2nd EXHIBITION

ART EXHIBITION NO APPEARANCE NON EXISTING
With Affiliated friends
Curated by Matthanee Nilavongse
Produces by Clare Donegan
at The Hole in t' Wall, Hebden Bridge, United Kingdom.
9 - 23 March 2009

ATTENDED ARTISTS
Sukhum Nakpradith
Matthanee Nillavongse
Saroengrong Wongsavan
Dhanyapat Sajjalaksana
Narissara Pianwimungsa
Pittikasem Nilavongse
Promporn Pakkam
Alice Hutt
Clare Donegan
Clare Lupino
James Bell
Kate Borgman
SNUB23
SINNA1

PRELUDE
I looked at my life, I'd love to have some link of art between Bangkok, Thailand and Hebden Bridge, United Kingdom.
Because even the racism is effect all around the world now but I still believed that art is having no boundary.
And also I would like to present one shade of the Thai Culture to the local people where I lived because not many people know Thailand if they never been. Some stereotype about Thai people is quite strong. I couldn't change the ideal but I could show some aesthetic side.
So from the little start I would like to have a first exhibition in Hebden Bridge, United Kingdom and then go to Berln, Germany which I have one connection with the independent gallery and then go to Bangkok and Chiangmai, Thailand and hopefully to expanding the group and continuing onto the next people.

by
Matthanee Nilavongse

OVERALL IMAGES

APPRAISAL
by Kelly Loughlin & Silmon Manfield, 2009

"No Appearance Non Existing presents work by an international collective of artists. The group includes a predominance of Thai artists living and working in the United Kingdom, USA and Thailand, alongside contributors from Britain and Ireland. The exhibition's leitmotiv has its foundation in Theravada Buddhist philosophy. The liberation from 'becoming' things or selves by the ridding of personal suffering, and was devised through an online exchange between Sukhum Nakpradith, director of the INVISIBLE PROJECT in Thailnad, curator Matthanee Gig Nilavongse in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire and the coterie of artists involved.

First show in Hebden Bridge in March 2009, the exhibition will tour to the Futuresonic Fringe arts festival in Manchester followed by shows in Berlin and Chiangmai.

On display are a diversity of styles and media, including painting and photography, however, the most utilised techniques on offer are collage and montage. In many ways this is fitting, as the project avoids any straightforward dialogue between East and West, opening instead for the way shared fragments of personal cultural and spiritual experience find resonance in an increasingly globalised world.

Among the pieces exhibited some common threads emerge. A dreamlike, hallucinatory quality is evident in many of the explorations of culture, myth, memory and presence. This is apparent in the constant blending of the iconic and the everyday. Figures from Greco/Romano and Biblical mythology (Pitikasem Nilavongse), Catholic liturgy (Clare Lupino) and Renaissance art (Mathanee Gig Nilavongse) appear as fragments of the mundane of alien intrusions.

Pitikasem Nilavongse's paintings employ a warm and calming palette and, with the inclusion of renderings of ancient figures such as Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses in the composition, are delicate statements of an ethereal world.

Clare Lupino's intensely personal pieces delineate memories of a past that has shaped her and has left its mark. Her Triptych 'Over the rainbow' explores this autobiographical theme in fine detail, describing a journey of self-discovery and the recuperation of relationships with family, self and God. The painting/montage has been executed with energy, radiating golden brush-strokes enliven the composition, while splayed hands in fervent celebration fill canvases with joy and devotion.

Matthanee Gig Nilavongse's photographic self-portraits display humour, exoticism, eroticism and aplayful dalliance with the history of art and culture. In one she has been transmogrified into the ubiquitous carved Thai wooden statue that greats you as you ender her pictorial world. The appearance of Antonio Canova's 'Three Graces' in another lends a demure counter to the baroque ostentation of the interior scene, while the artist stands before a set table bearing ad enigmatic smile resembling da Vinci's 'La Giaconda'

Titles such as 'Over the rainbow' and 'Once upon a time' suggest the mythic element of popular cultural traditions and mass media products. The sense of movement or voyage implicit in these titles echoes the idea of a personal, spiritual or political journey evoked in work by Dhanyapat Sajjalaksana, Sukhum Nakpradith, Clare Donegan and Alice Hutt.

Our interpretation, as westerners of some of the Thai artist's work is not straightforward. We view them not fully understanding their spiritual significance. The works of Sukhum Nakpradith, Dhanyapat Sajjalaksana and Narissara Pianwimungsa are emblematic of their beliefs, exploring the meanings of a Buddhist vocabulary self, truth and emptiness, but the most importantly the voyage to attain knowledge

Sukhum Nakpradith's photographic installation entitled 'End of Ens' obscures our perception of reality. Six images are hung closely together and each is a journey, or at least part of one. Viewing them is like watching the landscape pass from the window of a speeing train, until your eyes fix on the last image, where we go passing in to and empty night.

in Dhanyapat Sajjalaksana's tentraptych the vista is celestial. The spectator hovers above a geometric landscape, among naturalistic imaginings: a pair of unearthly wings, coulds, a bird perched on a branch of a blossoming tree and whathas the sense of a cityscape at its most frenetic.With titles such as '. . . seems like you are not realizing it'. the tour paintings forcast stages of the perpetual odyssey to enlightenment.

The inverted head of the figure in Narissara Pianwimungsa's solitary painting has an innocent face: its blue eyes stare, not into your eyes but just above your head. The figure is engulfed in a puffer jaket and sinks into an overall red-hued glow, depicting a mood of self-doubt and leaving us questioning who we are.

Depictions of the individual reverberate between being present and not present, connected but isolated. This dilemma is explored in relation to urban space (Promporn Pakkam, Saroengrong Wong Savan, Kate Borgman) or reconfigurations of the natural and the machine (James Bell). Clothing, tatoos and elements of tradition become a repertoire able to disguese yet simultaneously.reveal, distort yet affirm (Clare Lupino in collaboration with textile artist Nikki Rose, Matthanee Gig Nilavongse, Pittikasem Nilavongse)

As a whole the exhibition is quirky and thoughtful by turns. It challenges our preconceptions of what we find acceptable by ignoring the conversations of a traditionally presented show. It has a guerrilla/punk mentality; it is rough-and-ready and has a no-frills concept of display, yet the construction and ideals of the individual works do not comply with the ethos. Their conceptual identities are not so straightforward of unadorned. The exhibition title itself, No Appearance Non Existing. is thought provoking and leaves you asking questions. It is perhaps the many visual contradictions implicit in the collection of work here and the cathartic response inherent in realizing a piece of visual art that enables the artist/voyager to begin to understand the true nature of reality, helping to unburden the self. It is this realization that connects so precisely with the show's original template."

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Kelly Loughlin is a writer and academic based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.
Silmon Manfield is an illustrator based in Hebden Bridhe, Wel Yorkshire. He has recently completed Memoria Historica, his first major series of drawings. Memoria Historica depicts the progress of an excavation of a Spanish Civil War era communal grave in the north of Spain and, as a collection, has been exhibited internationally. He is currently working on an artist's book illustrating a poem by Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown, entitled Orcadians: Seven Impromptus.