Bangkok Post/Alan Parkhouse on Chris Coles "Flowers, One Butterfly and the Bangkok Night" show opening Jan 14th in Bangkok....

"Hollwood Agogo Nana Plaza" - Chris Coles

American expressionist painter Chris Coles is better known in Thailand and Cambodia for his neon-like work featuring bar girls and their customers, but now he's gone green.

Well, sort of. Coles' latest exhibition, which opens tonight at the Brainwake Cafe and Gallery on Sukhumvit 33, features six paintings of flowers and a butterfly. The title of the exhibition reflects Coles' slight change of direction -- "Flowers, One Butterfly And The Bangkok Night" -- but the artist's many fans need not worry as there are also 16 paintings of the Bangkok, Pattaya and Phnom Penh bar scenes.

The long-time resident of Bangkok has a "For Sale" sign on every item on display at the exhibition, so there is a strong chance some of the works will be gone not long after the show opens at 7pm.

British poet John Gartland will also be reading some of his work at the show, mostly from his contribution to the book Bangkok Heart Of Noir, which also featured some of Coles' paintings.

Coles, a former filmmaker, has been capturing the seedier side of Bangkok on canvas for many years and his work can be found in some of the establishments he's painted.

But recently he switched subjects and did something different, something his mother back in Maine can show her friends -- flowers and a butterfly.

"I did do this latest work with my mother in mind, although I was aware that many of the German expressionists had applied the style/genre to flowers, especially my Expressionist hero and mentor, Emil Nolde," Coles told the Bangkok Post.

Nolde was a German/Danish painter and one of the first expressionists of the 20th century.

"Many of my expressionist-style noir paintings are drawn from the context of the Bangkok night, a vast, multilayered entertainment spectacle that involves all manner of people from Southeast Asia, Asia and the entire world," says Coles.

The majority of Coles' paintings depict a side of life in Southeast Asia that is not promoted in the tourist brochures, but involves a lot of people, and money. And over the years Coles' bright, neon-like paintings of bars, the girls who work in them and the customers and characters who frequent them have steadily grown in popularity. A lot of people from different walks of life have become fans of his work.

"Chris Coles shows the other side of 'Thainess', the one that's not so rosy and pretty as the government would like to portray but certainly reflective of the reality…but he also shows that what appears at first glance to be ugly and dark can also be beautiful," said Bangkok Post columnist and TV and radio show host Suranand Vejjajiva.

"Chris Coles' beat is the expat neon triangle, Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong, where the wildlife gathers at the waterholes in the cool of the night," wrote Paul Dorsey, author of the Dali House blog.

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The "Flowers, One Butterfly And The Bangkok Night" exhibition starts at 7pm tonight at the Brainwake Cafe and Gallery on Sukhumvit 33.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/art/825968/expressionist-coles-changes-tack-for-latest-work

Noir Bangkok Post Columnist Bernard Trink in the Bangkok Night

"Noir Bangkok Post Columnist Bernard Trink in the Bangkok Night" - Chris Coles

For thirty-seven years, he wandered around the Bangkok Night back before it became the gigantic industrial-scale enterprise it is today, asking questions, poking around, writing his weekly Nite Owl column for the Bangkok Post..........

"Hearts in the Darkness" - Ezra Kyrill Erker Bangkok Post January 6, 2013

American artist Chris Coles illuminates the Bangkok night and its many denizens in an ongoing exhibition and book of paintings that capture a side of the city more commonly swept under the carpet

Chris Coles in a book on noir and an ongoing exhibition at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand  is one of the few artists to record the people and transactions of Bangkok's red light districts with all their vivid idiosyncrasies. He paints bright scenes in acrylics or watercolours, shapes the human form simply through thick black lines and captures some essential truths of a tawdry reality.

Part of a growing literary and artistic movement known as Bangkok noir, he adds his strokes of bounteous colour to a scene dominated by crime writers. Noir is often characterised by cynicism, fatalism and moral ambiguity _ a literal and figurative darkness for which Bangkok provides some fertile territory.

"The thing with black is that even when you scratch the surface, you can never find your mark. It vanishes like dreams, hope and love," writes author Christopher G Moore in the introduction to Navigating the Bangkok Noir, a book that collates a number of Coles' watercolours. What Coles does in his work is preserve the depicted noir before it fades.

Visually, the watercolours in the book are simple. Many look like they've been painted from photographs, with subjects posing. The more recent acrylic works of the FCCT exhibition, "Paintings from the Bangkok Night", are large profiles or tapestries of massage parlours and girl-bar strips, more detailed than those in the book and almost mesmeric in their alternating colours.

Few people are ambivalent about the red light districts, yet they are under-represented artistically. Berlin nightlife was a prime subject matter for German expressionists such as Emil Nolde in the 1920s, as was Montmartre for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and others in the late 19th century. Bangkok's red light districts haven't evolved the same mystique for artists.

Collectively, Coles' paintings and their captions shed some light on an underexposed side of Bangkok that attracts and repels, and its patrons have never been rendered so humanly.

His prostitutes have names and children, histories and dreams: "But she has seen too much, known too many men, danced too many nights. Her only desire is to go back to her hometown, take care of her 10-year-old son and live out the rest of this life in quiet, hoping the next cycle will be better."

His johns, punters and marks likewise have personal needs and insufficiencies: "They need her as much as anything else in their industrialised lives and will dream of her in their old age."

In the captions are occasional touches of poetry to add to those dabbed across his variegated canvas of the Bangkok night ("her whispered Thai words flowing across Bangkok's multi-layered spectrum as she weaves her multiple webs"), and some harsh realities ("no matter how wonderful the girls, how full of beauty, depth and soul, money determines the outcome").

To understand Bangkok it helps to understand such places; on the other hand, such places are not Bangkok; the city holds much more even under the banner of noir _ the police, the gangsters, the temples, the bribes, the waterways, gateways and getaways, beggars, the street life, the homeless, the illegal. Away from the darkness, the human landscape of the megalopolis can be varied and subtle, warm and compelling.

Depicted here is sexpat territory, the "neon triangle" of Patpong, Nana and Cowboy, along with a few other illicit parts of Bangkok. Coles in an afterward mentions that the Japanese, Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Nigerians and other groups have their own enclaves contributing to the Bangkok night. Yes, but it would also be nice to get beyond such enclaves. One of the book's negatives lies in its singular focus. There is also an occasional presumption that the Bangkok night equates to Bangkok as a whole, that red-light quirks can arise anywhere in the capital.

"If ... you ask, do you provide service, and they answer yes, it means they're available for sex, even if you didn't mean to ask. Whether in a department store, coffee shop, snooker place, barber shop, gas station or dry cleaner." Another such comment is "getting a haircut can mean more than one thing".

To 99.99% of Bangkokians, such terms hold no illicit secondary meanings. Other books on Bangkok's girl-bar scene often make similar generalisations about the city based on its sex trade, and thus rather than shedding light on an underexposed facet of local culture contribute to the many misunderstandings and occasional resentments between Thais and tourists.

Navigating the Bangkok Noir and "Paintings from the Bangkok Night", however, constructively add to the discussion. There is a captivating distance, a loving objectivity in some of the colours and words.

"If they are stylish, clever and speak enough English, they can end up in London, Beverly Hills or Sydney, living in a big house and driving a Mercedes. Or they can end up nowhere, too old, with too much mileage, unloved, their dreams of a better life unfulfilled," Coles writes.

And there is some perspective provided for those who look down on the sex workers: "No matter who and where we are in life we are all holding onto a pole and we are all for sale and we must examine our lives."

Decades and centuries from now these paintings may be among the few remaining records of a side of Bangkok that would otherwise have been swept under the carpet, its people and scenes faded into the darkness. For present and future these are creative noirish studies of a fascinating age.

'Paintings from the Bangkok Night' shows until Jan 15 at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand, Maneeya Centre, BTS Chidlom, open noon to 10pm on weekdays.

'Navigating the Bangkok Noir', by Chris Coles, is available from all good bookshops for 500 baht.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/arts-and-culture/art/329427/hearts-in-the-darkness

Bangkok Post's Sean Trembath Interviews Chris Coles

View from the dark side: Bangkok Noir artist Chris Coles has a unique perspective of the city

(May 12, 2011 - Bangkok Post - Reporter: Sean Trembath)

The Bangkok that Chris Coles paints is not the one you see on postcards. He focuses on the darker side, and the widely diverse collection of people who populate the city at night.

Chris Coles with one of his works.

Coles is heavily involved in the Bangkok Noir movement, a collection of artists, writers and film-makers whose work is grounded in what some would call the seedier side of Bangkok. He paints bar girls, sex tourists, people new to the nightlife and those for whom it is only life they've got left.

Rather than straight portraiture, Coles employs a colourful Expressionist style reminiscent of early 20th century French painters such as Matisse. The colours evoke the lights and the chaos that characterise the establishments Coles draws his inspiration from.

Earlier this year Coles released Navigating the Bangkok Noir, a book collecting paintings done from 2004 to 2007. He continues to paint, and plans to release more books in coming years.

Coles sat down with us to discuss coming to Thailand, developing the Noir style, and the different ways people look at Bangkok.

How did you get to Bangkok?

I first came to Bangkok in the mid-90s. I used to work in Hollywood, and I came here as a production executive on a really big, stupid movie called Cutthroat Island. I had never been in Asia before, and it was a great experience.

A self portrait by Coles.

The movie itself was just awful, but getting to know Thailand and Southeast Asia was a life-changing experience. I got to know a lot of Thais - we had hundreds working for us - so I started coming back here to visit.

Towards the end of the '90s the financial crisis was going on. It was 55 baht to a dollar and there were 600,000 condos for sale in Bangkok. I was going to buy a car when I got back to Los Angeles - I was still doing movies then - and I said, "Well that's stupid. Instead of buying a car why don't I buy a condo in Bangkok?"

When did you move here permanently and start painting?

I was going back and forth, still doing movies, but once my daughter finished high school in Los Angeles, I decided that I'd done enough movies to last me three lifetimes. I'd always painted as a hobby, so I decided to do nothing but paint. The Bangkok condo became my studio.

When did you start painting in the Bangkok Noir style?

I knew a lot of the expat writers, especially Christopher G. Moore. He and I would discuss various things. One day, I had been at the Kinokuniya bookstore looking through art books of the German Expressionists who had painted Berlin nightlife in the 1930s. The paintings would be somewhere like Ludwigstrasse in Berlin in 1930, and I'd say, "Oh, this looks just like Soi 4 at midnight on a Friday night".

I asked Chris if he knew any expats who were painting the Bangkok night, and he'd been living here for years and said he couldn't think of one. Then I asked some Thai friends about how many Thai artists were painting the Bangkok night, and there were very few. In Berlin, there were thousands of guys painting the Berlin nightlife. In Paris in 1900 all the artists lived in Montmartre, which was the centre of Paris nightlife. And they were painting all that stuff - Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin.

So I said to Chris, "Maybe I should do it" and he said I should. I started using the Bangkok night as a setting to do these Expressionist style paintings, which use a very unrealistic colour scheme and a lot of distortion and exaggeration to make something dramatic and exciting and more interesting than it might be in actual fact.

Do you think Bangkok Noir is the most accurate way to view Bangkok?

I think any large complex city like New York, London, Paris, Bangkok, Shanghai, Saigon, you can take various views of the city, because the city has a lot of different dimensions to it. And they all have their legitimacy. I don't think there is any single view which can encompass a large complex city.

The Tourist Authority Thailand view - serene, exotic, harmonious, tranquil, peaceful Bangkok - is fair enough. You can have that view, and take photographs of it and make it look that way, but that's really only one view, whereas the Bangkok Noir view is another, taking the same city. We sometimes make jokes about the TAT view, but we don't say it's not a legitimate view, it's just another way of looking at Bangkok.

Everyone has their own reason for consuming different views of a city they live in. Some people like the fairytale version of the city because it makes them feel better. In LA, someone might think Disneyland is wonderful, whereas I like the Port of Los Angeles, with all its industrial machines. It's the same with New York, London, Paris, and Bangkok.

What does Bangkok provide for a creatively minded expat?

The expats - who are not necessarily doing art or novels, but also blogs, journalism, or something sort of interesting - they come to Bangkok with an open mind, and they want to get to know modern Asia. They see stuff they never would have imagined would have been here.

They start reading books, they start meeting people. They go out of their way to meet diverse people, not just expats from their own little world: Thais, Asians, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Arabs.

Their whole world is starting to change as an expat who has come to Bangkok in 2011 because they are open to the experience. They had some need inside them for a more diverse, more interesting world that they wanted to be part of. And Bangkok can give that to them, and can give them a whole new life experience which takes them some place in their life they never would have gone to otherwise.

Bangkok has so many distractions. There are so many things that are so easy to just go and do and have fun, that in order to get something done here, something of note, you have to really focus, and sort of ask yourself what do you really want to do here, in your time on Earth, and in Bangkok.

That self-creation and self-imagination that takes place among a certain group of expats here who end up doing really interesting things in Bangkok is part of what makes what they do interesting. They came here, accepted the challenge of modern Bangkok, engaged with modern Bangkok, engaged with modern Bangkok in a creative and intelligent way, and made something out of their experience here bigger than what they would have done otherwise in their life, and bigger than what would have happened in Bangkok if they hadn't been here.