Kittiwat Unarrom finds there's bread to be made in body parts
By Chawadee Nualkhair
Assorted heads, arms and feet hang from the ceiling in varying stages of decay. Another dozen or so heads and noses sit, wrapped in plastic, on trays as a gaggle of schoolgirls gawp and point through the window, completely oblivious to the unprepossessing young man in the blue apron in front of them.
This is not a horror movie set. It's an exhibition of the young man's work, an artist who appears formidably unflustered, even on the first day of his very first gallery show, which has been six months in the making - or baking, as it were.
Continuing in the tradition of his baker family in Ratchaburi, award-winning artist Kittiwat Unarrom has fashioned a collection of heads and limbs out of bread for an exhibition he calls "Body and the Dead", inspired in part by Buddhist precepts and the similarity in smell between stale bread and rotting corpses.
"I like work that can be transformed by time," said the soft-spoken, unfailingly polite 31-year-old.
Mr Kittiwat said he had always been motivated by ideas of death and loss. "When my father fell ill, I started to get interested in death and read a lot about Buddhism," he said. "I made portraits of suffering. I wanted people I loved to still have life."
Moving on from portraits to mixed-media, Mr Kittiwat used found objects - rubbish, fabric, bits of junk - and in the process breathed new life into things discarded because their usefulness had been exhausted. Then he read a book on Michelangelo.
"He said something like, 'At least I'm not a breadmaker', sort of saying, 'Don't look down on me'. I remembered that later and it gave me the idea that maybe I could incorporate both - bread as art."
Against the initial advice of his breadmaker father, Mr Kittiwat made his first piece a large "cushion" of bread, the dough pushed into place by egg cartons before baking.
Later, opening a long-dormant refrigerator to discover "rotten bread, crawling with worms, with a smell like a rotting corpse", Mr Kittiwat hit upon fashioning bodies, heads and limbs out of bread as his final dissertation at Chulalongkorn University - a bigger challenge than it seems.
"When I make the face, it has to be a bit smaller than the human scale, because it will eventually get bigger," said Mr Kittiwat, referring to the "rising" that accompanies baking bread. Each piece takes three hours to finish, he said, though "real bread might take a bit longer to get bigger".GRUESOME DISCOVERY Mr Kittiwat is not the first artist to shock audiences by using death as fodder for his work. British artist Damien Hirst has explored universal concepts like death, love and loss in works such as 1991's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", a 4.3-metre tiger shark poised, mid-attack, suspended in formaldehyde.
Mr Kittiwat's first "human bread" show three years ago made a similar splash, winning a national art award. "Gruesome" and "morbid" were among the adjectives used to describe his sculptures - hands hung on meat hooks, feet piled on cooling racks - but the artist, unruffled as usual, explained the gore was all down to perception, the entry to concepts that were actually deeply Buddhist.
"When people see the bread, they don't want to eat it," he told reporters at the time. "But when they taste it, it's just normal bread. The lesson is, 'Don't judge just by outer appearances'."
Eating is an important part of the show, and what Mr Kittiwat insists guests do. In the process of steaming bread "noses" for that night's show, he pointed at the dangling limbs forming part of the "human mobile" in the corner.
Many of those limbs, smeared with "blood" fashioned out of food colouring and chocolate, are made out of hard, sweet crackers, while the heads - many including teeth made from cashew nuts - resemble steamed Chinese buns.
"I was trying to make it taste as good as possible, especially the ones that look disgusting," he said. Guests can even take a bit of the body home with them: noses and mouths go for a mere 70 baht, while the heads fetch between 800 and 1,500 baht.
"Ingestion is very important," Mr Kittiwat said. "Eating is a way of bringing people who are not in the art community together. It's something universal."
"It's a bargain," said Whitespace gallery director Maitree Siriboon, a high-profile artist himself. "When you think of it, it's just 70 baht to take this artist's work home with you."NATURE AS ARTIST Mr Kittiwat is already thinking about his next series, a meditation on the effect of time on beauty. Behind him, a series of bread faces, some he has kept for three years, shows different stages of decay. One a month old has a sprinkling of mould on the cheek like freckles, while another two years old is nearly obscured by a heavy covering of white fur-like mould.
"Nature is the better artist," Mr Kittiwat said. "It's better than anything in bringing people in to see my work."
Nature has clearly been hard at work: one face, three years old, sports a shiny, black patina, pockmarked with little holes "where the worms used to live", the artist said.
"When I look at things, I don't see them as disgusting or ugly. This white mould - it still looks the same on the inside when you cut it in half."
That said, "the audience is also part of the process. Everyone has a different opinion. Some can have a negative opinion and see the darkness of the artist. And some people look at it in a positive way, learning something for themselves."
Mr Kittiwat said he does not presume to imagine what visitors to the gallery take away with them after seeing his work. He only hopes his work will continue to teach him.
"Come see the work," he said. "It's not about liking or disliking. Just come to see."
Kittiwat Unarrom's exhibition is on at the Whitespace Gallery, 2nd Floor, Lido in Siam Square, until Dec 14.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Next
