

“Collaborating with Pichet has opened a door for me into Southeast Asian dance and culture [the pair is now also working on another project ‘Ramayana’, which also includes Javanese dance master Sardono]. Realising that nothing stands and grows on its own and that we’re all related and affected by one another brought me to care about and also question how we become who we are, and why we dance the way we do. And because we collaborate beyond a performance project, the learning continues to expand,” he says.

Chen WuKang, left, and Pichet Klunchun stage their collaborative project “Behalf” this weekend at Chang Theatre./Igaki Photo Studio

“Our work is not about a specific aesthetic that we want to create: it’s more about our discovery during the process.”

Making its Southeast Asia debut at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Arts Festival last Friday and coming to Pichet’s home studio this weekend, thanks also to the Taiwanese culture ministry, “Behalf” is the title that Tang has given to the work.

The Singaporean dramaturg and producer explains: “The title comes from the portraits that each dancer has created in the work. Their sense of identity comes from ‘inherited’, ‘borrowed’ or ‘cultivated’ sources. In short, it’s an ‘identity formed by and from proxy’. This multiplicity of identities is therefore about always speaking and behaving on ‘behalf’ of something or someone else.

“‘Behalf’ also points to the structure of the work, which is strictly built on the principle of ‘half’. The space, time and action of this collaborative work is democratically split equally into halves. This procedure questions the model of old intercultural collaborations in which two or more parties tend to exchange and hybridise, as expected of a typical ‘collaboration’. ‘Behalf’ challenges that assumption and operation,” Tang explains.

Another partner-in-crime who came in during the last stage of development is veteran Japanese lighting designer Takayuki “Kinsei” Fujimoto. And if his name sounds familiar to Thai performing arts fans’ ears, that’s because his wizardry was seen here four years ago in another contemporary dance work “Alpha” at the Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts where he also conducted an LED lighting design workshop.

Tang explains: “His adaptive lighting practice and tools allow him to be extremely responsive and flexible to instigating new ways of making propositions to the work, and not merely lighting the stage. In short, he has an excellent reputation for conceptual lighting, and this adds immense value and potential to our process.”

Another risk they’re taking is with the music, as the collaborating musician(s) will always be local anywhere they’re performing – in Taipei, it’s a percussionist; in Bangkok, a classical guitarist.

For the world premiere of “Behalf” last May at the Cloud Gate Theatre, Taipei Times’ critic Diane Baker wrote that the work “shows what happens when artists want to shake things up and get their audiences thinking. Not everyone was happy with that, judging by the questions asked during the Q&A section. However, anyone who has followed either Chen or Pichet’s work, or that of Horse, should know that these are men who are interested in challenging conventions.”

Without revealing too many secrets, Baker wrote that the work comprises, “a prologue, a duet, a series of solos and the Q&A, just not in that order”, noting that “Behalf” is about “examining Chen and Pichet’s identities as dancers, their respective cultures and the sharing and transference of power.” She concluded that the work “is not for everyone, but for those who are willing to take a risk, it is worth it.”

Pichet notes that they chose not to reveal any images from the second half of the performance, which was so controversial in Taipei that the theatre needed to issue a statement afterwards.

Chen laughs, predicting: “In Bangkok, I think the controversy will start from the first half when Pichet starts his solo. I can’t wait to see how we click with the audience.”

Will we take a risk with them?

BEYOND TAIWAN AND THAILAND

• •   “Behalf” is at Chang Theatre in Soi Pracha-uthit 61, Thung Khru, Thonburi, on Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm.
  •  Tickets are Bt 600 at (086) 419 6064 and (095) 956 9166.
  •  Find out more by visiting Facebook.com/ChangTheatre.
  •  Thanks to the continued support from Taiwan’s MoC, the work will also be at Centre Pompidou in Paris on April 24 and 25, Festival DDD (Dias da Danca) in Porto, Portugal on April 27 and 28 and Kaaitheater in Brussels on May 4 and 5.

 A new exhibition has uncovered a hoard of art looted from a Jewish family almost wiped out by the Nazis in the Louvre and other leading French museums.

The show about the booming art market in occupied Paris, when more than two million objects went under the hammer in a frenzy of forced sales and looting, has turned up works by Delacroix and Forain taken from the family by the collaborationist French Vichy authorities.

Curator Emmanuelle Polack discovered that the Louvre bought a dozen works seized from the Dorvilles while researching a new book on how Jewish families and some of the most important dealers in modern art were plundered.

The paintings are still in the French national collection, with three loaned to the Shoah Memorial museum in Paris for the show.

Three more works taken from the family – most of whom perished in Auschwitz – have turned up in the Gurlitt hoard of 1,500 Old Masters, Impressionist and Cubist works found in a Munich apartment in 2011.

Despite decades of pressure to restore works to their rightful owners, Polack says there has yet to be a proper audit of the works acquired by the French national collection during the war.

“We need to look at their provenance very calmy and scientifically to lift all suspicion over them. It is hugely important that this is done,” she stresses.

France’s Prime Minister Edouard Philippe – who visited the museum last week – boosted the investigative powers of a commission which awards compensation to victims of Nazi looting last year after criticism of the slow pace of restitution more than 70 years since the end of World War II.

In January, Polack helped return a painting plundered from the home of France’s heroic pre-war interior minister Georges Mandel, a man Winston Churchill hailed as “the first resister”.

Mandel, who refused to flee to London with Charles De Gaulle after France fell in 1940, was murdered by members of the French collaborationist “Milice” militia a month before Paris was liberated by the allies in 1944.

The portrait of a young woman by Thomas Couture was returned by the German government from the Gurlitt trove.

Polack says the free-for-all auctions during the war “utterly changed” the Paris art market, then the biggest in the world, and has been cloaked for decades behind “a kind of amnesia”.

“Major players whose suspect practices helped them flourish during these dark years were rarely investigated,” she points out.

Some art world dynasties rose during the war while others never recovered.

The exhibition shows how the pillage was pre-planned, with galleries sealed off by German troops after the French capital fell in 1940, and the premises of its most famous modern art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, seized and turned into the Institute for Jewish Affairs, which pumped out anti-Semitic propaganda.

More than a third of Rosenberg’s 162 seized paintings are still missing, including works by Picasso, Degas and Matisse.

Another legendary gallerist Rene Gimpel, who joined the resistance, was denounced by a rival |dealer Jean-Francois Lefranc and died in a German concentration camp.

Others were forced to “aryanise” their businesses, like Pierre Loeb, who had to hand over his gallery to his colleague Georges Aubry.

But as the exhibition shows, when the war was over Aubry refused to give it back until Picasso – a communist who had remained in France throughout the war – forced him.

Polack is now working to help the family of collector Armand Dorville, who had given works to French museums before the war and had intended to leave more in his will.

“It is not just about getting paintings back, it is about grief and acknowledging the terrible injustices of the past,” she says

“Confiscating art works was part of a process, which started with people being demonised, excluded from professional life, then pauperised when their bank accounts were seized before finally being deported for extermination in the camps,” Polack insists.

The paintings they were deprived of could have helped buy their escape, so “they were caught in a trap.”

Prime Minister Philippe did not refer to the often drawn-out legal process of restitution during his speech at the museum, but promised to double state funding for the memorial from next year.

Polack says she feels encouraged by the attitude of the Louvre.

“I think lending the three works to us for the show is a very big step and there is a good dynamic. They know the context and they know we need to work together to do everything properly to solve this problem,” she adds.

THE PHOTOGRAPHY exhibition “Little Wild” currently showing at Leica Gallery Bangkok is yet another testament to Her Royal Highness Princess Sirivannavari’s artistic skills.

As the creative director of high-end fashion house, Sirivannavari and S’Homme, the Princess always travels to seek new sources of inspiration. On this occasion she headed to the African continent, her Leica cameras round her neck, and photographed wild animals and the breathtaking landscapes of Kenya.

The exhibition, organised by Danai Sorakraikitikul, managing director of A-List Ltd, the sole distributor of Leica Camera in Thailand, continues at Gaysorn Village through April 28.

Princess Sirivannavari presided over the grand opening and explained that “Little Wild” reflects the wild beauty of Kenya and the African continent as seen through her eyes.

On her five-day tour last May, she experienced extreme weather, constant rainfall, high humidity, and cold nights. She travelled in jeeps and took to the sky in a hot air balloon, all the while recording her travels through still photographs, videos, and sketches. At night, she slept in a tent comforted by the soft grunts from a pod of hippos nearby.

“It was incredible, I was riding on top of the jeep, taking photos with one hand, and sketching with the other. My favourite photo I named ‘The Lady’. It shows a female lion. It took me a long time to get the shot, as I was using a fixed lens and it was hard to get as close as I wanted to. However, the lioness is so elegant and graceful, I felt connected.”

The images have an almost dream-like quality, capturing sunlight falling across the vast savannah, the powerful movements of the wild animals including a rare species of giraffe, and the Masai tribal people that she had the chance to get to know personally, visiting their homes and enjoying a traditional welcome dance.

“I focused on capturing the immediate feeling of the moment, as I want to retain its natural qualities as much as possible,” she explained.

Showing until May 5, Muller’s paintings take their inspiration from such diverse sources as medieval icons, Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, folk art and contemporary comics. He gained first attention by combining medieval Christian icons with modern digital art.

His latest work is close to the American lowbrow and pop surrealism movement. Characteristics of his paintings are animal illustrations with a very dark and apocalyptic mood, often appearing like modern takes on Bosch or Bruegel motifs.

Muller is particularly thrilled by the kind of spiritual terror found expressed in the paintings of the old Flemish masters and attempts to find out what happens when that mood is applied to the serene and harmless world of rural folk art.      Muller’s most recent work marks a return to painting after a long period of drawing with coloured pencils, during which he developed special techniques to make the drawings appear like oil paintings. His preferred media are acrylic and oil on paper and oil on canvas, complemented by pencil drawings.

His works have been exhibited in his hometown of Hamburg, Germany, as well as in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Paris, Saint Petersburg and Tartu. He also curated several exhibitions in Hamburg. He has a design diploma from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and is also working as a professional media designer and illustrator.

Gallery hours are from Wednesday to Sunday from noon to 6pm.

Telephone (095) 5915014 or visit http://www.lelinkgallery.com.

A YOUNG NUN breathes deeply as she peers up at a statue of an angel bathed in softly coloured light streaming through a church, and as she exhales, you can see her breath.

Instead of wood or bricks and mortar, this chilly house of worship perched among the snowy peaks of Slovakia’s High Tatra Mountains has been built from massive crystal-clear blocks of ice.

At 1,285 metres above sea level, the ice replica of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome is higher than any of Slovakia’s 4,158 churches, more than half of them Roman Catholic.

 The interior of the Tatra Ice Temple 

Although it has not been consecrated, another visitor, Zlatica Janakova from southern Slovakia, says it feels like a real church.

“It’s so good for your soul; it provides you with tranquillity,” she whispers.

“All of nature is inside and around this temple,” she adds, gazing at the surrounding alpine vistas.

Englishman Martin, who declined to give his surname, describes it as a “beautiful, religious place, so peaceful and calm”.

Since 2013, ice sculptors have flocked to the Slovak Tatra mountain hamlet of Hrebienok every winter to build a Tatra Ice Temple, or scaled-down replica of a famous church using only crystal-clear ice blocks.

This year, it’s an 11-metre tall version of the 16th-century Vatican basilica, complete with the imposing two half-circle wings of Bernini’s colonnade.

A quarter of a million tourists last year took the short funicular ride up the mountain to see the ice replica of Barcelona’s soaring and intricate Sagrada Familia.

A team of 16 sculptors from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Wales and the United States worked 12 hours a day for a month to create this year’s ice temple.

On Sundays, the venue vibrates with the sounds of sacred music concerts.

“I’m glad to see people crossing themselves and praying inside,” says Slovak chief sculptor Adam Bakos.

The interior boasts sculptures modelled on the works of Italian masters side-by-side with those of chamois, marmots and other wildlife native to the High Tatras.

“I gave them a free hand with the decoration, so each artist added their signature style to the sculptures,” Bakos said.

Slovak-Greek artist Achilleas Sdoukos designed and produced stained-glass decorations incorporated into the temple’s icy walls.

The building material, namely 1,880 ice blocks weighing a total of 225 tonnes, was imported from neighbouring Poland.

“We tried different suppliers, from the Netherlands, England, Norway and Hungary, but Polish ice seemed to have the highest quality, it really looks like glass if kept cold enough,” says Rastislav Kromka, technical director of the Tatra Ice Temple.

With an unusually warm winter threatening to melt details on their sculpture, Bakos and his team covered it with a geodesic dome, measuring 25 metres in diameter.

A tourist visits a Tatra Ice Temple in Hrebienok, a mountain resort in eastern Slovakia.

They also installed refrigeration units to ensure a bone-chilling minus 10 degrees Celsius to keep the ice solid.

“Cold wind was blowing in our faces from the AC (air conditioning) all day long.

“It was like a chopper ride in January.

“Once we were done, I didn’t even want to open the freezer at home anymore,” he jokes.

More than 15 carpenters helped sculptors with the demanding task of stacking the ice blocks, each weighing 125 kilogrammes.

“It took us more time to stack the blocks than to carve them,” Bakos said.

“Ice is also an extremely fragile material, you must be very gentle with it or details tend to fall off. We used only water to glue the pieces together,” he said.

Visiting the ice temple is free. It is funded by the Tatra tourism organisation, the transport and construction ministry and other partners.

Only cold air and water are used to maintain the ice church.

“It is not only that visitors touch the walls of the temple, they also breathe out warm air and come in sipping hot tea,” Kromka said.

When winter is over, the ice structure is smashed to pieces, the cooling system switched off and the ice carried outside to melt on the ground. Open annually from November until late April, the ice temple is also becoming a hotspot for destination weddings.

“Here… we are perhaps the closest to our spiritual selves and our respective religions,” says Veronika Littvova, head of tourism for the High Tatra region, much of which is pristine and protected national parkland.

She is also convinced that ice temple weddings lead to long, lucky unions.

“Thanks to that huge amount of ice, I believe that marriages entered into here will be preserved and last forever.”

The three-part project “The Study of the Front Palace (Wang Na): A Digital Revitalisation of the Palace’s Past” has reached at its final episode and has returned to the National Museum Bangkok – the site that was formerly part of the Front Palace.

“Wang Na Naruemit” sees seven contemporary artists and 13 experts in fields varying from linguistics, music, architecture, botany, textile design and cuisine creating works in response to the layers of time and space for the exhibition “In Situ from outside: Reconfiguring the past in between the present”.

Suanplu Chorus performs songs specially rearranged and adapted for the historical space Isara Winitchai Throne Hall in the National Museum Bangkok.

“My interest is to transmit the information and history to people in way that’s not academic, but on a deeper level,” says the project’s director Khun Sirikitiya “Mai” Jensen, the youngest daughter of Princess Ubolratana. “History is not something dead; it continues. The artists and experts will create different dialogues across various dimensions and make connections to the site, allowing the movement of history.”

The project’s first phase “The Architectural Ensemble of Wang Na Exhibition” at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in June last year translated the historical contexts and magnificent architecture of the Front Palace into an understandable visual language that was easily accessible to the public through Google Maps, 3D models, interactive maps and moving images on double screens.

The second part was the launch of the project’s website (WangNaProject.com) which brought together information and the research references, and is available to the public as an open archive.

The project’s director Khun Sirikitiya “Mai” Jensen stands next to Danh Vo’s work “2.2.1861” – a copy of the handwritten farewell letter of a French missionary in Vietnam.

“The first part was designed to spark the imagination, create an understanding of the history and raise curiosity,” says Sirikitiya, who is an official at the Fine Arts Department’s Office of Architecture. “The second part is the online platform for continuous study and this time, the third, the aim is to drive the history through different perspectives of people, not documents.”

The Front Palace was constructed in 1782, about the same time the Grand Palace was built and was one of the very first structures to be erected at the beginning of the Rattanakosin Era. It served as the residences for five viceroys and one Second King during the reigns of Kings Rama I to V.

The site encompasses the land now occupied by Thammasat University, the National Museum Bangkok, the National Theatre, the Bunditpatanasilpa Institute and the northern part of Sanam Luang. The surviving structures of the Front Palace that can still be seen today are mainly located within the site of the National Museum Bangkok.

Continuing until April 28, the exhibition showcases contemporary, site-specific artworks by seven artists at the museum’s Isara Winitchai Throne Hall while the works by specialists in different fields are on display at its annex called Mukkrasan.

On Kawara’s two–volume book project “One Million Years”

Though the artworks are relatively conceptual and thus probably not easy for the public to interpret, they are challenging to contemplate. Each work reveals the layers of time, space and history by temporally connecting the past to the present in a newly constructed context.

Upon entering the Throne Hall, visitors will encounter a table laid with two books created by celebrated Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara whose works deal with the awareness of places in history and the passage of time.

For this two–volume book project “One Million Years”, he transcribed a list of years that spans one million years into the past and one million years into the future. The first book, “Past – For all those who have lived and died”, covers the years from 998,031 BC to 1969. The second volume, “Future – For the last one”, starts in 1993 and continues on another one million years, to 1,001,992 AD.

For the presentation of his project, male and female participants will sit side-by-side and take turns reading dates, switching between the two volumes. Since 1993, live readings have been performed in cities around the world, with the most recent stop at Museum Macan in Jakarta early this month.

Nipan Oranniwesna removes the mercury ball – an artefact in the museum – for display in the exhibition space and replaces it with a reproduction.

Nipan Oranniwesna plays with real and the reproduced objects within a specific space. He removes a mercury ball believed to have been given in tribute byEuropeans to King Pinklao, who was “second king” to his elder brother King Rama IV. Nipan took the ball from King Pinklao’s residence, the Issares Rajanusorn Mansion within the museum compound, and placed it in a glass vitrine in the exhibition space of the Isara Winitchai Throne Hall. He left in its original place a reproduction of the ball he made.

“At the Issares Rajanusorn Mansion, the mercury ball is always overlooked because it’s displayed amid other artefacts and well away from the viewers’ gaze. Moving it here to a glass cabinet allows people to see it close up and in 360 degrees, and its surface reflects the viewers themselves and the space around them,” says Nipan.

Nipan  reinterprets the historical context of the Front Palace by displaying two hanging curved steel circles engraved with lyrics of the song “Lao Phaen”.

Nipan also reinterprets the historical context of the Front Palace by displaying two hanging curved steel circles engraved with lyrics of the song “Lao Phaen”, one in Thai and the other in Lao. The song, whose author remains anonymous, relates the lives of Laotian captives in Siam during the reign of King Rama III.

Also on view is Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo’s ongoing work on paper “2.2.1861” – a copy of an 1861 hand-written farewell letter that French Catholic missionary Jean-Theophane Venard penned to his father before he was executed in Vietnam. Vo asked his own father to transcribe this letter that poetically describes loss and departure.

Danh Vo’s ongoing work on paper “2.2.1861” 

“Vo’s father, who has beautiful handwriting, portrays the emotional despair and illustrates the father-son relationship of both the families of the missionary and his own. People may wonder how this work is related to the Front Palace. The original letter was actually written at the same time as King Pinklao was appointed by King Rama IV as both the viceroy and the second King. The work thus depicts the layers of history despite the different sites,” says co-curator Mary Pansanga.

Other conceptual works by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tanatchai Bandasak, Udomsak Krisanamis and Pratchaya Phinthong are also on display.

The 3D model of a demolished building Phlup Phla Soong (High Pavillion) that was formerly located in the compound of the Front Palace

Next to the Throne Hall is its annex Mukkrasan displaying the collaborative works of the experts. Situated right at the entrance is a 3D model of a demolished building Phlup Phla Soong (High Pavillion), which King Rama IV ordered to be built in honour of King Pinklao. It was located next to the palace’s eastern wall, and presently forms the northern edge of Sanam Luang.

Textile designer Jarupatcha Achavasmit creates curtains made out of brass and bronze threads with a patina technique to simulate the look of oxidised surface on metal weaving. Her work is meant to recall the curtains intricately woven with gold and silver threads previously allowed for royal use only, as well as serve as a dialogue with the old cement walls and the gold leaf dharma book chest – a piece of furniture at Mukkrasan – whose surface has peeled off in layers over the years.

Jarupatcha Achavasmit creates a metal woven curtain that has a similar appearance to an oxidised surface in line with the historical site.

Language specialists Pongsit Pangsrivongse, court Brahmin Bhidhi Sri Visudhikhun, Prapod Assavavirul- hakarn and Boonteum Sriworapoj jointly interpret the hidden messages behind the names of the monarchs.

“The royal names of Kings Rama I, II and III reflect the status of Thai monarchs who are highly revered as divine kings – a tradition influenced by Hinduism,” says Sirikitiya. “King Rama IV, who was a monk for 27 years before ascending to the throne, was the first king to choose his own royal name, which he felt reflected humanism and individualism.

“Though King Rama IV bestowed on his younger brother King Pinklao an honour equal to his own, the names of the two Kings imply different status. The term bovorn [excellent] was given to King Pinklao, while the term borom [utmost] was for King Rama IV, indicating his superior rank.”

Visitors wear headphones to listen to a new electronic mix of a song composed by King Pinklao and reinterpreted by musicians Tul Waitoonkiat and Marmosets. 

Musicians Tul Waitoonkiat and Marmosets rearrange a song composed by King Pinklao into a new electronic number entitled “Ghosts of Wang Na” to bridge the past with the present.

Visitors can wear the headphones to experience their creation, or scan the QR code printed on the handouts distributed to the public.

“We first borrowed a ranad (Thai xylophone) from the permanent collection of the museum to produce the melody before modulating it with elements of electronic sound for a distorted effect,” says Tul.

The Suanplu Chorus will perform four songs, especially rearranged and adapted to match this historical space. The ensemble will perform three times – today, March 30 and April 20 – at the Isara Winitchai Throne Hall. Visitors can also scan the QR code on the handbills to listen to the ensemble rehearsing.

Chudaree “Chef Tam” Debhakam, the winner of Top Chef Thailand, will recreate old recipes for a chef’s table onsite at the museum on April 27.

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

“In Situ from outside: Reconfiguring the past in between the present” continues until April 28 at Isara Winitchai Throne Hall and Mukkrasan in the compound of the National Museum Bangkok.

The museum is on Na Phrathat Road, next to Thammasat University. It’s open Wednesday through Sunday from 9am to 4pm. Admission is Bt30 for Thais and Bt200 for foreigners.

Visit http://www.WangnaProject.com.