"ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK" by American painter Chris Coles

“ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK” the noir expressionist world of the Bangkok night by American painter Chris Coles -

 Supported by : www.centrepiece.com.sg 

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  One Night in Bangkok is an event of IndigNation 2009.

 
About the Exhibition:

One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster

The bars are temples but the pearls ain’t free

You’ll find a god in every golden cloister

And if you’re lucky then the god’s a she

I can feel an angel sliding up to me

-          from the musical Chess, lyrics Tim Rice

The blinding neon and shady denizens of the Bangkok night are captured vividly in American painter Chris Cole’s watercolour renditions of the lurid and colourful world of the Thai capital’s notorious nightlife. Heavily distorted lines and strong, clashing colors dominate in these paintings which portray a chaotic, edgy noir world of colliding intention and misplaced desire, lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation. They echo the German Expressionist paintings from Berlin in the early 1900′s as well as the Paris nightlife paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the early Picasso. Organized into twinkling street scenes, situational encounters and mesmerizing portraits of the girls, the boys, the kathoeys (ladyboys) and their clients, Chris Cole shows us how the Bangkok night isn’t “only a sordid money-machine servicing the low-end of humanity”, but “an authentic and unique setting in the ongoing cultural history of mankind”.

 
About the Artists:

The visual arts representative of the emerging Bangkok noir movement (including the crime fiction of Christopher Moore, Jake Needham, Stephen Leader and John Burdett; and the films of the Pang brothers and Smith Timsawit), Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles and Bangkok.  One of the first artists to explore the world of the Bangkok Night, his paintings, in the Expressionist style, are jagged emotional portraits, revealing a raw and primitive layer of the human experience.

Chris grew up on the coast of Maine and after graduating from Brown University, received a Watson Fellowship to spend a year living in the Bajuni Islands off the coast of East Africa where he made a series of voyages up and down the coast in Swahili trading dhows.  He has lived and worked in Europe, North America, Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Greenland. Chris is also a graduate of the British National Film and Television School and has taken art courses at the Otis School in Los Angeles.  Among the films he has worked on are CHAPLIN, L.A. STORY, RAINBOW WAR and BALLET ROBOTIQUE (both nominated for Academy Awards as best dramatic short), CUTTHROAT ISLAND, ROAD TO WELLVILLE,  ROSARY MURDERS, the SUPERMAN films, OUT COLD, the TV series SIRENS and many more.

Supported by : www.centrepiece.com.sg 

and

 http://centrepiecefurnishing.wordpress.com/

customise a piece of art and support a social cause!

 Email for more details: justin@centrepiece.com.sg

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