Bundit Puangthong’s paintings represent many of the concerns of recent contemporary painting. His approach to story telling and image making relies on the long history of painting and a variety of different cultural forms. Instead of highlighting cultural difference the paintings elide the old and the new, the contemporary and more traditional narratives. The critical approach in these paintings is to always keep these contradictions in play. The works do not neatly unify into a clear whole but insist on difference and juxtaposition. In a contemporary way the work seems to debase or declass itself. This is not parody but a constant feeling that bits of the work are fraying at the edges; the works have a feeling that Puangtong is constantly working through cultural artefacts without ever allowing the works to fully finish.
This constant layering creates a palimpsest effect that is quite familiar in contemporary art. Even in the modern period the graffiti like marks of Cy Twombly, or the layering of a Debuffet come to mind. But perhaps the expressionism of the eighties, coming itself out of the street graffiti of 1980s New York is the most direct influence. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring often scratched out and revised the very pictorial motifs that they were using like graffiti artists “capping” themselves. This state of hesitation and uncertainty seems to define much of contemporary practice. In Heaven Nine the titular painting in this show, the grand scale of the painting seems to referecne the street or the billboard. It competes with spectacle while willing the spectacle to fail.
In asking how to image the “now” Puangthong shows that we are made up of many colliding influences, none of which can take precedence, the traditional hierarchies are dead. A number of writers have mentioned the nostalgia in Puangtong’s work for his Thai heritage. There is no doubt that the paintings mine Thai cultural manifestations for their subject matter. Puangtong came to art early helping his grandfather paint puppet theatre sets; similarly the primary art form of Thailand, dance is ever present in the work especially through the costuming and stylised gestures. The many animals and Gods also directly reference Thai fable and religious story.
Puangthong suggests: In this new work I have tried to capture the spirit of the animals and fictional characters from my childhood. Like much of my work, these paintings deal with nostalgia for a time and place that is no longer, expressing my gratitude for the understanding and perspectives my childhood experiences have given me. On the other hand the work shows a successful coming to terms with this shift into modernity and urbanity. As clearly illustrated in these works for Puangtong he is hopeful that the past and the present must co-exist. Similarly Puangthong shows himself to be a citizen of the world, not wholly connected to one place in particular. In this sense the works are contemporary pop art, summing up the experience of late capital which flattens cultural context out into a transglobal homogeneity. By keeping everything in play though, by allowing certain objects and words to come to the surface at different times, Puangthong fights this coca-colonistation. He slows us down enough to see everything clearly at once.
