Wid Muenster Reviews "Navigating the Bangkok Noir:

"Midnite Lower Sukhumvit" - Chris Coles

Navigating the Bangkok Noir  by Chris Coles

Outdated Bangkok hands will no doubt be familiar with the function of artist Chris Coles whose portray are being slotted into the new style called Bangkok Noir, a genre that covers each art and literature of which the crime novels of John Burdett are 1 instance. Lately there has been more than a little excitement around this motion and now American artist and Bangkok resident Chris Coles has produced a book of paintings,, an album of expressionist functions, mainly watercolours on paper, known as Navigating the Bangkok Noir.

Patpong and Soi Cowboy Night Scenes

To these familiar with the bar scenes in Thailands capital, the paintings will strike a familiar chord. Elegance and tragedy can be seen in the eyes and posture of the ladies whose tales can be study from the paintings a vignette accompanies every portrait to help the viewer of the function or reader of the painting to understand the situation. The captions work to merge the visual and the printed word, the entire being a sociological essay on the red mild district of Bangkok.

Evening scenes feature individuals from all walks of lifestyle and from many nations, unhappy-eyed for the most component, broken and searching anything but happy. Yet the vibrant, jewel-like colors are this kind of a distinction that a glib reading of the melancholy could be wrong, especially if we study it from a western-centric point of see,. These denizens of the night are very much part of the genuine Bangkok, not an aberration as some would have you think. Chris Coles has carried out them a favour by rescuing them from the Patpong Disneyland in which they are frequently set and re-instating them on the canvas of Thai life particularly the red-light areas of the money.

Criminal offense Writers and the Artist Chris Coles

Although the style hyperlinks criminal offense writers like John Burdett and Christopher Moore to the artist, the thriller writers’ work is relatively various as plots and motion seem to give lifestyle and option to the individuals who inhabit these stories. One feels they have free-will of a type while the people in Chris Coles’ photos appear to look out, glassy-eyed on to a world in which their horizons are limited. Nor are these the individuals the (frequently) drunken farang see via rose-tinted glasses, the mythical happy hookers this is how it is, the bleaker, seedier aspect of Bangkok life,.

The Photos

Every image is a single event, a standalone glimpse of the underbelly of Bangkok, not a complete story. There are simply a few names to put to the faces, and you feel that Chris Coles has a great well of sympathy for these evening individuals. He does not even seem to dislike their clients much but looks on them dispassionately, even though they are usually painted as physically gross.

Crime writer Christopher Moore has written an exceptional foreword to the exhibition catalogue for Navigating the Bangkok Noir. But then, Navigating the Bangkok Noir is more than a catalogue: it is a pictorial history of lifestyle in Krung Thep, the Metropolis of Angels so known as, a metropolis exactly where there are much more sinners than saints.

Navigating the Bangkok Noir by Chris Coles is printed by Marshall Cavendish (2011) and is accessible from all great bookshops and from Amazon.com at roughly twelve