THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
nationthailand

In lost temples, faith renewed

In lost temples, faith renewed

What happens when a venerable wat decays or dies? Perspectives shift with the sun's shadows, and life begins anew

Wat Khun Samut Jeen on the shore of Samut Prakan is a hauntingly strange place, an old temple almost submerged in the rising waters of the Gulf. Wat Kalayanamitr in Thonburi, nearly 190 years old, is allegedly suffering the bizarre and impious fate of disintegration due to human mistreatment. But the artwork these two holy sites have recently inspired is even odder, even more disturbing.
Disorn Duangdao and Suwicha Dussadeewanich visited the temples, took dozens of photographs and collected loose bricks, splintering wood, even soil and brackish water – debris of a sacred past that they’ve transformed into art for an exhibition whose title is formed by a circle and trapezoid rather than words. It’s showing at Cloud, an alternative-art space in Bangkok’s Yaowarat district.
Hand-drawn circles and trapezoids and part of an old wooden staircase are the first things you see on entering, seeming parts of a puzzle that whet the curiosity.
Upstairs is a large and decidedly futuristic temple. A wild trapezoid table fashioned from old temple bricks has a top of rough-textured concrete and four legs that were once parts of balcony banisters. A window is lined with blooming and wilting golden lacquer flowers.
Gold thread the thickness of human hair hangs against a wall. Monochromatic paintings depict a towering wave of that brackish water from the Gulf, while others are slashed with strips of embossed white paper. Tiny, blurred photos rustle in the wind.
Everything here came from places of decay and ruin and, reassembled, it points to rebirth. “Everything eventually falls,” Disorn and Suwicha note in the catalogue. Yet, “Shadows only occur when there is light.”
Working separately in different media, they’re seeking greater understanding of nature, humanity and Buddhist philosophy. Disorn created three paintings in the two weeks before the show opened early this month, while Suwicha built the table and the window installation, borrowing the traditional lai rod nam lacquerware painting technique common in temples.
“We’re interested in how things collapse and how they’re rebuilt,” says Disorn. “It was a coincidence that we were both looking into the demise of two different temples. It was observing how Wat Khun Samut Jeen is being demolished by nature.”
“And the destruction of Wat Kalyanamitr is because of its treatment by humans,” says Suwicha. “I’m not interested in conflicts between conservators and developers – I’m more concerned about the forgotten value of art and the instability and the uncertainty of an object’s existence.
“At Wat Kalyanamitr I found metal signs saying ‘No admission’, and I was shocked. There are bricks and other debris lying all around the grounds. I asked a monk if I could collect some pieces and he told me to ask Luang Por Toh, and he told me, ‘Please use them because you’ve studied this situation’.”
Suwicha noticed how the glass of a window in the chapel distorted a mural depicting the beautiful and symbolic cotton rose. “That was the scene that inspired me.”
The loose bricks he collected were used to form new shapes and assumed new functions, as in the distorted table he calls “Day”, a mass of concrete and debris, deliberately askew to replicate an off-kilter society. Viewed from a certain angle, the table appears normal, but shift your position and the asymmetry becomes obvious.
Suwicha says the table also represents society’s outsiders – including artists – who observe the erosion taking place and the imbalance between nature and human need. Collapse is inevitable.
The cotton rose on the temple mural echoes in his golden flowers on the window, an installation called “Time”.
“In Buddhism the cotton rose refers to the cycle of life and represents time,” says Suwicha, who learned the lai rod nam technique in high school but hadn’t used it since. “Almost two decades!” he laughs. “It took three days to make the pigments from herbs. Then, working from a rough sketch, I painted the flowers freehand.”
“Time” plays with the light. At night the flowers stand out against the glass, and by day they almost vanish in the sunshine.
Disorn had a shock of his own visiting Wat Khun Samut Jeen after having only seen images online. The erosion that’s surrounded the temple with seawater was much more extensive than he expected. He actually measured it – and turned the measurements into art, using the same units and volumes in his paintings and also using the very materials found at the site.
“It’s amazing that the temple still exists at all after sitting in the water for so many years,” he says. “It’s nearly 1.5 metres underwater.
“You can still go inside, but you see that everything’s now out of proportion. The floors are being lifted higher and higher, almost reaching the ceiling, the windows are shrinking, and all the murals are gone.”
The dirty water and soil at the temple, mixed with acrylic paint, became his pigments. His method was the “action painting” that Jackson Pollock made famous. Grey and muddy colours were spontaneously thrown against white canvas.
One result is “Wave”, a threatening brown tsunami hanging exactly 143 centimetres above the ground, the same level the seawater reaches at the temple.
Disorn knows all about gold because he grew up in Kanchanaburi, where the precious metal is mined. He’s often used gold and other natural materials in his work. “One day I was watching people sift for gold in the river, using bamboo baskets, and my grandma said, ‘Just like sieving gold from the soil, we can separate the real from the unreal.’”
He bought two grams of gold and asked that it be made into threads the width of human hair. This forms the sculpture “As long as possible within two grams”. The idea is that gold is “assumed” to be valuable because it’s relatively scarce in the ground, but the price is never quite stable – unlike the righteous mind. It can shake like bamboo in the wind. It could very well become worthless, the unexpected death of seeming permanence.
“These falling temples remind us of the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence,” says Suwicha. “Everything arises, exists and finally falls.”
 ART FOR 
THE SOUL
 n The exhibition by Disorn Duangdao and Suwichcha Dussadeewanich closes on Buddhist Lent Day, July 31.
n It’s at Cloud on Mai Trichit Road in Yaowarat, Bangkok’s Chinatown, and is open from 3 to 7pm daily except Monday.
n Find out more at www.Facebook.com/|CloudProjectSpace
 
nationthailand