The body in the frame

A NAKED man covered in white powder is not a common sight in the quiet northern province of Nan. But then, this was no common Saturday morning either.

Seemingly oblivious to the stares he was getting, the white-powdered figure was calmly eating his breakfast in a small restaurant next to the provincial town’s famous Phumin Temple. Amused and bemused passers-by tried very hard not to stare as his nakedness as he munched on a sausage, dabbed his lips with a tissue and sipped his hot and sweet chai. Obviously the good people of Nan are not familiar with the works by such artists as Vasan Sitthiket.

“It’s not a common sight in Nan, is it?” grins the White Man, who in real life is known as Nattanat Sudrit, a performance artist. 

“You’ll see more like me, performance artists with a provocative appearance, around the city’s landmarks today. We’re here for the Nan Arts Festival.”

Tucked away in Thailand’s North, last weekend was the first time Nan had welcomed an arts festival. Named “Nan Nerb Nerb”, a title that pokes fun at the province’s super slow life, the inaugural festival was a showcase for performing arts, poetry, movies, painting, photography, installation and music and was aimed at celebrating the small but growing artist community in Nan province.

“In the last few years Nan has become home to many artists. The local artist community keeps expanding,” adds Nattanat, who is also a resident of the town.

“Some artists might be baristas or innkeepers but they still create their own works after hours.

The famous murals of Wat Phumin and Wat Nong Bua, Nattanat points out, make Nan a city of art in itself. But the arts festival is setting out to take the province to a new level , one that goes far beyond the murals.

Respected Nan artist and owner of the Nan Riverside Art Gallery Winai Prabripu declared the festival open then handed over the town to the artists who would be contributing their creations to the three-day event. Among the headliners were national artist and respected poet Nawarat Pongpaiboon, songs-for-life legend Surachai Chanthimathorn aka Nga Caravan and that famous bete noir of the Bangkok art world, Vasan Sitthiket himself. Asiatopia, the international performance art festival founded by Chumpon Apisuk, sent along some members too and they happily mingled with the crowd. 

Friday, the first day of the event, was relatively tame with punters invited to catch a screening of Uruphong Raksasad’s “Agrarian Utopia”. Kongdej Jaturanrasamee’s “Tang Wong” and Sivaroj Kongsakul’s “Eternity” followed on the following nights.

Nattanat and his mates came into their own on Saturday, when the town was handed over to the weird and wonderful spectacles of street art and performance art.

Vasan, clutching a sickle in his hand, was one of the first to appear, leaping from the footpath into the main street and gyrating within touching distance of the audience. With his strange mop of hair and provocative if confounding act, Vasan ignited a chain reaction of smiles and laughs. Active in the anti-government protests in recent weeks, he made a strong political statement about the controversial rice-pledging scheme by creating a human figure from a pile of white rice and elicited both curiosity and wonder for his efforts.

Across the street, the good people of Nan were discovering that art has many forms and reaches people in many ways as Wanaphon Chimbanchong, an actress-turned-artist, invited the audience to take a marker from her hand, write a message on a piece of adhesive tape then post it anywhere they liked on her body. Soon she was wrapped in sticky tape, looking for all the world like a living mummy.

“Unlike big cities like Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Nan is a virgin to the street art scene,” Vasan enthused. “Here if they see a performance artist on the street, they will stop, watch and try to make sense of the performance. This is wonderful.”

Vasan was right. As I followed the Nan Nerb Nerb map towards the installation art scattered around the Nan National Museum, I was stopped by a resident who was looking thoughtfully at my breakfast companion’s work, cocoon-like sculptures hanging around the branch of a tree. 

“What is it?” asked the resident, scratching his head.

“A piece of art for sure, but I don’t know what the artist is telling us,” I replied, scratching my head myself. “What do you see when you look at it?

“A corpse…a dead body. It makes me feel uncomfortable,” he whispered.

Fortunately, things are not always as they appear.

In fact, the performance artists didn’t seem to care much about the meaning. They were more interested in capturing the attention of their viewers and having them come up with their own interpretations.

As the day wore on, I joined a small group watching as a female artist soaked her hair in a bucket of paint and started walking over a sheet of paper. 

Funky strange or true art? None of us had the slightest idea but we certainly thought about it, which was after all, the object of the exercise.

Weird but different, was the overall opinion, which perhaps explains why the people of Nan are already counting down the days until next year’s edition of the Nan Arts Festival.