Thepnara Kongsawang was uncomfortable elaborating on how he was punished by his drill sergeants during his one-year conscription at a military camp. What's done is done, the 28-year-old artist said, and his art was never meant as an act of hostility against the military in any way. It's simply a set of works designed to make comments and poke fun.
As I'm writing this article in the office, there's a M-16 airsoft gun laying by my side. Everyone visiting Thepnara's exhibition "Unity Management Course", which opened earlier this month at Speedy Grandma, gets to pick their favourite toy weapon and bring it home.
"This is the first part that I came up with," said Thepnara, still sporting a crew cut as he was discharged just last month. "People can bring these guns home. Or if they stay to party, they can play with the guns, maybe pointing them at one another. I'm trying to transfer this feeling of military-ness onto the visitors so that they can react and interact with the idea in their heads. Each of us has our own image of the military in our heads, of this controller who's stronger than us and governing us. I'm interested in how the audience plays with it and how they bring it out to the society."
A variety of guns -- there were originally as many as 50 at the opening -- are arranged on a low tiled roof structure which serves as the centrepiece of the show.
The roof alone looked like quite a task for someone who was just out of the military camp less than a week before the show's opening. Thepnara actually began preparations for the show while he was inside, collecting material and phoning builders regarding what he wanted done.
Thepnara didn't train as an Army Reserve Force Student during high school and it was the gallery who approached him with the idea of a military-related art show, after which they realised he had to do a one-year conscription.
With a degree from Silpakorn University's Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking, with mixed media as his major, Unity Management Course is a continuation of his experiment with public participation as a way of questioning or pondering a set of rules in nature and society. The subject is just different this time round.
In his previous project "Jump", he asked as many people as possible to jump at noon, when the Sun was exactly above their heads, in an attempt to move the Earth further away from the Sun and consequently make it less hot.
"I didn't feel anything much towards the coup," said Thepnara who began training a few months after the National Council for Peace and Order took power. "I just didn't like the way I was treated inside. We were the lowest rank in the army and we were told to never question anything and to just do what we were told."
But surprisingly, just as Thepnara assures us, there isn't any sense of hostility in his works. While one side of the roof structure serves as a gun rack, the other was made of transparent tiles with Christmassy light installations under it, which has the effect of immediately reversing the sombre feeling of its counterpart.
Moving away from the roof which serves as a gun rack, there's a mirror station with some camo face paint powder Thepnara secretly collected during his training.
On the wall on the opposite side, there's an animation projected: a face of Uncle Sam staring straight at you, but in the costume of the Chinese Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang in Wu Cheng'en's novel Journey To The West. Nearby, there's a famous animation character of a little Buddhist monk Ikkyū-san doing a military-style punishment exercise.
The only sign of resistance and criticism is on his Facebook account. Even after his discharge, Thepnara still constantly posts photos and clips he secretly documented during his time in the camp. Different from the show itself, these posts, which Thepnara said was the process of material collecting, are the only part that can be deemed provocative -- while one clip simply shows his friend trimming bushes in the military compound as their daily routine, another photo shows a soldier stark naked but with his boots and rucksack on.
"Even when I was in the camp, I wasn't against the army but tried to just go with the flow," said Thepnara. "I told myself that if I'm to make art, any sense of hostility could only bring hatred and negativity."
While other pieces in the show seem somehow only passive recreations of an atmosphere or an element in the military institution, the corner further inside, entitled Grandma's Bed, is a sharp commentary on the strict and oppressive hierarchy system experienced during his time there. On the floor there's a plain mattress, inviting viewers to lie down and look up at the plain ceiling boards above. Standing up, however, one sees the upper side of those boards, which are created from intricate and elegant patterns.
While it seems low-rank soldiers like Thepnara would be stuck in a dark lower ground, this upper space is obviously restricted to just high-ranking generals. The only strange thing about it is there's a balaclava mask hanging mid-air and it looks like one used by thieves.
"Unity Management Course" is on display until Dec 5 at Speedy Grandma, Charoen Krung 28.
Unity Management Course.
Thepnara Kongsawang.
