Through the looking glass | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

ART REVIEW

Images of sexy naked bodies typically challenge the possibility of responding objectively to the terms of their representation. Any implication of prurience, voyeurism or the potential to be turned-on or turned-off complicates the matter of clearly deciding what it is we are looking at and how it might be interpreted.

Such a vexed response is compounded by the fairly widespread and misguided (if not stupid) assumption that sexual imagery is somehow self-evident in what it is and does and therefore doesn't demand a close examination of its codes, conventions and its affects.

I write this as an introduction to a groundbreaking exhibition of photographs by the late ML Toy Xoomsai, a pioneer of nude photography in Thailand in the late '40s, because Kathmandu Gallery's PR performs a humorous feat of schizophrenic description. On the one hand, these black and white girlie pin-ups are described as "an act of defiance against the power of the fascist state and its imposed social order". (They were produced during the nationalistic reign of Field Marshall Pibulsongkram). And, on the other, they reflect "Thai male fantasies concerning the opposite sex".