"Ratchada Fishbowl - Thailand for Sale"..............

"Ratchada Fishbowl - Thailand for Sale" - Chris Coles

Emmanuelle Ratchada - Enter the Night...................

"Emmanuelle Ratchada - Enter the Night" - Chris Coles

Disco Ratchada Bangkok Night.........

"Disco Ratchada Bangkok Night" - Chris Coles

Thai-Chinese Guy at VIP Club Ratchada

"Thai-Chinese Guy at VIP Club Ratchada" - Chris Coles

Thai General in the Bangkok Night

"Thai General in the Bangkok Night" -Chris Coles

A Thai general has many responsibilities and obligations......from Thailand's Deep South to the northwest border with Burma.....and in Bangkok too....Ratchada, RCA, around the Asia Hotel and more....everyday there are complex and difficult tasks to accomplish and many interests to be kept in harmony....

Sexy Sauna & Soapy Massage in the Bangkok Night

"Sexy Sauna & Soapy Massage in the Bangkok Night" - Chris Coles

PAD/Yellow Thai Guy in the Bangkok Night

"PAD/Yellow Thai Guy in the Bangkok Night" - Chris Coles

Sometimes, the PAD/Yellow royalist guys pretend they are above, floating in a superior form of oxygen, detached and disconnected from the material earth.....but the owners and managers of the gigantic massage palaces in Ratchada and the 5 star Executive Clubs in Upper Sukhumvit know better...........

"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

"German Expressionism and the Bangkok Night" at FCCT, Friday, Oct 19th

"Boys Town" - Chris Coles (80x100cm acrylic on canvas)

For anyone who might be interested, I'll be giving an illustrated talk at FCCT on "German Expressionism and the Bangkok Night" on Friday evening, October 19th, per the FCCT announcement below.  

Philip Cornwel-Smith will be providing the introduction and sharing his thoughts/overview on Bangkok's nightlife as a source and inspiration for art, music, literature and movies.  

Followed by a Q and A.

The talk coincides with the Opening/Launch of my "Paintings from the Bangkok Night" exhibition at FCCT  which will be running from October 15th thru November 14th.

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FCCT Announcement:

"Paintings from the Bangkok Night" Exhibition by artist Chris Coles
7pm, Friday, October 19, 2012

Free Admission

This special exhibition will present some of Chris Coles' most recent large-format acrylic paintings of various scenes and some of the people who populate the Bangkok Night, an almost infinite neon landscape that stretches from Ratchada to Thaniya Plaza, Surawong Boys Town, Soi Cowboy, Sukhumvit Soi 33, Nana Plaza and beyond; a world inhabited by people from all over Thailand, most of Asia and just about every country on Earth.

Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who divides his time between Bangkok and the coast of Maine. He is one of the first artists to explore the chaotic and ambiguous world of the Bangkok Night. His paintings, in the Expressionist style, are jagged and emotional portraits, revealing a raw and primitive layer of the human experience. A book of his paintings, "Navigating the Bangkok Noir", was recently published by Marshall Cavendish Singapore.

As part of the art show's Opening Night, Chris will give a short talk regarding the origins and style of his work titled, "German Expressionism and the Bangkok Night".

Philip Cornwel-Smith, author of VERY THAI and Founding Editor of Bangkok Metro Magazine, will introduce Chris and provide some thoughts on Bangkok's nightlife as a source and inspiration for art, music, literature and movies.

The FCCT exhibition runs from October 16 to November 14.

"Navigating the Bangkok Noir" is available at Kinokuniya and Asia Books stores, and also via the Internet (Bt500 to Bt600 baht, depending upon the supplier).

For more details go to the Chris Coles Gallery website at www.chriscolesgallery.com

For a map of how to get to FCCT @ Penthouse Floor, Meneeya Center, BTS Chitlom:  http://www.fccthai.com/FCCTMap.pdf

"Creatures of the Night" article from The Nation

Nice article/interview in The Nation, Tuesday, October 16th, on "Paintings from the Bangkok Night" show opening at FCCT on Friday October 19th, 7pm.......
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Creatures of the night

by Jim Pollard  - The Nation October 16, 2012

 

Artist Chris Coles focuses on the bright lights and dark pulse of Bangkok's infamous nightlife

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the appeal of places or things that locals can be blind to. For Chris Coles, an American artist who has lived in Bangkok on and off for more than a decade, the urban jungle is the source of his inspiration.

Coles worked in the movie business for a quarter of a century and travelled widely before buying a condo in Bangkok in the late '90s. He says his time in the film industry, with set designers such as Stuart Craig and filmmakers like Roger Deakins, heightened his appreciation and awareness of the sights he encountered in Southeast Asia.

"It was a real eye-opener the first time coming here - visually dense and the energy here. I got really interested in modern Asia. For a Westerner, it's such a different universe."

Most farang, he says, are not used to all the motion and density they initially encounter in the Thai capital. "Thais are quite relaxed and at ease in a lot of dense visual information - holes in the sidewalk, motorcycles, soi dogs, etc - but it overloads your senses. Most Westerners are not used to that in the first year here."

For Coles, whose mother was an artist, just having a meal or a drink in some notorious nightlife areas can be a rich visual feast. "For an artist, it's like sitting next to Niagara Falls."

He talks about art with passion. He is big on the German expressionists such as Emil Nolde, who painted scenes in Berlin in the 1920s, and sees similarities to modern-day Bangkok, which he rates as "the real capital of Southeast Asia" - a city of multiple cultural streams, great infrastructure, and "tremendous visual intensity".

Coles uses colour with similar boldness - bright, vivid images, with characters and scenes from "the noir side of the Bangkok night".

His book, "Navigating the Bangkok Noir", published last year by Marshall Cavendish, portrays the diverse underbelly of life that makes the capital so spicy and colourful.

He makes it sound like a hot tom yum of all the things conservative locals would stir clear of - as his book says: "bargirls, punters, ladyboys, rentboys, and the assorted cast of thugs, scammers, traffickers, dealers, perverts, hitmen and the endless stream of fugitives from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America, not to mention Thailand itself".

Coles grew up in a fishing village in Maine on the US Atlantic coast. At 17 he caught a bus to Los Angeles on the West Coast and worked in a Mexican restaurant. The following year he was on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii. Shortly after that he was in the West Australian outback, before returning to the US to study literature at Brown University. He journeyed around Kenya before travelling to London, teaching, and then taking a course at Britain's national film school.

In the late '70s he got into the movie business, working as a production manager on the Superman movies with Christopher Reeve.

By 1995, when he came to Phang Nga to work on "Cutthroat Island", he was a studio executive. Directed by Renny Harlin, the movie starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine was the biggest bomb in box-office history, but it got him to Thailand.

With less interest in films, and his daughter then at university, he was free to pursue his interest in art and live in Thailand.

Coles graduated from sketching to painting after doing art courses at the Otis School in Los Angeles in 2002. He now paints about eight hours a day at a studio off lower Sukhumvit Road.

"A lot of what I'm doing is coming out of the German expressionist style and out of Nolde," he says. "I paint all day, have lunch or dinner on the street or at a food court, and maybe go to the gym. At 10pm I'm finished and wander around for a couple of hours. I might go to Saphan Taksin, Sukhumvit, Ekamai or get the Skytrain somewhere."

What amazes him is the variety of people one can meet - and paint - here. He talks of sitting and deconstructing a scene while having a bowl of noodles on the sidewalk.

When painting, he likes to use strange lighting and will often focus on a person's face.

"I'm interested in what the face hides that's within, and how the same person in the day, during the Bangkok night suddenly they're something else - like someone set them on fire."

MEET THE MAN

Coles will feature new works in a show at the Foreign Correspondents Club, opening on Friday at 7pm.

Philip Cornwel-Smith, the author of "Very Thai", will give a short introductory talk about how Bangkok's nightlife has been an inspiration for many artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians.

For more details, see www.FCCThai.com

http://nationmultimedia.com/life/Creatures-of-the-night-30192373.html

BK Magazine Blurb on FCCT Show

Italian Sex Tourist Nana Plaza Bangkok

Italian Sex Tourist Nana Plaza Bangkok - Chris Coles/2008

......he's partied in Estonia, Prague, Havana and Rio, even little Costa Rica..........but he always comes back to Bangkok........Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy, Patpong, Sukhumvit, the mighty Ratchada. There's something about the ambiance and smiles, the slender girls........the music, the street stalls......the feeling of another planet beyond space and time.................