MUSEC – VILLA MALPENSATA
Attasit Pokpong (Bangkok, 1977) is one of the leading exponents of Thai contemporary art. The exhibition, curated by Giancarlo Ermotti, Paolo Maiullari and Nora Segreto, brings together 29 large-scale oil paintings and 22 watercolours depicting women’s faces. This is the subject that, after the survey of Thailand’s natural landscapes and Bangkok’s urban landscapes, became the most characteristic element of Pokpong’s production between 2008 and 2023. In early 2023, the artist created 14 new works specifically for display in MUSEC’s Sky Space.
Attasit Pokpong’s woman, whose features are inspired by those of his wife, is almost always impassive, portrayed in close-up and frontally. The clean cut of her hair frames her face, where the brightly coloured lips emphasise her charm, and the oriental features of her oval make her gaze penetrating, capable of communicating with the viewer.
The Thai artist calls her work ‘an art of presence’, where the mediation of the female figure testifies to the encounter between the world’s multiple specificities. In Pokpong’s works, the female face is the absolute symbol of emotion and the communicative form par excellence, as well as the ideal expressive vehicle of his art, as it is able to fascinate and disturb his inner world, enhancing its creative potential.
One of the most recognisable features of Pokpong’s work is also colour. After an early period in which the impact of the female portraits was centred on the lips, the chromatic vividness has extended to the whole face, until it takes over the entire surface of the canvas in the most recent works. Such a change corresponds to an expansion of the artist’s investigation of contemporary society through female aesthetics. The colours in her paintings draw their meanings from the colours of history, society, politics and culture of both Thailand and the globalised world, taking on the function of a code that celebrates diversity and advocates a present of respectful coexistence. Pokpong has recently experimented with a new communicative register consisting of the reflection of people and things on the lenses of his protagonists’ sunglasses. The subjects not only show the sensible reality, but also the inner reality, made up of past and present, roots and new identities. Through the mirror, Pokpong evokes contemporary society, the past, the other, the future, change, and invites the viewer to physically place himself in front of the work and immerse himself directly in the proposed themes.
Attasit Pokpong. Biographical notes
Attasit Pokpong was born in Bangkok in 1977. From an early age, he was attracted to drawing, which he furthered by attending the Rajamangala University of Technology in Bangkok, where he graduated in Fine Arts in 1998. His career started immediately after his studies. Since 1999, he has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and in 2009, he opened the Magic Gallery in the Thai capital in order to have a permanent space in which to present his work. From 2009 onwards, he exhibited in numerous solo shows that took him beyond the borders of Thailand and Asia, to countries such as Cambodia, China, Korea, Taiwan, Belgium, France, Italy and the United States. The MUSEC exhibition is his first solo show in Switzerland.
Sensitive to the recognition of a new multicultural reality and aware of the constructive contribution that the artist can make to the current context marked by many fragilities, in 2012 Pokpong inaugurated the V64 Art Studio project, a meeting point available to the Thai artistic community, a ‘place of creativity’ clearly visible and open to the world.
Global Aesthetics is a project dedicated to exploring the relationship between contemporary art and the ideological and cultural context in which it moves.
By its very nature, it envisages the confrontation and interaction of the different disciplines with which contemporary creativity can be read, and thus offers itself as a tested methodology capable of reconciling the different perspectives at play.