Visitors turning up at art exhibitions on Narathiwas 22 this month are greeted with two galleries of faces. While Tawan Wattuya's neon-coloured portraits of the rich and famous -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- have captivated media attention, Japanese artist Mika Tamori subtly challenges viewers' gaze and inverts the power dynamic between subject and spectator.
In "Do Not Look At Me", on display at Cartel Artspace until March 21, Mika Tamori takes us on a sensorial journey, albeit one that takes place in the confined space of a cage. Visitors walk in endless rounds, animals in a zoo, watched by the same beasts they have come to see.
A white cube populated by birds, monkeys, goats and feline specimens, the gallery is filled with animal sounds, soft shrieks and wails, as well as nondescript odours -- pheromones -- like a mirror held up to our faces.
Prior to conceiving this exhibition, Mika Tamori says she paid a visit to Bangkok's notorious Pata Zoo, a menagerie located on the rooftop of a rundown department store, where animals essentially await their death in prison.
The artist began to make sketches on site, drawings with a frail, seismographic quality, the animals' faces, eyes and expressions. Displayed at varying heights on the gallery walls -- most of the faces are looking down upon visitors -- the drawings are both melancholic and haunting. Yet, there is a sensation of discomfort as we walk past these sad eyes. The gallery space takes on a cocoon-like feeling -- after all, these wild animals have become domesticated.
Viewers' ambiguous relationship to these portraits is what makes Mika Tamori's work so different from Tawan's. In "Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire", at the Artist + Run gallery until March 25, the Thai artist uses images commonly found in traditional and online media channels to denounce the subjects' power and the hold they sway over our minds. However, in displaying the portraits of already sanctified figures on a "wall of fame", Tawan merely replicates the deference commonly shown to his subjects.
On the contrary, "Do Not Look At Me" challenges perceptions of what should be put up on gallery walls. In this case, defenceless animals become symbolic of marginalised beings, oft reduced to their "otherness".
Visitors are encouraged to light incense sticks made of dejections and animal odours, like holding a candle to their souls and turning the gallery into a shrine.
A video installation of the artist, caged and left alone for several hours, is also on show. Filmed with an infrared camera, Mika Tamori lies on the ground, staring intently at the lens or trying to pass time while remaining lucid.
"The hardest part of this video performance was not knowing time," she says, explaining she didn't have a watch and couldn't keep track of how long it had been since she first entered the cage.
While the artist has an acute awareness of the camera recording her, it is no different than the feelings animals exhibited in zoos might have. Perhaps the mise-en-scène of their existence is their only pastime.
Do Not Look At Me is on show at Cartel Art Space until March 21.
