"Culture Shock Bangkok": Dan Waites on the Bangkok Noir movement writers and artists

Dan Waites' thoughts on the Bangkok Noir movement from "Culture Shock! Bangkok"....

"Much has been written about the Thai capital.  The large 'Thailand Interest' sections of the city's bookstores are proof of that.  Unfortunately exaggerated memoirs about stints in Thai prisons, tracts about the joys of sleeping with bargirls and horror stories about being ruined by Thai wives are not for everyone.

In terms of fiction, or at least serious fiction, Bangkok remains curiously undocumented, given its size and importance.  It has, of course, provided a lot of inspiration for a lot of crime fiction.  Some of the authors, like John Burdett and Christopher Moore, have produced well-crafted crime novels that demonstrate a level of insight into Thai society few other outsiders have reached.  Others haven't fared so well.

The city's crime writers have formed a scene of sorts, the so-called 'Bangkok Noir' which crystallized in 2011 in the form of the book 'Bangkok Noir', a collection of 12 short stories by Thai and Western writers edited by Moore himself.  Chris Coles, a painter specializing in Expressionist portraits of the denizens of the city's libidinous nightlife, is also involved, and has published a book of his work, 'Navigsting the Bangkok Noir'.

Bangkok Noir is unusual as a scene in that appears to have been driven by the artists themselves, rather than critics and journalists.  Local author and critic Tim Footman says he 'doesn't blame the writers for that at all'.  Bangkok lacks the kind of critical apparatus that exists in many parts of the world that might identify such a scene form the outside. 'I can understand why they're doing it.  No one else was going to do it for them,' he says.

Outside the crime fiction genre, relatively relatively little fiction of note has surfaced about Bangkok in the English language.  Why?  Is there something about the city and its inhabitants that defies the foreign writer?  At least part of the reason must lie with the difficulties foreigners have in penetrating and understanding Thai society itself.  As novelist Lawrence Osbourne says, 'Obviously, foreigners are not going to be writing delicate comedies of manners about Thais, because they don't really move easily in such a hermetic culture."

Perhaps the city's wilder side hypnotises foreign writers - the lights of this city are so bright that that's all they see.  Footman tells of writing a novel set during the 2010 Red protests.  Not setting out to write about the city's seedier elements, he eventually vcame to a plotting cul-de-sac.  'Suddenly, and I have no idea how ]it happened, there was a hooker in there.'  He later abandoned the book.

Naturally, more has been said about the city by Thais themselves, but few foreigners get good enough at Thai to be able to access it.  There's also the reality that Thailand doesn't have a particularly literary culture.  It's a shame: many visitors to the country would appreciate access to the kind of insight into ways of life and thinking that only fiction can really provide."

Link to Dan Waiters "Culture Shock Bangkok! A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette": http://goo.gl/MMTb7Z

NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR now available worldwide

Here's the cover of the NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR book published by Marshall Cavendish Singapore (100 of my Bangkok paintings accompanied by text and an introduction by Bangkok Noir author Christopher G. Moore).

Links to internet bookstore sites which have NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR available for purchase at this time:

In Singapore and Asia at Noqstore: http://goo.gl/11BDS

In North America at Amazon: http://goo.gl/trjhn

In UK at Amazon: http://goo.gl/u2nPD

In France at Amazon: http://goo.gl/vfaVf

In Bangkok and Thailand at AsiaBooks: http://goo.gl/cSF5u

In Tokyo and Japan at Amazon: http://goo.gl/v5Gwc

In Germany at Amazon: http://goo.gl/ebRmw

About the Book:
Bangkok, also known as Krung Thep or the City of Angels, is an almost-perfect setting for noir fiction, films, music and paintings, and the artistic movement known as Bangkok Noir. Between the gangsters, the beautiful girls, the vibrant nightlife and the gigantic scale of the city itself, full of its diverse millions and their struggles, the lurid and colourful world of Bangkok's notorious nightlife is brought to life in Chris Coles' series of Expressionist-style paintings. Broad, sweeping lines and strong, contrasting colours dominate in these artworks, portraying a chaotic, edgy world of colliding intention and misplaced desire -- lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation. At once beautiful and frightening, this collection of paintings is a vibrant celebration of psychedelic Bangkok and its many shades of noir.

About the author:
Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who divides his time between Bangkok and the coast of Maine. His Expressionist-style paintings are jagged emotional portraits that reveal a raw and primitive layer of the human experience. After graduating from Brown University, Chris received a Watson Fellowship to spend a year living in the Bajuni Islands off the coast of East Africa. He is also a graduate of the British National Film School and has taken art courses at the Otis School in Los Angeles. Films he has worked on include Chaplin, L.A. Story, Rainbow War, Sirens, Cutthroat Island and Superman.

CNNGo Tim Footman's piece on Chris Coles & the Bangkok Noir

Rainy Season Suzy Wong Bar - Chris Coles

“Bangkok Noir” has become something of a buzzword in recent months, although more cynical minds might deduce that it’s little more than an attempt to spin the work of local crime writers such as Christopher G. Moore and John Burdett into an authentic genre, bracketing their books with the likes of James Ellroy or even Raymond Chandler and hoping a little of the critical credibility rubs off.

Artist Chris Coles is happy to be seen as part of the movement, to the extent that his new book of his paintings is called “Navigating the Bangkok Noir.” (See the above gallery for a small sample.)

In his hands, the Bangkok night becomes “a Darwinistic and brutal stage on which humans from all over the planet, rich and poor, dark and white, tall and short, fat and slim, civilized and uncouth, intelligent and incredibly dumb, come together to mingle, interact, devour, be devoured, stalk prey and to be stalked by predators.”

Chris Coles' damaged denizens of Bangkok’s nightlife are highlighted in "Navigating the Bangkok Noir."

It’s rather different from the Land of Smiles mythology peddled by the government and the tourist authorities -- the mythology that holds topless Songkran dancers to be completely antithetical to Thai culture and morality – and indeed from the majority of Bangkok-based artists.

For a real exercise in contrasts, check out his exhibition at the Koi Gallery on Sukhumwit 31, which hangs his works alongside the pastoral confections of Anita Suputipong.

But Coles’s work is also distinct from that of Christopher Moore and his fellow writers, who are forced by their chosen genre to tie the atmosphere down to a plot, to add a little action and danger to their depictions of Krung Thep at night. The results sometimes feel as if they’ve been designed to flatter the white-knight fantasies of their male, farang readers, for whom real life can still be a bit mundane, even in this city.

Moore writes the foreword to Coles’s book, and compares the painter to Toulouse-Lautrec, but this misses the mark a little. Toulouse-Lautrec’s pictures of prostitutes were tender observations that focused on the women’s off-duty moments -- sleeping, bathing, dreaming.

Coles is an Expressionist, though; his bargirls are in the tradition of the underweight, glassy-eyed Viennese hookers immortalized by Egon Schiele. Moreover, his combination of garish colors and thick black lines suggests the styles of Georges Rouault and Marc Chagall, both of whom were influenced by stained-glass windows in places of worship.

In his hands the damaged denizens of Bangkok’s nightlife achieve a transcendent aura, the profane becoming sacred.

Behind the sad, garish smiles

That said, Coles doesn’t impose an explicit narrative or moral on his images of Bangkok nightlife. What he sets out to do is “to accept and understand that as humans, even in the year 2011, we still harbor some very primitive, reptile-like qualities that lie not too far beneath our modern and ‘civilized’ exterior surface.”

Each image stands alone, a single event in a single night, take it or leave it. His deadpan annotations put a few names to faces, a little context for those who might not be au fait with Nana or Cowboy, but stops short of fleshing out a full biography for these damaged creatures.

He doesn’t idealize or idolize the bargirls, but is always sympathetic to their situations, always keen to find out where they came from, what brought them here, to see behind the sad, garish smiles.

He is more ambivalent about their clients, who come over as endearingly naïve at best, monstrous and controlling at worst.

That said, Coles doesn’t impose an explicit narrative or moral on his images of Bangkok nightlife. Each image stands alone, a single event in a single night, take it or leave it.

Coles is a good painter, but more importantly (and more surprisingly), "Navigating the Bangkok Noir" works as a book in its own right, rather than just a glorified exhibition catalogue.

The closest comparison is with Philip Cornwel-Smith’s warm and wacky "Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture," to which it acts as a sort of grim, evil twin. Coles illuminates images from the bleaker, seedier side of Bangkok life, but ultimately it’s up to you, the reader, to do the work and create a story.

"Navigating the Bangkok Noir" is published by Marshall Cavendish, Singapore and is also available on Amazon & Noqstore.

For more on Chris Coles, visit his website: www.chriscolesgallery.com

New Mandala piece Chris Coles' NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR

A beginners’ guide to Bangkok Noir

March 28th, 2011 by Christopher G. Moore, Guest Contributor

[There will be an Art Opening/Book Launch event for Navigating the Bangkok Noir at Koi Gallery, 43/12 Sukhumvit Soi 31, Bangkok, at 7 PM, Friday 1 April 2011].

Bangkok at midnight: streets splashed with neon, tourists feeding bamboo to baby elephants, hookers eating at roadside tables, eyeing those who pass by, and soldiers in combat kit, carrying automatic weapons standing on the BTS, watching, waiting, taking in the sights. If noir had a smell it would be jasmine on a hot tropical night in Bangkok, the City of Angels. It is a beat that I’ve covered for more than twenty years. The thing with black is even when you scratch the surface, you can never find your mark. It vanishes like dreams, hope and love.

Chris Coles likes to say there is a noir movement in Bangkok. The quantum world has a lesson: we must choose between measuring position and velocity of particle. Noir, for me, moves so fast, I can never nail down exactly where it is, where it has been or where it is going. It is a particle in motion smashing through the walls, consciousness and lives of people living in the City of Angels.

Every artistic movement is created by a group of writers, painters, photographers, filmmakers, and lyricists. While they mostly work in isolation from each other, they draw from the same material, and their creativity combines into a larger force than any one of them. In the case of the Bangkok Noir movement, the idea of a noir community started to take shape as these artistic individuals began to assemble in ever larger numbers about ten years ago. A number of factors, social and political, have come together to form a critical mass, allowing for the noir movement to not only take hold but to gain international attention. Mass media and mass tourism has helped to make the developmental changes into the kind of perfect storm that feeds the instability and insecurity that creates noir.

I think of Chris Coles as occupying Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s shoes in Bangkok. For my money, Coles has grabbed from the nightlife hundreds of images, vested them with vibrant, gaudy colors, his theatrical images of faces smeared with regret, hope, boredom and hate. He catches his subjects in the throes of navigating the night world heavily mined with pleasure, power and money explosives.

Toulouse-Lautrec captured Montmartre nightlife. A century later, Coles has found his Montmartre in Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong. Coles’s passion has been a large-scale work in progress to translate the bohemian Bangkok lifestyle into art. On the surface, the paintings are about world of sensual pleasure where romance is manufactured in these dream factories. Noir is hidden below the surface of these places of work. Go behind stage and you find what you’ve long suspected, work is about putting in time for money and workers value themselves according to the money they earn. Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Coles’ figures are objects of compassion and sympathy. We know that both sides of these transactional arrangements are doomed. There is no need to leer or show disrespect as the reality that the darkness of such lives fills us with a deeper knowledge of hopelessness. In painting after painting, Coles reveals bar girl and customers mental processes. The ones they carefully hide behind a smile.

What makes Chris Coles noir vision unique is his skill to draw powerful psychological images from inside the world of Bangkok’s entertainment industry. His haunting faces and scenes emerge from the darkest corners of humanity; the gangster, the prostitute, the dispossessed, the traveler, the nice guy freshly arrived on holiday, the people on the run—from themselves, their family, country—all of these souls are stirred in the cauldron of Coles’ imagination. He mingles his colors with shades of innocence and hope but we know from their expressions and stories that disaster is a couple of minutes away.

His subjects are caught in a bubble of wonder and sensitivity, unaware that like a condemned man, they have no idea they have mistaken the executioner’s smile as an invitation to pleasure. I reminded of the first time years ago (1993), when I walked through Tuol Sleng, or Security Prison 21, a museum to the Khmer Rouge victims. The faces of men and women in the photographs on the walls were frozen in a moment of horror, the self-realization of what was coming next. Coles’ Bangkok subjects are emotional kin who share the same look of incomprehension, pleading, and worry.

Capturing the pathos of the Bangkok night is the goal of noir creators. But this is no easy thing. What Chris Coles brings to the table is of extra value: he delivers a hard driving narrative description of the setting and characters, which accompany each painting. The effect is to create an illustrated short story as a time capsule stuffed with images and stories that magnify the haunting illusion of reinvention through carnal pleasure. In painting after painting, Coles shows us men—mainly but not exclusively foreigners—and Thai women—mainly though not exclusively prostitutes. A rap sheet with Tuol Sleng mug shots of people shedding one set of dreams for another, their emotions and lives riding on the conveyor belt that morphs into a roller coaster slamming a hundred miles an hour world through the Bangkok night.

Coles guides us through his images and accompanying short vignettes, to witness a strange ballet of men and women whose emotions are filtered and shaped by cultural misunderstanding, language incompatibility, and moral and ethical mismatches until all that remain are residue of mental projections—one person’s vision and wishes as to what the other person is and wants.

In this book, modern pop art merges with contemporary pulp story telling. The individual narratives reinforced and enlarge our understanding of the paintings. The language is expat English, funny, dead pan, screaming at the top of one’s lungs prose like a machine gun cutting down a frontal assault. Each story attached to the painting establishes the context and perspective for what you are seeing. In the past, for many years, Chris Coles was involved in making films. In this collection, he has story boarded the world of the Bangkok Night from the inside. He portrays his subjects anxiety, desires, dreams, and delusions, and perhaps, above all their vulnerability where survival depends on the skill to exploit the weak, the romantic, and inexperienced.

Noir is more than paintings laced with plumes of cigarette smoke, bottles of beer, angry tarts, and dissolute drunks, it is a world of broken dreams, shattered lives, exploitation—that word born of noir—and thirty word English vocabularies that must carry the full weight of pleasure and desire, and the rundown short time hotels. This is the opposite of the fairy tale where the orphaned girl is swept up by a prince and given a glamorous life. Noir is the spotlight held on people caught without escape from a pleasure-domed hell. The Bangkok nightlife is where money is the only vocabulary worth memorizing, the only way of measuring happiness and success. And dreams of a better world have a long passed their expiration date.

Most of the Thai women in the Bangkok bars have traditionally come from the Isan, the poorest region of Thailand. We find out about the background of these women—largely peasant girls born and bred in small villages, daughters of rice farmers, women who have had little chance of a acquiring a formal education. These women have seen other girls return from Bangkok with a foreign boyfriend or husband. Often the returning woman comes back as a heroine to her classmates, who admire her iPhone, expensive clothes, handbag, watch, and fistful of money to buy food and drink for all. Thus starts a fresh cycle of new faces appearing in the clubs, bars, and restaurants inside Bangkok’s scattered nightlife. Those women who have stayed behind and married local boys, have their children but little else. It’s not uncommon for them to have been abandoned by their husbands without any financial support. Next thing they are on a bus to Bangkok, children left with the grandmother or aunt, with a promise of money to be sent back. Soon she is dancing naked and sleeping with foreigners, and perhaps taking drugs to numb the pain of separation from her children and the disgrace of what she is doing.

Coles digs deep to tell their stories with compassion and introspection. He goes inside their lives and we come away with a greater understanding of what forces unite a bar girl from a poor region in Thailand to a foreigner who knows little of her culture and language inside a Bangkok bar. But this happens every night of every day of every week of every month and year. A relentless, pounding, unstoppable dance between men with money and power and women who understand that sex is the easiest short cut for someone with no other marketable skills or education. Sex in the noir world is a system that redistributes money and power to women. It’s not about reproduction or a relationship or marriage, though these may, now and again, happen as a freakish by-product.

In these paintings, Coles has captured the contradiction of Bangkok, the noir part, where at the moment of greatest relaxation is the moment when one should be the most vigilant. The void is always waiting between the laughter and smiles, to swallow up the outsider, consume him, hold him, digest him and wake up the following day hungry for a new meal.

[This article was written by Christopher G. Moore as an Introduction to Navigating the Bangkok Noir. For some more information on Moore and Bangkok Noir see here and here.]