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Doing Fieldwork in an Acrylic Hell: Mediations between Personhood, Art and Ethnography in a Thai Mural Painting.

Irving Chan JohnsonAssociate Professor

Department of Southeast Asian StudiesFaculty of Arts and Social SciencesNational University of Singapore

Blk AS8, Level 610 Kent Ridge Crescent

Singapore 119260Singapore

seajic@nus.edu.sgTelephone: 65-98785874

word count: 10,282

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Abstract

In this article, I explore how my scholarly training as an anthropologist informs the way I produce and understand what I do as a traditional Thai temple muralist. Thinking about personhood and context in the process of temple mural painting forges a new reading of murals as ethnographic texts that weave together diverse narrative content, fictional moments and experiential threads. The process of painting temple murals are, like the ethnographic works anthropologists build, a space through which multiple dialogues are encountered, referenced and negotiated. Using anthropology to think about my art practice in a Thai Buddhist temple outside of Thailand, I show how traditional Thai mural artists did not just paint scenes rich in historical and mythical meaning but were (and continue to be) shaped by the audiences who view their intricate and colorful creations. Mural painting, I conclude, is ethnography-in-process. Mural painters like anthropologists, constantly reflect on their art practice as a text sans words, in a dialectical process of entangled agencies as they spin tales of pasts, presents and futures in vivid hues on the walls of Buddhist temples. (Keywords: murals, Buddhism, reflexivity, anthropology)

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FIGURE 1. The Buddhist saint Phra Malai surrounded by a blue halo and holding a

monk’s fan, enters the Underworld where he meets Pol Pot, Phraya Yomaban, and

strange sprites.

Introduction

Nineteenth-century artists in Central Thailand visualized hell as a space populated

by a plethora of strange creatures. In a mural I painted in 2010, a hungry-ghost (pret)

with bulging eyes and tiny genitals towers above Pol Pot – the notorious leader of the

Khmer Rouge.1 The pret stares at the flying Buddhist saint Phra Malai, his palms pressed

together in a traditional gesture of respect, fear and subservience.2 Phra Malai’s sacred

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power is marked by a halo of red and green flames that encapsulates his delicate figure

against a bright blue background constructed from a tube of System 3’s acrylic paint.

Beneath him are the sad and the sinister – a snarling saber-toothed tiger, souls with

human bodies and animal heads, Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden and Phraya Yomaban –

ruler of the Underworld with his crown of skulls. I painted the scene on a concrete slab

that forms the back wall of a larger-than-life statue of a bearded Hindu ascetic (resi).3

The image sits on the grounds of Wat Uttamayanmuni, a Thai Buddhist temple (wat) in

Singapore, a nation-state with a predominantly ethnic Chinese population.4

My associations with Wat Uttamayanmuni go back to my childhood. I was

brought up by my Malaysian Thai mother and American Caucasian father as Theravada

Buddhist – a religious tradition inherited from my maternal kin. As a family we would

often go to the temple for ritual and social events and were close friends with many of the

monks who lived there. I was not tasked by anyone to paint the mural, although the

monks, knowing of my penchant for traditional Thai art, had hinted to me many times

that the slab looked dull and could well do with some colour. I did not request payment

for my effort spent in decorating the slab, viewing it as both a means to acquire Buddhist

merit (bun) and a way to introduce Thai visual art to the temple’s many non-Thai

visitors.5 What started out as a casual artistic endeavor soon became a social and ritual

commitment to materializing one of the most popular Thai Buddhist narratives of the

mid-nineteenth century. Juggling a packed university schedule of teaching and writing, I

eventually completed the painting after a year.

This paper is about the interface between creative practice and ethnographic

inquiry. Through a close scrutiny of the sights and characters I encountered in producing

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my painting, I explore a little researched dimension in art anthropology. Anthropological

scholarship on so-called traditional genres of non-Western art have focused largely on the

social processes and symbolisms surrounding the art work, rather than on the agency of

artists themselves.6 Thinking about my practice as a Thai artist living Singapore, I tease

out the complex relationship between anthropology, aesthetics, reflexivity, storytelling

and ways of seeing. I achieve this through a retrospective account of the processes I

jostled with in painting a mural. In so doing, I not only give voice to myself as an art

maker but bring forth the complex conundrum of what it means to be both an insider

(Buddhist, Thai painter) and an outsider (anthropologist) in art making. I discuss how my

work as a Thai mural painter and my professional training in anthropology, forced me to

engage with the concerns of contemporary ethnography. Phra Malai’s journey to the

Underworld was can thus be read as an imaginative ethnographic text, albeit one

constructed from acrylic paints and gold leaf. In short, my essay explores the

entanglements between art praxis and ethnographic theorizing - the “ethnographer-as-

self” and the “ethnographer-as-other,” in the realm of Thai Buddhist painting (Davies

2008:228). In this paper, I do not attempt to generalize across all forms of art practice.

Rather, the paper represents a case study of a particular experience of art, that of Thai

mural painting, albeit one with resonances within the field of creative ethnographic

production and interpretation.

Laslett (1999: 392) discussed how social scientific linkages

between structure and agency could be profitably addressed in the

study of personal narratives. My discussion of Thai mural painting as seen

through one of my works, is as much a Geertzian-inspired ‘thick description’ of the

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cultural processes that go into the production and subsequent reading of a visual image as

it is a theoretical exploration of the interface between positionality and personhood. In

this paper, the artist and the anthropologist are one and the same albeit inhabiting

different worlds. The paper calls for a refocusing of the study of a traditional genre from

one that had for a long time been fixated on the objectivity of form to one where the artist

shared his/her voice in translating materiality into scholarly text.

But this was (and continues to be) an affective and decentered voice, molded by a

multiplicity of other selves and varied contexts clamoring to be heard/seen/translated. In

his 1991 essay on video documenting the life history of the Sinhala monk Gnanavansa

Thero, anthropologist and film maker David Blundell, echoing Jay Ruby’s earlier work,

observed how ‘the research producer must contemplate him or herself, in the research

method, and the research outcome as the entire package of relationship: the formula of

meaning’ (1991: 43). This “research group” Blundell reminds the reader, comprises

‘participants, expressed ideas, and aesthetic symbols or forms to make a complete human

endeavor’ (ibid). Thinking through Blundell’s “formula of meaning,” I reflect on the

multiplicity of “relationships” Thai mural painters are entwined in when producing and

translating their works. In the case of the Phra Malai mural, what I painted resulted from

the interplay of various complex relationships – of people as well as thoughts and ideas

about traditionalism, globalization and modernity garnered from my experiences of being

a Buddhist anthropologist working within an indigenous art aesthetic in a diasporic space.

The unit of analysis in my paper is not merely the product – a scene of the Thai Buddhist

Netherworld, but the entanglements between self (as both artistic creator and

anthropologist), product, and cultural universes. Like the ethnographic texts we read,

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Thai mural painting, when seen through the lens of the painter, allows one to think

critically about the nuances of interpretation that have become the hallmark of modern

anthropological story-telling.

Thai Murals as Text

Thai Buddhist temples have traditionally been arenas for many art forms such as

mural painting, stucco molding, woodcarving, and mirror inlay. From at least the

eighteenth century, murals (jittakam faa phanang) have been painted on the walls of

temple buildings across much of the Thai Buddhist world. Although stylistic variations

ranged according to the creative whims of artists and patrons working in the aesthetic

traditions of different cultural locales and trends, the Central Thai style of painting

became the form of choice for many Thai artists from the early twentieth century to the

present. This standardization of form was in line with Siam (and since 1939, Thailand’s),

attempt at forging a national aesthetic based in the royal and bureaucratic capital of

Bangkok. 7 Bangkok’s politicians and academics used Central Thai (Bangkok) definitions

of art, language, and religion to draw imagined borders around an otherwise culturally

heterogeneous state, effectively forging a seemingly homogenous rendition of national

identity and citizenship.

Temple mural painting in the Central Plains of Thailand suffered a setback after

the Second World War with very few new walls being painted in the immediate post war

period. By the 1970s the art form witnessed a revival contributed in part by Bangkok’s

Department of Fine Arts (Cate 2003; Jaiser 2009). Older murals were preserved (and

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sometimes painted over) and a new generation of artists trained in Bangkok’s state

administered art schools in line with the Department’s attempt at aesthetic nationalism.

The Thai government’s aggressive promotion of national culture via art production

spread to the furthest borders of the kingdom. Thai Buddhist diasporic communities were

not immune to trends in cultural nationalism and murals painted in Thai temples beyond

the nation’s borders took on a uniquely common form that tied them to Bangkok’s

dominant discourse on what an officially sanctioned traditionalism should look like.

Temple murals often adhere to a common narrative theme centering on scenes

from the life of the Buddha and of his previous incarnations. Mural paintings revel in the

bricolage of combining real and mythic time, past and present. Regal scenes of the

Buddha and the world of ancient India take on distinctive Thai trappings, dramatically

reflecting local visual aesthetics and the culture of the day.

Thai and Euro-American scholarship on Thai mural painting have largely focused

on murals as an objective window through which to think about history and culture,

emphasizing the evolution of mural art, its narrative content, iconography, production

techniques, paints, conservation practices, and symbolic meanings (Wray et.al 1972,

Santi 2000, Silpa 1959, Leksukhum 2005, Green 2013, Ferguson and. Johannsen 1976,

Boisselier 1976, Brereton 1986; 2015, Pichai 2011, Wenk 1975, Jaiser 2009, 2010,

Wiyada 1979, Uthong 2003, Sothiwan1994, Lyons 1990, Ringis 1990, Pattaratorn 2005,

Malinee 2006, Thipawan 2003, Du Guerny 1979, Ginsburg 2005, Pichayada, Preda and

Dhamrongruchana 2013; 2014, Department of Fine Arts 2015). Little has been written

about murals from the gaze of the artist, in part due to the difficulty in tracing who these

early painters were. Traditionally, Central Thai mural painters came under the

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occupational rubric of “chang” – a generic term referring to craftspeople. The word

encapsulated artisans of all genres including architects, technicians, painters, carvers and

sculptors. This of course, did not mean that work of “chang” were not celebrated by the

viewers who experienced them (Department of Fine Arts 2015, Cate 2003:56). Thai

mural art, as painted on the walls of temple buildings, was (and continue to be), public

art. Temple visitors and monks often point out certain unique features of the paintings or

recall stories about the painters of the past. Painting a temple mural is a long and

complicated process and artists (often working as teams) spend many years painting and

living at the same locale. They become a part of the temple’s lived environment and their

visible presence never goes unnoticed (ibid. 3). Many of the earliest painters whose

names we know had been monks who most probably would have moved between the

temples they worked on. Contemporary mural painters are no longer monastics although

many still live in or near their workplaces. A recent trend in Thai mural practice has been

to paint on carefully measured cloth sheets which when completed, are mounted onto

walls as per wallpaper. This allows for artists to work in their studios without having to

pack up and move every few years.

Traditionally, Thai muralists did not sign their works, although some have left

remnant signatures in the guise of self-portraits and unique stylistics forms that did not

detract from the overall composition.8 Personal identity and style were subservient to the

larger visual patterning of the mural as sacred and beautiful art. Signatures were not

meant to stand out and announce the painter’s presence. In theory, the mural’s overall

composition had to be constructed as a common narrative sans self-expression when seen

by anyone but the artist. Like the late medieval paintings produced by German nuns

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studied by Jeffery Hamburger (1997), traditional Thai mural painters worked with the

knowledge that what they did was for the sake of both beauty and religion. Hence,

paintings did not require personalized signatures as the images were not about individual

creativity per se but about the sacredness of the story being captured. In practice,

however, many Thai muralists continued to search out sites within the rigidity of

traditional norms of aesthetic acceptability to situate individual identities hidden from the

prying eyes of viewers.

Ajaan Wichai, a mural painter and teacher of traditional Thai art in Bangkok

spoke to me of how some Thai mural artists increasingly focused their work on

generating a personal style that was increasingly celebrated in the contemporary Thai art

world. This new style was tied in to celebrations of the self that according to Ajaan

Wichai, were not part of Thai and Buddhist ideals of art meaning. Murals now became

sites to generate a cult of artistic personality with viewership being directed by the name

and fame of particular painters rather than to the story on the wall.

The Thai painter does not have much freedom in painting. This is

especially so in the old style of mural painting. But this was because artists

painted for the sake of religion. It was not about them. Artists may attempt

to interpret a scene in a particular way or add certain characters in the side

scenes that become markers of their style. But these are not the central

focus of the mural. If a mural becomes too much about the artist, it loses

its meaning. Individualism is a characteristic of Western thinking. It is not

found in Thai art (personal communication with Ajaan Wichai, 2017)

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Not all the names and lives of temple mural painters remain unknown. Writing

the early twentieth century, Thai artist and historian Prince Narissara Nuwattiwong

(1863-1947), traced snippets of the lives of renowned monk muralists like Khru Khong

Pek, Khru Thong Yu and Phra Ajaan Naak who painted in the early to mid-Rattanakosin

period (1782-1851) (No Na Paknam 1983, 1988). Although trained in Western painting,

the Prince was enamored by the old murals that covered the walls of many Bangkok

temples. His research combined interviews with monks and residents in old communities

surrounding these temples, in an early attempt at moving artistic scholarship away from

form to subject. Yet despite his efforts, little information remains about the lives and

inspirations of these painters. The monk-painter Khrua In Khong, well-known for his use

of Victorian images and Western art perspectives to illustrate Buddhist metaphysics in

the mid-late nineteenth century has been discussed by Cate (2002), Listopad (1984), and

Wiyada (1979). Chainarong Di-in (2006), Tiffany Hacker (2009) and Dendao Silapanon

(2010) and have researched the work and life of Phra Thewaphinimit (1883-1947) one of

Bangkok’s most famous painters, whose combination of Western realism and Thai visual

aesthetics forged a pop style of mural painting that continues to be copied by many artists

to this day. Helen Duncan, writing in 1967, discussed the life of Ajaan Lert, one of

Thailand’s last traditional painters who worked within a classicism of colour and

technique that harped back to the golden-age of mural art in the nineteenth century.

Contemporary Thai mural painters the likes of Chalermchai Kositpipat have had their

works and biographies written about as well (Cate 2003, Sanitsuda 1983).9 In 2007, the

Department of Thai Painting at Pok Chang School of Arts and Crafts in Bangkok issued a

beautiful book in celebration of the life and work of the late Sompong Akharawong – a

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mural painter and teacher at the school. Phaptawan Suwannakudt, daughter of famed

muralist Phaiboon Suwannakudt (1925-1982) and a Thai mural painter and contemporary

artist now living in Australia wrote about her entanglements with her own Buddhist

upbringing in her modern compositions in a recent essay (Phaptawan 2013).

Historian David Wyatt (2004:2) rightly pointed out that Thai temple murals,

regardless of when they were painted were (are) ‘created by human agency, and those we

consider to be especially beautiful, we consider to have been created by “artists”’. Yet

with the lack of personal associations people trace between an artist and his product,

scholarship on Thai mural painting has remained largely attempts to configure larger

social and aesthetic meanings from the images painted on temple walls. Sandra Cate’s

(2002) ethnography of globalization, Thai identity, politics, value and transnational

religious practice in the production of the murals on the walls of Wat Buddhapadipa’s

ordination hall in Wimbledon, showcased a new way of reading the mural that moved

away from the historicism and rigid narrative focus of the earlier art history and

anthropological literature. Thai murals were thus, sites of cultural translation and their

artists and viewers agents in the interpretive process.

Locating the Nexus between Art and Anthropology

In The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant

Village, Hildred Geertz (2004) showcased the ways in which the carvings, paintings and

buildings that make up a Balinese temple complex were filled with rich meanings that

reflected the diverse motivations of its many producers. These comprised a multiplicity

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of hidden subtexts unknown to all but the artist and ranged from the spiritual to the

political. In a subsequent book, Tales from a Charmed Life: A Balinese Painter

Reminisces (2005), Geertz shines the spotlight on the late painter Ida Bagus Made Togog.

Through listening to the way Togog narrated the often messy and punctuated episodes in

his dreams, life and art-making, Geertz teased out the cultural dynamics of Balinese

religion and history as expressed by Togog in Chinese ink on paper.

Art functions not merely on the level of the product but is an expression of the

social and personal worlds artists find themselves enmeshed. Echoing Alfred Gell’s

(1998) seminal work, Geertz (2004:115) rightly noted that art objects generate complex

responses in their viewers which can and do mold the way their producers think and

rethink their practice. Like the ethnographer, the artist is both producer as well as

audience to his or her work. Art, in Gell’s framework, was not merely a study of

culturally constructed visions of “beauty” but more importantly, of social processes and

its technology to embody effect in people (including the artist). In other words, art

displayed a special ‘technology of enchantment’ that elicited a response from all those

who came into contact with it (Thomas 2001:9). The anthropology of art was therefore a

study of art as process in the guise of a “series of reciprocal responses” between artists,

the material and visual forms they created and the viewers of these works (Gell

1998:165).

Although I agree with Gell’s focus on art as process, I believe that a richer picture

of an anthropology of art should not discredit the aesthetics of art pieces and issues

surrounding representation, appropriation and authority which are key considerations in

ethnographic praxis (Campbell 2001). Audiences as well as artists are more often than

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not, familiar with and highly critical of culturally defined standards of acceptability and

beauty, and regard one another according to these standards. Nicholas Thomas (2001:10)

observed that art practices are inevitably tied to the politics of unbounded art worlds and

that any endeavor to write about an “anthropology of art” is therefore “irretrievably

eclectic.” The celebration of the varied cultural dimensions of art is a new trend in art

anthropology as is the role of painting in structuring anthropological knowledge (Marcus

and Myers 1995; Ossman 2010; Elliot and Culhane 2017).

Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (2010:1) discussed how anthropologists

need to look at the “border zones between art and anthropology practices in recent

decades.” This frontier is often an uncomfortable locale for ethnographers who are also

artists as it forces them to rethink taken for granted cultural assumptions about fieldwork,

inspiration, meaning, style, aesthetics and creative choice in their own artistic practice.

Rather than writing ethnographies about art works as has been traditionally the norm in

anthropological circles, Schneider and Wright suggested that anthropologists work with

artists in thinking about new ways to produce cultural knowledge (ibid. 5). The classic

binarism between self and object often disappears in the confusing process of reflexivity

as artists attempt to view their work through an anthropological lens (Davies 2008:4).

What emerged was akin to the “shadow side of fieldwork,” blurred regions where

scholarship, methodology, personal life, Self and Other met and became entangled

(Leibing and McLean 2007:5). As Merton (1988:18) pointed out, the identity of the Self

and that of the Other become inseparable once anthropologists become autobiographers,

much in the same vein as when artists think anthropologically and anthropologists think

artistically.

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Echoing Schneider and Wright’s (2006) earlier work on the relationship between

contemporary art and anthropology, Nakamura et.al (2013:7) noted how artists and

anthropologists are alike in that both are “creative practitioners whose work involves

appropriating from and representing others.” Their edited volume titled Asia through Art

and Anthropology, pulls together a number of papers by both practicing contemporary

artists as well as scholars of art and anthropology. In so doing, the editors showcase the

decentering of art and anthropology as distinct disciplines through focusing on how both

deal with issues of translation and interpretation across cultures and spaces. It is at the

interstices of these disciplinary boundaries that I locate myself as an anthropological

cultural translator – a Harvard trained anthropologist who is also a traditional Thai

painter, living and working in Singapore. In my practice as both artist and ethnographer, I

crisscross many borders - of personal and professional identity, objective and subjective

distance, academic theorizing and Thai painting. My painting, like Blundell’s film

mentioned earlier, ‘represents countless thoughts and ideas stemming from the

participants and authors as a continuous flow of data’ (Blundell 1991:44).

Yet the simple fact remains that not all anthropologists who study art, are

practicing artists.10 And for those who do enjoy making art, many prefer to keep the genre

separate from the so-called “professionalism” of scholarly inquiry. Art is often relegated

to the realm of the hobby, a silent and sometimes hostile space of relaxation and privacy

far removed from the worlds of academic publishing and teaching. For many

anthropologists, painting remained secondary to the written word – it lacked the

seemingly sacred legitimacy of the text and hence was never considered scholarly

“enough” in ethnographic terms. Schneider and Wright’s (2010) call for more

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experimentation in the ethnographic method through thinking about the borders of art and

anthropology is a pressing one as the perennial questions of representation, authorship,

uncertainty and reflexivity continue to bog both art makers and anthropologists alike.

George Marcus (2010) pointed out the contemporary fieldwork methods and art

production share a lot in common by way of ethics and aims. Marcus’s article however,

like that of Schneider and Wright, focus on modern artistic genres. Danielle Elliott and

Dara Culhane’s new book (2017) take up this challenge by discussing how art practice is

a new and legitimate methodology in what they term “a different kind of ethnography.”

Nevertheless, the collaborative and experimental methodology of doing and experiencing

art as a sensorial and personal ethnographic text continues to remain marginalized in

anthropology. Art makers continue to be “interlocutors” at best, and “subjects” at worse.

Howard Morphy rightly summed up the need to understand the visual not merely as

object but as part of a human creative endeavor. He observed that:

While it is true that aesthetic and expressive forms can affect the viewer

whatever their cultural background, that initial experience of the work is

only the beginning of appreciating its potential and of understanding its

significance to the artist that produced it. Fuller appreciation requires some

movement into the frame of the artists’ creativity and an understanding of

their agency in the work (2013: xv).

Unlike in dance studies where personal embodiment has been part and parcel of

the research trend since the 1990s, an anthropology of art tends to neglect the role of

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anthropologists who are art practitioners (Buckland 2006:13).11 This methodological

neglect has often resulted in an anthropology of art where the ethnographer continues to

‘describe’ artists and their work as exotic sites rich in cultural meanings that have to be

carefully teased out, theorized and interpreted. As with Buckland’s work on dance, the

production of visual art encapsulates a complex strategy that involves ‘selection,

omission, exclusion, transformation, and creation in the embodied production of cultural

memory’ (ibid.17). Anthropologists who are practicing artists, by virtue of their academic

training and awareness of artistic concerns for viewership, composition, form, and so

forth, reflect on their work as a cultural manifestation of various phenomenological and

dialogic strategies that bridge both selves.

Mural Ethnography and Creative Practice

As in any ethnographic process, contextual awareness is key to understanding the

creative genius of an artist. In painting the Phra Malai mural, I was always conscious of

the connections I had between the space in which the work appears (an upright concrete

slab in a Thai temple in Singapore frequented by Chinese worshippers) and the dialogue

between my artistic self and those around me. This was largely stimulated by my

professional training in anthropology, where graduate classes in ethnographic reading and

writing had made me aware of what otherwise would be taken-for-granted experiences.

Citing Austin (1996), Heewon Chang (2008:134) states that ‘the essence of who we are,

what we think, and how we talk is contingent largely on the others we celebrate’ (Austin

1996:206, cited in Chang). These “others” were the people who shared the temple as a

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living ethnographic field site with me. They were the men, women and children who

would watch me as I painted, sometimes silently from a distance, at other times talking,

gossiping, joking, advising, and criticizing my work. These interactive moments – a

common experience in all ethnographic encounters, shaped what I thought about and the

details of what I painted. As the painting progressed I noticed that it began taking on an

agency of its own – not dissimilar to Gell’s earlier observation. The painting triggered

emotions, ideas and reflections which in turn shaped what was subsequently painted –

characters, modifications and omissions. I did not work with a fixed visual template as do

some Thai painters who copy the works of more established artists such as Chalermchai

and Phra Thewaphinimmit. Rather, I worked with the overall composition in my head,

thereby allowing room for change as experiences and contexts unfolded.

In deciphering what he termed the “aesthetic experience”, Jacques Maquet (1986)

called attention to the everyday realities by which art is deciphered in informal contexts.

He analyzed his own experiences in Los Angeles and the way in which people behaved in

the presence of aesthetic objects – refocusing the gaze away from an earlier anthropology

of art that was grounded in materiality. For Maquet, the aesthetic significance of an

object lay both in its form and its ability to stir contemplation in the viewer. As an

anthropologist, I was fascinated by how others looked at and talked about my mural.

These conversations in turn shaped the way I developed the painting as an artist –

transforming it according to a perceived aesthetic experience in a diasporic religious

landscape. As with any ethnographic narrative, the dramatis personae that form the story

of the painting are diverse. Thai murals, as with other forms of public art, elicit many

voices, some audible, others embodied. At Wat Uttamayanmuni, these included the Thai

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Buddhist monks from the Malaysian state of Kelantan who resided at the temple, Chinese

Singaporean worshippers who came to offer silent prayers in front of the cement statue,

regular temple goers (including my parents), and the Thai housewives with their playful

children who cooked food for the monks every Sunday. The act of watching me paint was

often a pause in their otherwise moving lives. Thai mural painters work slowly. Brushes

are tiny and fine lines the hallmark of a good painting. The slowness with which I worked

seemed in opposition to the world that rushed by me. People moved. Sounds and scents

wafted through the air. But in coming into contact with me, a slowness seemed to

overtake my arts viewers. They stopped to look, glance, wonder, converse and listen.

When they asked me questions I answered, otherwise I worked in silence. Often parents

would point out the punishments in my acrylic hell to their children. ‘Look, that is what

happens when you do bad deeds,’ was a common refrain I heard, at which point I would

sometimes describe the tortures being meted out on terrified souls. On some hot

afternoons, the temple’s monks sat with me on faded plastic chairs that they had arranged

around my workspace, as if creating a theater of sorts. The area where I painted my

mural was comfortable, shady and far from the hustle and bustle of the temple’s main hall

and kitchen. It was surrounded by a clump of banana trees and a large mango tree.

Nearby was a fish pond where the monks raised goldfish and a few koi in what looked

like a grime covered tiled bath.

The monks watched me paint daily and gave suggestions as to what to include in

the scene or if my proportions were off. Phra Dam, a tall monk in his forties, who always

had something to say, suggested that I paint him in the hell scene. ‘Paint me climbing the

ngiu tree, he jested many times over, they say that if you visit hell, you will definitely see

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Buddhist monks there. Not everyone is perfect’.12 We laughed at the sheer absurdity of

the scene in our imagination, monks scrabbling up the ngiu tree in search of their

adulterous lovers, their saffron robes ripped to shreds by the tree’s sharp thorns. The

mural generated conversation – people talked about what they saw, what they did not see

and what they expected to see. Some people would ask if they could help me paint – a

process which generated merit in Thai Buddhist thought. I obliged some of them although

keeping a firm eye on their hand. But not everyone who ‘saw’ the painting spoke. Many

ignored me altogether as I painted, walking around me as they attempted to place flowers

and sweet smelling incense sticks at base of the sacred fig tree growing next to the

painting.

Although working within a rigid conventions of a Central Thai aesthetic

classicism in terms of form and pattern, my mind toyed with the idea of cross cultural

translation constantly as I painted. Prior to embarking on the painting, I had looked up

images of the Phra Malai story in books and the internet. I was fascinated by the

paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the nightmarish dreamscapes he had created. I

wanted my mural to communicate a message that did not require words as did many of

the wall paintings seen in Thai temples. How was I to make non-Thai Singaporeans relate

to the otherwise foreign art style and its narrative content? Similarly, in writing

ethnographies, we are faced with this question at the onset of our endeavour. What makes

captivates the reader of an ethnography? How does the anthropologist as a writer,

communicate culturally and emotionally specific experiences to his or her readers, many

of whom have no prior knowledge of the society or experience in question? I pondered

over these questions constantly as I painted, thinking of issues of cultural translation and

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the visuality of public art. Cate (2003) recalled how English visitors to Wimbledon’s

Wat Buddhapadipa would point out the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein,

George Bush and Mother Theresa on walls that detailed episodes from the Buddha’s life.

These ‘international’ figures – symbols of a new global neotraditionalism in Thai art,

were carefully integrated into the murals by the Thai painters.13 They existed as part of a

larger Buddhist landscape, albeit occupying traditional minor positions on the painted

wall without detracting from the story-at-hand. In the language of Central Thai muralists,

these figures were the quintessential ‘dregs’ (phaap kaak) of the painting. They inhabited

the margins of the work, not contributing to the narrative per se but enlivening it and

making it socially relevant to viewers. The use of mundane images of everyday life to

enhance the visual experience of murals is nothing new in the tradition of Thai painting.14

This representation of alterity made the painting inhabit a social world that made sense to

its viewers. Ajaan Wichai summed up these non-narrative images of the everyday as we

talked:

It is alright to include scenes that do not stick to the traditional framework but

these have to be minor scenes that do not detract from the gaze of the viewer.

They can be in the kaak. This has always been done. The old painters (chang

boran) have been doing it for a long time by including sex and episodes of daily

life in the murals. This is where the painter has more freedom to be himself

without breaking from the dictates of tradition.

In the case of my Phra Malai painting, ensuring the Buddhist message of merit

accumulation and transference – a tenet at the core of many Thai Buddhist rituals, was

22

particularly challenging due to the large number of non-Thais who visited the temple.

Chinese Singaporeans, who made up the majority of temple goers in Singapore, were

largely unacquainted with the tale. Many adhered to popular Taoism and Sinic Mahayana

Buddhism and had never encountered Thai mural art. They could not distinguish the

prototypical characters that Thai audiences could identify such as Phra Malai and the

thorny ngiu tree. Throughout the months I worked on the mural, I had to be constantly

aware that for many in my audience, the mural represented a new way of seeing – one

that was a combination of aesthetic spectacle and translation. Many a time, I was asked

what I was painting and had to explain to them the story and the message it conveyed.

Sometimes I received help from the temple’s monks who would do the explaining for me.

In her study on the ‘captivating agency of art’, Shirley Campbell (2001:3-4) wrote:

Those regarded as artists in any given society are working to supply an

audience of consumers who are well ‘educated’ in the process of accessing

works, determining whether they meet the requirements, as these are

defined by ‘tradition.’

The majority of consumers of my art were not ‘well educated’ in Campbell’s

sense of the term with regards to Thai mural painting. They were unfamiliar to the

tradition I painted in. Rather than forsaking Thai mural traditionalism altogether, I

preferred a more nuanced form of intercultural translation. I began to ponder how best to

illustrate Buddhist morality and karmic-justice on the wall in such a manner that all my

viewers, regardless of their cultural background could understand the painting’s message

without having to verbally explain it each time. I did this by injecting the mural with a

dose of Western aesthetics. This realist mode of painting is nothing new in Thai art and

23

temple muralists have been adding elements of Western realism into their paintings since

the mid-nineteenth century. Using conventional modes of shading and anatomy, I painted

a skull, a vulture, a saber-toothed tiger, a wolf and a variety of creatures with realistic

looking animal heads on traditional Thai-styled two dimension human bodies.

Ethnic Thai viewers who looked at my painting would often mention to me the

patience needed in producing temple murals. They associated the slow process of

constructing intricate Thai designs with Buddhist meditation (samathi). Painting was a

form of meditation as the artist had to focus his mind fully on the image while

simultaneously ignoring the distracting world around him. Not all Thais were familiar

with the story of Phra Malai but most nodded in assurance when I told them of it. They

pointed out the ngiu tree as a symbol of the punishment for sexual misconduct. Chinese

Singaporeans who were largely unfamiliar with Thai traditional art rarely spoke of art

practice as meditation. Their viewing of the painting was of a total albeit culturally alien

landscape rather than in the series of closely scrutinized episodes Thai viewers picked

out. The location of the temple in a non-Thai space – an ethnic Chinese world, forged a

new thought process in art making.

Influenced by the photographs in Sandra Cate’s book and a visit to Wimbledon in

2006, I decided to eschew the rigid dictates of mid-nineteenth century Thai mural

classicism to include life-like portraits of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden.15

These men had been responsible for the death of countless individuals, an action which in

Thai Buddhist thinking would result in them suffering terrible torments in the deepest

levels of hell. World history and Western readings of time as a unilineal progression of

events was symbolized in the portraiture of these men. Like ethnographies that call forth

24

interpretation, the painting thus represented ethnographic realism in visual form that

called for personal interpretation.

FIGURE 2: Neomodern imaginings. Hitler, Osama, a saber-toothed tiger and the souls

of sinners being boiled in a cauldron of hot oil.

Self-Expression and Censorship in a Thai Painting

A painting, like an ethnography, makes visible what is otherwise unseen. The

circulation of media images have given form to ideological discourses such as terror, evil

and ethnocentrism. Artists and ethnographers inhabit this world and their stories tell of

complex cultural entanglements that go beyond the conventionality of essentialised forms

and styles (Hamburger 1997). Western artistic realism allowed for a refocusing of the

non-Thai viewer’s gaze away from one of cultural uncertainty to one which brings the

mythic world of flying monks and macabre hell beings into the historical moments of

25

Singaporeans. Portraits of Osama, Pol Pot and Hitler in the tale of Phra Malai were not

only symbols of a hegemonically constructed historical truth based on Western

perspectives of temporality, but encapsulated theoretical ideas of suffering and terror in a

material form.

Kenneth George’s (2005) observation on the force of artistic realism and violence

are pertinent to understanding reflexivity in the artistic process I was engaged in. ‘The

character of the violence that needs to be narrated is such that it demands “realism” in

figurative form,’ noted George, adding that, ‘vision is key to the agents of violence, just

as it to the artist who looks at it from afar.’ (George 203). History in the case of the Phra

Malai scene was one based on a particular way of seeing – a photographic stock image of

real people inhabiting a two-dimensional hellish Buddhist universe. Seemingly “realistic”

portraits lead to silent questions and conversations about the themes of the universality of

immorality and Buddhist laws of karma as showcased in the artists’ narrative.

The visuality of these now deceased men triggered a series of interesting

comments from my Singaporean viewers. One middle-aged Chinese man, on noticing the

portrayal of Hitler staring up at Phra Malai, asked me in jest if I was going to add Lee

Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister into the hell scene. Many Singaporeans

consider Lee Kuan Yew as a patriarchal figure in the governance of Singapore. Although

admired for his political acumen in seeking Singapore’s independence from Britain in

1965 and his visions of moving Singapore away from being an impoverished third world

nation to one that was first world, many Singaporeans also question the hegemonic nature

of his iron-fisted rule. Questioning took the form of jokes and rumors, narrated in the

safe zones of non-political spaces. I responded candidly to the man’s suggestion by

26

saying that painting Lee Kuan Yew (he passed away in 2015) into the scene would irk

officialdom with possible negative repercussions both for the artist and the temple. It was

a risk no one wanted to have to deal with. Octogenarian George Neo, a regular at the

temple and close family friend, asked me if I was going to paint Mao Tsetong into the

mural. I decided against it due to the political sensitivity of the issue as Singapore hosts a

large number of Chinese citizens, some of whom visit Wat Uttamayanmuni. Another

friend, this time an academic in Thailand, noticed my portrayal of Hitler in a photograph

I had uploaded to my Facebook page. In an email correspondence, he suggested that I

include fugitive former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in the painting. I replied

yet again that to do so was only to court danger with Thai authorities and that besides,

Thaksin, like Lee Kuan Yew, was very much alive at the time of my painting and hence,

it did not make sense to include him in the work. Seeing Osama’s turbaned image in a pot

of boiling oil, an American professor gave me puzzled looks. ‘Where is George Bush? He

is just as evil as Osama and should be in here too’ the anthropologist reminded me

matter-of-factly.

These realistic images triggered self-censorship on the part of the artist. The

mural was in a public place and I did not want my art to lead to problems between

members of the wider Singaporean and temple community. Thai mural art has

traditionally been conservative in its form. Self-expression and individual style, when it

appeared was often subsumed under the larger rubric of the art forms didactic theme.

However, Thai mural painters working within today’s image saturated world where a

new found personality cult of selfhood has taken precedence in cross cultural definitions

of aesthetics have found themselves struggling at how to juggle authorship within a non-

27

authorial form. Cate (2003) noted that the use of new ways of seeing in the murals of

Wat Buddhapadipa, stirred a variety of responses among Thai viewers in London – not

all of which were positive. Just as anthropologists carefully choose what to write in their

ethnographies from the myriad of experiences encountered in the field, many artists

censor their works in part due to the social world in which the painting occurs. Images

are selected from the compendium of snapshots that saturate an artist’s personal

experience.

Like ethnography, visual art requires a deliberate choosing of frames (in the guise

of color, pattern and image) through which culture and its emotions are presented for

dialogic interpretation and translation. Concerns for context and representation have

become hallmarks of the poetics of self-expression in both anthropology and creative

practice. Artistic production communicate with their viewers/interlocutors within

particular spatial and temporal moments. The artist, like the anthropologist who

constructs ethnographies of the present, needs to be aware of the context in which his

work is to be read/seen. And it was this constant sense of awareness that patterned my

objective view of the Phra Malai mural. As I painted, I could not help but place myself in

the shoes of my artwork’s non-Thai viewers and to think of how these men and women

would look at the painting and what they would take from the interactive experience of

seeing. In the production of ethnographies, anthropologists do the same thing. We think

through the myriad of voices saturating our field notes and select only what is

representative in ensuring the success of textual translation with full respect for our

interlocutors’ agency. The Phra Malai mural, like an ethnographic text, was about the

translation of ideas across intertwining cultural frames and the interpretation of narratives

28

and experiences that blended modernity with traditionalism in a unique mode of self-

expression.

Conclusion

In his essay The Artist as Ethnographer, Hal Foster (1996) stated that both artists

and ethnographers shared common concerns in their production of cultural texts. They

were very much aware of the dominant ideas of the time including interdisciplinarity,

ethnocentrism, alterity, reflexivity and encountering. Forster concludes however, that the

contemporary artist and the ethnographer inhabit ideationally disparate worlds.

Ethnography calls for a full-on engagement in culture, a sacred activity that has marked

anthropology as a unique discipline. Contemporary artists, argued Foster, attempted to try

their hands at participant observation (especially in the realm of public art) and to engage

with ethnographic ideals such as placing attention on context and ambiguity, but often

ended up with self-centered cultural productions that hinted at marginalization and

inequality. In other words, as artists try to break away from self-referencing their works

and focus on the community around them, they inadvertently fall back into a mode of self

essentialising that celebrates the artist as genius. The objectivity of the anthropologist is

missing in art practice.

In this paper I have shown how the process of painting a Thai mural is akin to

ethnographic practice. Artists who are also ethnographers toy with anthropological as

well as aesthetic concerns in their scholarly and creative work (although the line between

both categories is blurred). I have used my painting of Phra Malai’s Netherworld journey

as a platform from which to ruminate over issues that ethnographers think about in their

29

work: self-identity, translation and reference. As with the production of all ethnographies

in whatever form, concerns with text and audience remain key in the way I understand

my creative endeavour as a mural painter. Through thinking anthropologically, Thai

painters were (are) able to locate agency into an artistic genre which has traditionally

inhabited a voiceless landscape. Thai temple murals resemble what George Marcus and

Michael Fischer (1986:46) called “ethnographies of experience”, where the ethnographic

gaze is focused ‘on the person, the self, and the emotions – all topics difficult to probe in

traditional ethnographic frameworks.’ Through their large and intricate paintings Thai

mural artists narrate an autobiography of sorts that only they are privy to and which is

largely invisible to the non-artist practitioner. The silences in the painting only come to

the fore when the Thai artist thinks reflexively about his work. At the same time, the

identities of self and other become entangled in the workings of aesthetic agency, just as

they are in the production of ethnographic texts (Ingold 2008). Subjective experiences

shape the painting albeit in unassuming ways. In thinking about my mural as I painted it

and retrospectively, as I wrote this paper, I found myself working ethnographically as I

“produced” culture (Myers 2004:247). Painting the scene of a flying Buddhist saint

brought me in communication not only with the people who visited the temple and spoke

to me but with the processes that molded what I said to them, my translation of the tale

and the experience of anthropological enquiry – concerns with history, politics,

globalization, space and personhood. As with artists everywhere, Thai mural painters

(even though unnamed) are engaged in the lives of their audiences and are both affected

and effected by the images they churn out. Of the painters of the old Thai city of

Ayutthaya whose art continued even after the city was sacked by Burmese invaders in

30

1767, and which has provided visual fodder for generations of Thai painters afterwards,

Forest McGill (2005:27) writes, ‘they must have lost friends and family members and

seen beloved temples and images – perhaps – their own works – go up in flames. Their

resilience is hard to imagine.’ It was this experiential resilience that I attempted to

capture in this paper through exploring the interstices of art, reflexivity and ethnographic

curiosity in my work as a Thai mural painter.

31

ENDNOTES

1 In popular Thai Theravada Buddhism, humans who committed the worst atrocities are reborn as hungry ghosts in one

of the thirteen levels of hell when they die. These ghouls suffer from an appetite that cannot be satiated due to their

mouths being no larger than a pin-hole.

2 The Phra Malai story was often painted in Thai temples and on paper manuscripts (samut khoi) during the eighteenth

and nineteenth century as part of a larger narrative detailing Buddhist ideas about death and dying. The story has lost

favor amongst mural painters in Thailand today who prefer scenes from the life of the Buddha (Brereton 1986, 1995).

3 Hindu statues (deities and ascetics) are common in Thai Buddhist religious art. Wat Uttamayanmuni has three such

statues, the Hermit (resi), Phra Rahu (the god of eclipses of the sun and moon) and a large statue of Brahma... On Hindu

iconography in Thai Theravada Buddhism, see McDaniel (2013).

4 Singapore’s population of some four million people is comprised largely of Chinese, Malays and Tamils. In the 2010

census, Buddhists made up 33% of the country’s religious demographic.

5 Thai mural painters are often paid for the projects and many use their artistic skills as a means to generate an income.

Payment is usually calculated as per square meter of wall space.

6 In this paper I refer to Thai mural artists by the masculine pronoun as most were and are, men, although there are no

taboos against women painters.

7 Paintings in northern Thailand for instance, were shaped by Burmese and Shan sensibilities due to the region’s long

history of cross cultural interaction with these polities. In Thailand’s deep south, with its predominantly Malay Muslim

population, old Buddhist murals show visible traces of Malay artistic genius. On the Lao-influenced murals of

Northeast Thailand, see Pairote (1989) and Brereton and Somroay (2010).

8 Brereton and Somroay (2010:53) documented an artist’s self-portrait on the wall of Wat Sanuan Wari in Northeast

Thailand’s Khon Khaen province. I noticed a similar type portrait with a corresponding signature at Wat Mahathat in

Phetchaburi province. Cate (2002) has pointed out realistic artist portraits at Wat Budhapadipa in Wimbledon. It should

be noted however, that these are recently painted murals, dating from the mid-twentieth century and later.

9 Some mural painters and traditional artists in Thailand have written their own books as well. However, these are

primarily confined to art manuals (tamra lai thai) that provide text-book guidelines to drawing and painting traditional

Thai forms and figures.

10 Very few ethnographies have been produced by anthropologists who are also artists. Jazz musician Steve Feld’s work

on the Kaluli combined his personal interests in music with research on the culture of sound in Papua New Guinea.

Susan Ossman’s (2010) more recent discussion on art ethnography and war, showcased how her paintings reflected

ethnographic concerns with media movements in Morocco. See also Hiller (1996).

11 Writing of recent trends in dance scholarship, Theresa Buckland (2006:13) notes that, ‘the researcher’s own

movement experiences become part of the means of comparative analysis…the ‘I’ persona as a source, dancing and

reflecting on sensation and meaning, has produced a significant extension and alternative to earlier objective modes of

practice.’

12 Traditional Thai depictions of hell often include illustrations of the thorny ngiu tree. The souls of men and women

who had committed sexual misconduct (adultery, rape, etc.) were forced to climb the tree repeatedly only to be attacked

by vultures and ferocious dogs.

13 A number of contemporary Thai mural painters have incorporated non-Thai images in their works, the most popular

being Chalermchai Kosipipat’s images of superheroes and the 2011 destruction of the New York’s World Trade Center

on the walls of Wat Rongkhun in Chiang Rai. The young artist Rakkiat Lerdjitsakul has created a name for himself in

Thailand’s artworld today by incorporating pop images of cartoon characters like Doraemon, Angry Birds and Ben Ten

into Buddhist narratives. His work at Wat Sapha-siew in Suphanburi province, has made the temple a local attraction

for curious tourists.

14 The depiction of so-called “contemporary” figures like world leaders in the Wimbledon murals reflects an older

practice in Thai painting of depicting the Other in visual form. See Peleggi (2012) on the depiction of French and

Muslims in Thai art of the Ayutthaya and early Bangkok period.

15 Osama bin Laden was inserted into the painting only after he was killed by US forces in 2011 as I added the finishing

touches to my mural. I had wanted to include him in the art work earlier but as he was still alive it did not make sense to

have him in the Netherworld.

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