Navigating the Bangkok Noir

My very first book, NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR.....with an introduction by Bangkok Author Christopher G. Moore.....available on Amazon dot com as quality paperback or E-Book....

Renoir Club Soi 33

Christie's Club

Late Night Rainbow Agogo

Party Time Voodoo Bar

Crazy Hour

Tall Blue Dancer

Midnight Patpong

Lazy Afternoon Lonestar Saloon

Lek at Pretty Lady Agogo

Two Dancers

Happy Couple

E_Book at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Navigating-Bangkok-Noir-Chris-Coles-ebook/dp/B07PV7K62S/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2RQVHNMLWYHCO&keywords=navigating+the+bangkok+noir&qid=1657499550&s=books&sprefix=navigating+the+bangkok+noir%2Cstripbooks%2C81&sr=1-2

Quality Paperback at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Navigating-Bangkok-Noir-Chris-Coles/dp/9814346497/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1N4S16A576HEU&keywords=navigating+the+bangkok+noir&qid=1657501664&sprefix=navigating+the+bangkok+noir%2Caps%2C105&sr=8-1

Evergreen Review: Navigating the Bangkok Noir

 

by Christopher G. Moore

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, and 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’ 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 am 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 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 reinforce 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.

Link to "Navigating the Bangkok Noir" quality paperback on Amazon dot com...

Link to "Navigating the Bangkok Noir" e-book on Amazon dot com

Link to Evergreeen Review piece on "Navigating the Bangkok Noir"

Exhibit at Check Inn 99 Lower Sukhumvit Bangkok between Soi 5 & Soi 7 Dec 26 thru Jan 2015 (part of at Bangkok Fiction Night of Noir Event Jan 8, 2015)...

This exhibit featuring some of my original paintings from the NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR book is part of the Bangkok Fiction Night of Noir event which will take place at Check Inn 99 Thursday January 8th featuring readings from many of Bangkok's leading Expat authors, all part of the burgeoning Bangkok Noir movement......

(Check Inn 99 is located on Lower Sukhumvit between Soi 5 and Soi 7 opposite the Landmark Hotel...the exhibit will be up for about a month from December 26th onwards....open from 6pm to 2am every night.....musical performances by Music of the Heart band starting around 8pm...many thanks to Check Inn 99 Bangkok's energetic and creative impresario Chris Catto-Smith)...........

"Spirit House Japanese Karaoke Sukhumvit" - Chris Coles (15x20 inches watercolor)

Every night before they start work, the hostess girls at the Japanese KTV bring offerings to the Spirit House....small bottles of red soda, shot glasses of Thai whiskey, bananas, a chocolate donut....asking the spirits to bring many Japanese business guys loaded with dough and ready for action.....

(already sold)

"Obsession Bar Nana Plaza" - Chris Coles (24x18 inches watercolor)

Nana Plaza's Number One Ladyboy bar, Obsession's sign says it all.......

(available for sale at 12,000 baht)

"Lazy Afternoon at Lone Star Saloon" - Chris Coles (24x18 inches watercolor)

A lazy afternoon at the Lone Star Saloon on Washington Square...he's been a regular since the end of the Vietnam War and she's been there for fifteen years, both of them well past their expiration dates, happy to share a smoke and a few beers.....

(available for sale at 12,000 baht)

"Party Time Voodoo Bar" - Chris Coles (24x18 watercolor)

Voodoo Bar is a mix of ladyboys and one hundred percent ladies, it is difficult to tell. Some say Thai ladyboys are sometimes so perfectly feminine, only their hands can give them away. With too many beers, multi-colored lights, pounding music and so many bodies moving, the only way to avoid a mistake for sure is to not go there at all. On the other hand, for whatever reason, ignorance or desire, some guys do..........

(available for sale at 12,000 baht)

"Reincarnated German Sex Tourist at Soi Cowboy" - Chris Coles (24x18 inches watercolor)

There are many German tourists who come to Bangkok to chase the bargirls. Every night, night after night, they never have enough. Until their two weeks are up and they catch their flight. In Germany, they dream about their Bangkok girls, hoping to find a way to come back and never leave. Some say when the German guys are re-incarnated they come back as soi dogs and wander around Soi Cowboy to their heart's content...........

(available for sale at 12,000 baht)

"Midnight Patpong" - Chris Coles (18x24 inches watercolor)

By midnight on Friday, Patpong’s full, twenty thousand tourists from Europe, the U.S., Australia, India, the Middle East and Japan, ten thousand girls, hundreds of ladyboys, plenty of beer, whiskey, endless stalls selling counterfeit goods, thirty or forty different disco tracks blasting out of the gogo bars, a world vortex of man woman interaction, a combination sexual theme park, shopping mall and inferno, fiercely consuming an endless stream of humanity and their desire.......

(available for sale at 12,000 baht)

"Happy Couple" - Chris Coles (24x18 inches watercolor)

A happy couple, they each have dreamed of the other, hoping to find what they have been missing in themselves. But what happens if what they see is something they have imagined, not what is actually there.....

(available for sale at 12,000 baht)

"Soi Cowboy" - Chris Coles (100x80cm acrylic on canvas)

The Bangkok Night's most iconic destination a neon wonderland filled with raucous bars, multiple music tracks, people from all over the world and thousands of bargirls who are mainly from the rural northeast region of Thailand called Isan.....

(already sold)

"Sexy Bar" - Chris Coles (80x100cm acrylic on canvas)

The neon sign says Sexy Bar and the blindingly bright colors are screaming for attention....but it's a quiet night, only a few customers, a couple of ladydrinks and very little action.......

(available for sale at 30,000 baht)

"Thaniya Plaza" - Chris Coles (80x100cm acrylic on canvas)

On Patpong's fringe, Thaniya Plaza is for the Japanese executive crowd in Bangkok. They are Thailand's largest group of Expats, owning and running most of the automobile and electronics factoories. Thaniya's set-up to look like Tokyo's Ginza with a vertical array of clubs, KTV's, bars and cozy hang-outs, over a hundred, all with colorful Japanese signs. The Thai hostess girls are dressed in kimonos and gowns and speak a little Japanese. Heloo, How are you, Please come back. They bow from the waist with heads tilted down. If a Western guy approaches, they turn and look the other way, sometimes pointing towards the little sign on the door that says, For Japanese Only.....

(available for sale at 30,000 baht)

NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR at Kinokuniya Bangkok December 2014....

"Navigating the Bangkok Noir" still being featured at Kinokuniya Emporium and Siam Paragon Bangkok in December 2014......in the art book section.....

Jim Algie Reviews "Navigating the Bangkok Noir"

Bangkok's True Colours At Night

By Jim Algie

Bangkok at night is one of the world's gaudiest cities. Neon signs for karaoke bars and massager parlours compete with the fluorescent tubes in restaurants and bars, and lurid goings-on in establishments catering to the world's oldest obsession.

Chris Coles has brought out these true colours of the nocturnal capital in the series of paintings that make up Navigating the Bangkok Noir.

What some may see as a new (and equally virulent) strain of German expressionism - which the artist himself happily admits to - that speaks to the decadence of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic and the Thai capital of today - these watercolor-on-paper images are also coloured by pop art references, which allows Coles plenty of leeway to satirize as he seduces.

In comic-loving Asia, some of these subjects become caricatures of themselves, while some of these images lampoon that very same cartoon culture ("Cartoon" being a popular Thai nickname for girls) and the kind of kitsch that gives Bangkok noir a comical air.

Almost stripped of their identities, the subjects of these paintings, the bar babes and the customers, the boozers and malcontents, blend together in a way that suggests dehumanization.

But the captions allow the painter to paint these subjects with a little more depth, arousing sympathy for the prostitutes and setting the scenes with vignettes about the customers who are anything but stereotypical lechers: "Timothy's been in Bangkok for ten years, the Director of Asia Marketing for a leading luxury goods company. He spends his days in a gleaming office tower, reviewing the last campaigns, checking demographics, chasing down manufacturers of counterfeit goods. He's built an Asian luxury goods empire and made a few million along the way. A regular at Pegasus, the Mamasan knows him well, as do many of the two hundred girls. He brings out-of-town clients there, as well as the guys from headquarters. The smiles, beauty, and style leave them dazzled, dizzy and grateful, an ultimate boys night out."

The wordsmithing side of Bangkok's night strife has been well documented, but Chris Coles is painting the town with different brushstrokes and shades of gaudiness in this book and his exhibitions.

Off-beat Review of Navigating the Bangkok Noir by Biscotti

Chris Coles’ Paintings of Bangkok’s Working Girls

While surfing around the net recently I came across the paintings of an American born artist who has dedicated considerable time (and probably considerable dollars) to documenting the nightlife at Bangkok’s numerous Go-Go bars, strip clubs, pick up joints and hostess bars. And the documentations he produces are in the form of colourfully grotesque, expressionist paintings. His work is not to all tastes (I think they’re mostly hideous) but on his blog he writes short explanatory paragraphs to accompany each painting, and his writing is brilliant. Sometimes pithy, almost always poignant, his observations truly bring the paintings to life.

 Rainbow Two Bar, watercolor on paper, 5 x 7 inch

Anyone not familiar with Expressionism should be forewarned: the paintings are SUPPOSED to look ugly. Expressionism is an artistic style that grew out of the European experience immediately following the unbelievable slaughter of the First World War. The artist’s world is now viewed as a harsh, edgy, dangerous place, filled with bad intentions and alienation. The Expressionists often painted their vision with dark lines and clashing colors, rather than the soft images and harmonious tones (like the Impressionists who preceded them). Famous Expressionists include George Grosz, Oscar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Otto Dix. OK, now that the art lesson is over, time to look at some paintings.

Late Night Rainbow A-Go-Go, watercolor on paper, 18 x 24 inch

The painting above is meant to portray the 1am blur of mild insanity that can be witnessed almost any evening at the Rainbow A-Go-Go bar in Bangkok’s ultra-sleazy Nana Plaza entertainment district. And truthfully, it captures the scene pretty well. “Too much beer, too much flesh and too many expats out of control” says the artist on his website.

Expat Hangout, watercolor on paper, 5 x 7 inch

This painting, no bigger than a postcard, depicts the mundane side of almost any bar on Bangkok’s garishly seedy Soi Cowboy. A mix of lust and languor, or, as the artist so amusingly writes on his blog: “Certain Soi Cowboy bars are hangouts for retired expats, old hands in Bangkok, where they go to say hello to their friends. The girls are just there, in the background, available or not – no one cares. Where’s so and so? I just got back from the States, it ain’t the same. When’s your next visa run? I was over in Saigon last week. You should go over and take a look. If they lived in Arizona or Florida, they would all be playing golf.”

Patpong Girl, watercolor on paper, 18 x 24 inch

The crude but compelling painting above is a great “capture the moment” slice of life in the night of pretty much any go-go dancer working in Bangkok’s Patpong red light district. And the angle is familiar to anyone who has sat in the front row watching these girls as they gyrate onstage in their high heels and skimpy bikinis (yes, guilty as charged). The artist on his blog imagines the numbers of tourists that she’s scene in her brief 2-years working as a dancer. “… about a hundred tourists a night, thirty-five thousand a year, seventy thousand in all, from Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Japan, Korea and the USA.”

Number 26, watercolor on paper, 5 x 7 inch

Although I haven’t seen any other painters depicting Bangkok’s “ladies of the night”, the tradition of artists using prostitutes as models has a long history. Toulouse-Lautrec, the famous French Post-Impressionist, purposely sought out prostitutes and cabaret performers as models, arguing that they provided him with the natural, unconstrained movement he preferred. I’m sure artist Chris Coles (whom I’ve never met) also finds the attitudes and body language of Bangkok’s good time girls to be a big part of his inspiration. But he also seeks to depict the “world” these girls inhabit.

Quiet Night, water color on paper, 18 x 24 inch

The painting above, which is as hilarious as it is disturbing, has a great bit of poetry to go with it on the artist’s website. It describes perfectly the feeling one experiences after being in Bangkok too long – when the heat and the repetition begins to wear you down a bit: “A quiet night in April, Bangkok’s hottest month. Outside, even at midnight, it’s a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity. Inside the bar, the A/C is on full blast, the beer cold and everybody’s happy to go through the motions, thankful for the escape.”

Washington Square Girl, watercolor on paper, 5 x 7 inch

As I spent time online finding out more about Chris Coles, I discovered that he has packaged his collection of paintings into a book, entitled Navigating the Bangkok Noir (available online and at a few select bookstores in Bangkok, Singapore, and, perhaps not surprisingly, France). I haven’t seen his book here, but I hope it includes the insightful words he uses on his website. His thoughts behind Washington Square Girl (above) are actually quite poetic and moving: “Sometimes she sits the whole day without any clients or drinks. She thinks about her life as a little girl, in a house on stilts, taking care of the chickens and water buffalo. Her mother worked from dawn ‘til dusk, taught her kids to smile and sing, no matter how hard their life. At age 12, she finished school and joined her father in the rice fields. Before she was 18, she had two babies. Her boyfriend ran away. The kids are teenagers now, living in the house on stilts. Someday, they will come to Bangkok too.”

Lek at Pretty Lady, watercolor on paper, 5 x 7 inch

I was also surprised to find out that Coles, who divides his time between Bangkok and the USA (Los Angeles and Maine), has had exhibitions in New York, L.A., and even some prestigious galleries right here in Bangkok. He’s also had a pretty interesting life, working around the world in some very exotic locales. His paintings may not suit every taste, but art is where you find it, right? And if nothing else, his wry observations elevate the material to a universal level. Take for instance this blurb, which accompanies the painting above. It even touches on a bit of Buddhist philosophy: “Almost thirty, Lek’s body is still slender and supple. 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 ten year old son and live out the rest of this life in quiet, hoping the next cycle will be better.”

Jai Roon Reviews "Navigating the Bangkok Noir"

Chris Coles Paintings and Social Commentary.......

 By Jai Roon

Since writing pros James A. Newman and Jim Algie have both written extensive reviews on this book and both reviews are excellent, I'll keep mine brief.

I remember discovering the art of Chris Coles over 10 years ago. My first thought was: this guy seems interesting. Nobody is doing what he is doing. Dozens had written about the Bangkok Night before and dozens have written about it since but in the 21st Century, Chris Coles has been the indisputable leader in painting the darkness and the neon of Bangkok's notorious night paths.

But he does more than paint. He provides the quintessential social commentary needed with every colored frame. Chris Coles is to Bangkok Noir as Gary Trudeau was to Washington D.C. politics. The efficiency of what he gets across with the written word is classic story telling, usually with conflict involved, not often with catharsis.

Like many great artists, Chris Coles is misunderstood at times. There are some who see him as a proponent or cheerleader for the pay for play sex industry in Thailand. Not true. Chris has merely been making an extensive documentary in his art for over a decade.

The word prolific is overused but it is not overstated in his case. In NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR the very best of Chris Coles over 1,000 paintings have been selected.

Christopher G. Moore writes an excellent Forward to the book explaining the world of noir that Chris Coles captures so well.

I have no idea which authors will be remembered best in the 22nd Century for having written about the Bangkok night in the early 21st Century, if any at all. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the legacy of Chris Coles, the art of Chris Coles and the words of Chris Coles will linger well into the 22nd Century and beyond. His art, his documentary will be a reminder of a dark time. A time that once was and never will be, exactly, that way, again.

Kenneth L. Kantor Reviews "Navigating the Bangkok Noir"

Complex and Powerful Modern Expressionism

By Kenneth L. Kantor

On the one hand a free-form fantasy and on the other a fascinating ethnographic documentary, "Navigating the Bangkok Noir," is a powerful work. 

With its haunting, ghost-like figures and its chaotic, yet desolate, landscapes, Coles' work has become one of the favorites in my collection. This is a rich and compelling effort that I find myself drawn into again and again. Each time, something new and unexpected is revealed. It is rare to find an artist who combines such a skilled and playful sense of aesthetics with an unblinking eye for the turbulence which lies hidden just below the surface of a smile. Observing the paintings, I find myself sometimes forced to look away... to mitigate their intensity or to reassure myself that I am safe in the comfort of my own world.

Rooted in the Expressionism of the early 20th century, Coles' work employs deceptively simple imagery to illuminate complex emotional moments. Coles himself stands outside of any particular epoch; his images are simultaneously quite modern and intensely primitive. In spite of, or perhaps because of the decision to work in a social context alien to his primary audience, he manages to speak strongly to universal human feelings like alienation, hope, fear and desire.

Three Reviews of NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR

from the Goodreads site, reviews by Kevin Cummings, James Newman and Tom Vater........

Kevin Cummings:

Since writing pros James A. Newman and Tom Vater have both written extensive reviews of this book and both review are excellent, I'll keep mine brief.

I remember discovering the art of Chris Coles over 10 years ago.  My first thought was: this guy seems interesting.  Nobody is doing what he is doing.  Dozens had written about the Bangkok Night before and dozens have written about it since but in the 21st century, Chris Coles has been the indisputable leader in painting the darkness and neon of Bangkok's notorious night paths.

But he does more than paint. He provides the quintessential social commentary needed with every colored frame.  Chris Coles is to Bangkok Noir as Gary Trudeau was to Washington D.C. politics.  The efficiency of what he gets across with the written word is classic story telling, usually with conflict involved, not often with catharsis.

Like many great artists, Chris Coles is misunderstood at times. There are some who see him as a proponent or cheerleader for the pay for play sex industry in Thailand.  Not true.  Chris has merely been making an extensive documentary in his art for over a decade.

The word prolific is overused but it is not overstated in his case.  In NAVIGATING THE BANGKOK NOIR, the very best of Chris Coles over 1,000 paintings have been selected.

Christopher G. Moore writes an excellent Forward to the book explaining the world of noir that Chris Coles captures so well.

I have no idea which authors will be remembered best in the 22nd century for having written about the Bangkok night in the early 21st century, if any at ll.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that the legacy of Chris Coles, the art of Chris Coles and the words of Chris Coles will; linger well into the 22nd century and beyond.  His art, his documentary will be a reminder of a dark time.  A time that once was and never will be, exactly, that way again.

James Newman:

At first glance I thought negotiating would be a better transitive than navigating to describe the Bangkok bar-scene.  The way one negotiates an obstacle course, or say a bar fine.  A metaphorical obstacle course, fraught with dangers, the hurdles and the prices oscillate in accordance with the negotiators strengths, weaknesses, experience and beer Singha consumption.

Then I got it!

Nobody truly understands the city!  She does not really understand herself!  SHe is a new city, two hundred years and counting and full of a hodgepodge of crazies from around the world.  The word navigate spells uncharted territory.  It is a better word than negotiate.  Bangkok is for the tourists and the sex workers that find themselves washed up on her muddy banks a city yet to be navigated fully.  These are the subjects of Chris Coles' paintings.  Women working in bars.  Wenches as lost and as mean and as cruel and as happy as the men drinking in those bars.  It's a long dusty, winding road from Isaan.  A long flight back to the West.  Twice as long if you're going back.  Back empty-handed.

Bangkok noir is the end of the dream, the horrific memoir, the realization that what has motivated us for so long may not have been wholesome for the soul, the liver, nor the pocketbook.  Bangkok noir is the waking up in a hot tub with a gaggle of nubile North-Eastern women and wondering where it all went wrong.  Bangkok noir is the hundredth client serviced in an many hours in a downtown fishbowl.  The flicker of hope in a soi dog's eye.  The Arab's bent dagger.  The bargirl with a heart of gold.  The washed-out mamasan.

This is noir.

Bangkok noir is what it is becasue it isn't ever what it seems.

I arrived here ten years ago at the age of twenty-five.  I foolishly considered my previous incarnation as a Lloyds of London litigation broker would prove helpful in keeping afloat above the scams and the scum and the schemes of the city.  I was wrong.  I naively considered romance and commerce to be two separate items.  I would learn....  For the women of the night they are inseparable and absolute....  Money and love... There is no such thing as love without money and I'll say whatever you want and do whatever you please as long as the lolly keeps on coming, honey....

One of my favourite pieces in the book is Lover's Quarrel.

Coles describes the scene.

He's still you and naive, learning how to live.  She's spent the last five years working in a Bangkok bar, at least three lifetimes compared to him.  Both twenty-three, they're not frm different planets but separate solar systems, intersecting in the Bangkok night.

It's these descriptions alongside the paintings that bring Navigating the Bangkok Noir to life.  We can cook up out own stories from the paintings, but what Chris Coles does is describe them in a way that really hits the spot.  All any artist in any given medium can ever hope to achieve is to show us what we already knew, or didn't know that we knew.  But somehow we knew it.  Coles achieves this with each piece in the book.  The thrill of realization is overwhelming.  I had seen many of the paintings before the book was published and had perhaps seen some of the paintings before they were painted.  This is the magic of Bangkok noir.

The book begins with an excellent introduction by Christopher G. Moore - "Noir is more than paintings laced with plumes of cigarette smoke, bottles of beer, angry tarts and dissolute drunks" - It is and it isn't.  Moore concludes - "It is a universe of clashing colours, dramatic contrasts, jagged lines, extremes of behaviour and personality, mankind tilted on a primitive edge."

The dilemma that Chris Coles brings to light in his work is that of the struggle between the sexes and the cultures of desperately different wants and needs satisfying each other, or not, the neon-lit dollar-hungry underworld of Bangkok.  It is a world of abuse where nobody knows who is abusing who.  Who holds the power?  Is it the banker from New Jersey or the hooker from Udon Thani?  Or is it her Thai boyfriend, or the parents back home?  His job, his wife?  The weather?

This book is not only one of the finest art books to have been published thus far this year, it also points the way ahead for a colony of Bangkok artists to produce work that can be appreciated globally.  A Bangkok art movement could be afoot.  I hope it is. Coles is leading the way.

Tom Vater:

Producing great art in Thailand is difficult. It is even harder producing great art about Bangkok, the Thai capital.

On the one hand, Thai artists are constrained by wide-ranging limits on self-expression and freedom of speech. Decades of repression – occasionally both violent and deadly – of intellectuals, left-field politicians, social activists and artists, as well as high profile campaigns by the Ministry of Culture that appears concerned primarily with Thailand’s image abroad (in the same way the Catholic church or a multinational corporation spin alternative history) and countless, anything but subtle attempts to push a narrow elitist view of what it means to be Thai down the population’s collective throat, appear to have taken their toll.

Musicians, painters, film makers, poets and writers, for the most part, produce bland, non-confrontational, easy-to-consume fare, in tune with autocratic opinion-makers in the government and military. Those who do produce genuine masterpieces – like highly acclaimed film makers Pen Ek Ratanaruang, whose most recent film Headshot played Thai cinemas with a limited release for little more than week or Apichatpong Weerasethakul whose excellent Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which one the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010 – are occasionally lauded abroad, yet ignored at home.

Civil society has almost nothing to say about Thailand’s political shenanigans, and academics who raise their heads above the common swill are vilified and attacked by army generals and policemen. Sadly the quasi-fascist governments Thailand suffered through in the wake of World War II, supported by the US during the Cold War, have done terrible damage to Thailand’s current Zeitgeist.

On the other hand, millions of foreigners visit the country each year, in search of cheap holidays, beautiful beaches, great food and cheaper sex. Try as it might, Bangkok has not shaken its reputation as one of the world’s notorious sex capitals – though one might argue that Pattaya, a collection of high rises and brothels that puts Miami to shame, located a couple of hours east of the Thai capital, should actually be holding the crown as the number one Sleazeville in the region. In Thailand, if you have the money, you can buy anything readers of this page are likely to be able to imagine.

Some of the visiting foreigners love it so much, they stay. They just can’t stop rolling around in it. And some, a few, produce work about their experiences – books, films, visual art. Almost everything they write or shoot or paint is crap – cliched rubbish populated by sad stereo-types even more disturbing and one-dimensional than the Fellinis, tweekers, sex-pats and creeps that swarm from international flights into Bangkok’s airport and into the lonely tropical nights beyond, every single day of the year. Stand in the arrivals hall for an hour and watch what comes off the plane and you will see what I mean.

In recent years, several small independent publishers have given rise to a couple of genres of piss-awful ‘literature’ dedicated to those wallowing in Bangkok’s nighttime muck. On the one hand, writers like Christopher Moore and John Burdett, the best of the lot, lead a small pack of crime writers dispensing twisted tales of nefarious on-goings in the Thai capital, while there’s another batch of much worse authors who churn out books, both fiction and non fiction (it hardly matters) focused entirely on Bangkok’s sordid and tired sex for sale nightlife, dreaming up badly written tales of hapless, happy or predatory hookers. In these crummy tomes, the myths of the happy whore, the seedy but decent private eye fighting the forces of evil and the land of smiles are copied and pasted over and over again. Sadly, those millions of punters who spend most of their time propped up on a bar stool in a go-go bar in Patpong, Nana or Cowboy (those Bangkok’s nightlife areas that are frequented by foreigners), relate to most of this literary dross and provide a market for it. There are enough dumbbells out there buying into the story of swinging Bangkok to enable a whole roster of useless scribes to eke out a living, or at least provide themselves with opportunities to stroke their egos.

There are exceptions of course – artists and writers who try to approach Bangkok’s high and low life from their own personal and unique perspectives without getting their private parts caught in the recesses of passing ladyboys. The Windup Girl by Pablo Bacigalupi is an excellent novel about the Thai capital, set in the 23rd century, a time when a Monsanto-type corporation has destroyed the world and the Thais own the world’s last seed bank. Gripping drama, and yes, there’s sex thrown in, as well fascinating politics, social comment and rip-roaring action. For me, literary visions of Bangkok almost end there.

Navigating the Bangkok Noir, a book of paintings by American artist Chris Coles, takes a different route into Bangkok’s underbelly. This series of expressionist paintings in book form, published by Marshall Cavendish and accompanied by sensitive and insightful captions by the artist, somehow manages to take us to the same places that the Bangkok hacks frequent without falling for the same cliches. Perhaps painting is a better medium to portray the sadness and beauty, the darkness and the occasional rays of bright shining light – in short the unearthly glow of the Thai capital – than the written word. Perhaps, because Thailand prides itself on its anti-intellectualism, Coles’ images transcend the prostitute Disneyland of countless wasted pulp novels and bring some real dignity and, most importantly, substance to its subjects.

Coles’ paintings have a bitter-sweet glow all of their own, taking us down the crummy sois, letting us look at the city from a street dog’s perspective (who is really a German sex tourist, we are told), helping us understand that the world is unfair, and that as soon as it gets dark, unfairness goes at a premium in the City of Angels. The artist manages a difficult hat trick. His night girls are beautiful and tragic at the same time. His johns are as gross as in real life and yet they have charisma. His world is sleazy, sure, but it exists and the artist has a gentle way of explaining why it has a right to do so, just as much as any other world out there.

There is reason to paint these people – that appears to be the central premise of Coles’ work – and the artist knows how to pick his characters, men and women of an inconsequential neon-netherworld that exists primarily because it offers an escape from the equally sordid and boring but less exotic real world its inhabitants came from. The girls leave their villages because girls have very very little opportunity in Thailand and the men fly in from around the world because they can no longer cope with their lives and loves and prefer to pay for female (or otherwise) company or are so lonely that they will accept semi-literate rice farmers as MCs providing psychiatric discourse on the hang-ups of the western world.

Chris Coles catches the nuances, the small pains and tiny losses and gains that are made each night on Sukhumvit, Bangkok’s main downtown thoroughfare: he captures the tide of emotional refuse that washes up on the Thai capital’s pavements. The women emerge with dignity intact, while the men don’t emerge at all. They are what they are, empty, broken human beings who roll around in it.

Navigating the Bangkok Noir is an excellent introduction to Southeast Asia’s Interzone, to the black patches on the global map of capitalist indifference, and to the lost opportunities of thousands of young Thai women who get screwed, both literally and metaphorically, day in, day out, by their government, by society, by the cops, by peer pressure and by foreigners. I don’t see this book in the Top Ten of the Ministry of Culture any time soon.  It's got too much soul.

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

Photos from FCCT Show of "Paintings from the Bangkok Night"

Philip Cornwel-Smith and Artist discuss "Soi Cowboy"
(photo by Richard Barrow)

King of Ratchada Chuwit with "Ratchada Poseidon" in background

FCCT Bar with "Sexy Bar" and "Thaniya Plaza" in background

FCCT crowd

FCCT Guy with "Soi Cowboy" neon in background

"Girl from the Bangkok Night" with Ido Berger

"Sexy Bar"  (photo by Aroon Vater)

Quiet conversation at FCCT show
(photo by Aroon Vater)

FCCT with "Sexy Bar" and "Thaniya Plaza" in background

"Sexy Bar" and "Thaiya Plaza"

FCCT show

Montage of FCCT Show by Richard Barrow

View from FCCT Speakers table

View from speakers table

FCCT bar

"Sexy Bar" and "Thaniya Plaza" in background

"Soi Cowboy" in background

"Old Hand Bangkok Journalist" and "Tilac Agogo"

"Sexy Bar" and "Thaniya Plaza"

"Midnite Bar" and "Bangkok Boys Town"

"Midnite Bar" and "Bangkok Boys Town"

"Ratchada Poseidon"

FCCT bar

"Sexy Bar" and "Thaniya Plaza"

"Soi Cowboy"

"Sexy Bar" and "Thaniya Plaza"

"Midnite Bar" and "Bangkok Boys Town"

Journalists at FCCT bar

FCCT speakers table before Opening

FCCT before Opening

FCCT speakers table

About to speak on German Expressionism and the Bangkok Night

"Navigating the Bangkok Noir"