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NAVIN RAWANCHAIKUL

Conceptual Framework: Artwork

There is no Voice (1993)
Installation with photographs, glass bottles, cork and wood
122 X 122 X 259 cm

The artwork consists of an installation of 15,000 bottles stacked in diminishing circular tiers, each bottle containing a photograph of one of the village people from rural areas around Rawanchaikul’s city, Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand.

Conceptual Framework: Artist

Born in Chiang Mai, Thailand, 1971, Navin Rawanchaikul, is a contemporary South-East Asian installation artist whose artmaking fits within both the Cultural and Postmodern frames. His role as an artist is to be a social activist. He has an on-going interest in the daily lives of ordinary people and so uses themes based on the changing identities of local communities throughout S.E. Asia in the wake of westernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation.

Conceptual Framework: World

Rawanchaikul inhabits a world in which traditional values are being rapidly supplanted by western values. This is reflected in his artmaking. In There is no Voice (1993) he comments on the changes to village life and identity for the ordinary people of rural Thailand. But he is also part of the wider, developed art world, having worked and exhibited in Japan, London and New York. He can work within the western system of exhibiting his work in an art gallery, or he can use more unorthodox methods to bring his work to public attention. He has developed a mobile art gallery in the form of a taxi-cab as a space in which to exhibit artworks. He uses this to provide a bridge between the contemporary art world and an audience which has little knowledge of contemporary art practice and the, as yet, poorly-developed art scene in S. E. Asia.

Frames: Cultural/Postmodern
Conceptual Framework: Audience

Navin Rawanchaikul interviewed local villagers near Chiang Mai and discovered that their sense of cultural identity was changing. They could not see themselves as being part of the larger, contemporary world. They felt that increasing urbanisation was destroying their place in the world and their voices, as the older, wiser generation, were no longer valued and no longer heard. As a way of dramatising this cultural change, Navin Rawanchaikul constructed an installation that could be displayed in places where the audience, other everyday people in Thailand, but especially those with education, could see them. He wanted the audience to be active: to think about the message of the artwork and perhaps even act on it. The installation was placed in places such as libraries and universities rather than in art galleries.
Navin Rawanchaikul has appropriated the art form of installation from contemporary western art but has transformed it with his own Thai sensibilities. He has placed There is no Voice into the context of a Thailand experiencing cultural displacements so that it is recontextualised as a postmodern statement about identity.

Artmaking Practice: Ideas

Rawanchaikul developed the idea that cultural changes to the lives of everyday people in Thailand needed to be identified and presented in a compelling way to an audience. In There is no Voice his idea is to bridge the gap between the younger, educated people in the cities and the older folk living in the countryside. Another of his ideas was to move away from the traditional art scene in Thailand based around the market for old artifacts and traditional crafts and move firmly into the area of contemporary art practice. But to make sure that there were enough points of reference for the Thai audience to be able to understand There is no Voice he chose to use materials and a particular shape familiar to this audience.

Artmaking Practice: Actions

Rawanchaikul chose to use black and white, full-bodied photographic portraits of the elderly villagers that he interviewed placed within discarded medicine bottles, on display, but their images are protected and their memories preserved. The installation comprises a two metre high, eleven column semi-circular tower on which the uncleaned bottles are placed in a seemingly-random fashion. The artist has carefully chosen the shape of the tower to mimic one of the culturally significant structures familiar to his Thai audience – the Pagoda.

This then alerts the audience to the cultural gravitas of the work, so that these images of a Thailand rapidly disappearing are placed in a shrine-like construction as well as being like specimens on display. This form of double-coding expresses the trapped situation of a people whose voice is not heard.