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.”

Review from an Anonymous Blogger

"Bangkok After Hours" - Chris Coles

I recently came across the following comment/review by an anonymous blogger which I thought was very insightful and quite interesting:

“Chris Coles paintings and artwork is very striking I guess I would say.  They remind me of Zappa lyrics...'gross and perverted, obsessed and deranged'.  His colors are so primitive and their throbbing clash on your eyes and senses ooze a sense of darkness, of evil even.  Yet, they are almost playful at times and amusing as well.  His work reminds me of what I expect to see when I am fairly obliterated and moving aside the thick velvet curtain of the umpteenth 'next' gogo bar, the one I know I should not go in, but enter I do. You know, the bar with the katoey mamasan with the garish make-up that glows under the black lights that scares the bejesus out of you as his/her face looms in your drunken blurry field of vision.  Coles captures the extra-dimensional feel of the Thailand nightlife.  His work occupies another zone of existence.  It's so ugly at times it is intriguing in a perverse way that makes one want to embrace it.  If you know what I mean? Maybe not....” 

From BangkokEyes:"Through the Neon & Black-Light Looking-Glass with Chris Coles"

Bangkok's nightworld expands undiminishingly, and has done so in three dimensions for several decades - there is no end in sight. It has become a fathomless, garish world, the dynamics of which are no longer capable of being comprehended by a single person, or organization or government entity. More complex than any single living organism, the Bangkok Night Scene has, like the fictional SkyNet in the Terminator series, begun to function independently, both inside, and outside the boundaries of society's manmade laws, ordinances and norms. Bangkok's Nightworld complexities can be seen, in parts, by anyone venturing into the streets after dark, however, a holistic comprehension shall remain beyond the pale. The Night Scene 'whole' is now made up of too many 'parts' - many of these parts coming into contact with the other parts, and many not. The immensity and complexity of Bangkok's Nightworld is such that no two individuals perceive the Bangkok Nightlife Scene in the same way. It is more likely than not that individuals living in, or coming to Bangkok will not be exposed to all, or even some, of the same things - and will almost certainly carry away with them entirely different views of Bangkok's Night Scene - it has become that big - that multi-faceted. While self-annointed "Old-Bangkok-Hands" will tend to be skeptical of this view, they are in fact, the first to be lulled into a simplistic view of 'The Scene'. To illustrate : - the Khao Sarn Road crowd, with their Lonely Planets in hand, often do not see any other 'Bangkok Nightlife'. There are those who prefer the laid-back bar beer scene, with a regimen of darts and pool, and there are those who are exclusively "pub people". The drug dealers and pushers live in their own stratum of the Nightscene, as do the street hookers, who rarely or never mix with other Nightlife strata. The gays see only their gay world within the Nightlife Scene, never needing to leave Soi Twilight, Soi Katoey and the like. The mainstream "Bangkok Bar Scene" boys see their own "Bangkok", as do Bangkok's police, as do the night street vendors and sidewalk barkeeps. Then there are the "party" crowds who, by design, keep to themselves and their soft drugs and orgies - their 'Bangkok Nights' being separate and apart from the others. There are also those who prefer the specialty massage parlors over the bars, and spend virtually all their (night) time at these venues. And there are others who only see, physically, a small part of Bangkok's Nightlife; one soi, or perhaps two or three sois in a given neighborhood (such as Washington Square, or Rachada, or RCA, or Suthisarn, or Jatujak). And there are those from Germany who see and know one 'Nighttime Bangkok', while those from Nigeria see and know another -almost exclusively. While it serves no purpose to ennumerate each and every aspect of Bangkok's Night Scene, it should also be noted that there are some individuals who 'partake' of more than one of the above. However it becomes abundantly apparent that it is physically impossible to partake of the entire "Scene" in all its forms and in all it's localities. And while there is no finite, all encompassing definition of this potentially dangerous, high-energy morass of boozers, soft and hard drug addicts and traffickers, whoremongers and whores, gays and straights, pedophiles and child prostitutes, scammers and hustlers and pickpockets, drug-you-and-rob-you katoeys, liars, human traffickers, bent and honest cops, dishonest and honest taxi drivers (and etc), Bangkok's Nightlife denizens do exist, do adapt, and do develop an overall sense of how to, and how not to, navigate through much of our midnight jungle. It is, rather, this navigational sense -this ability to remain functional in a darker world where cause-and-effect is often not obvious- that defines the "Bangkok noir". One such denizen of Bangkok's 'electric nights' is an expatriate American artist by the name of Chris Coles, whose paintings you are now viewing. His total immersion in Bangkok's Nightlife Scene preceded his current series of 'noir' paintings - his absorbtion of that around him was, and is, complete to the extent that he "sees" each of his subjects as though illuminated in neon and black-light. Originally, these paintings were thought to be "weird", however, because his unique surrealism keeps this one hook in reality (abundantly apparent to Bangkok's like-minded denizens), the interest in this one-of-a-kind artist and his works continues to grow. A recent showing of his works at Liam's Gallery in Pattaya was more than modestly successful - one local expat now owns two of Coles' works, and others are considering it prudent to add one to their personal collections. But regardless of who owns, or doesn't own whatever, Chris Coles' Nightscene works are the real deal - a part and parcel of Bangkok's neon circus.