Hung on the walls of Sukhumvit 43's Galerie Oasis are oil paintings oozing with grief, melancholy and pain. There's a figure of a woman crucified on a giant cross with blood streaming out of her hands and genitalia; an angel with empty eye-sockets holding his bloody eyes in his hands; and Buddha standing on a bloody lotus with a skull instead of his usual serene face.
The exhibition, named "Apocalypso", is the first ever solo-show by environmental journalist-come-documentary-and-horror-film-director Ing K (director of the banned independent films My Teacher Eats Biscuits and Shakespeare Must Die). For some, the paintings may be unnecessarily grotesque, but for others, the pain and frustration within the gallery speaks to them personally, creating a cathartic experience which the artist herself seems to be looking to achieve.
"You could say that I paint so I don't have to become a terrorist," said Ing K, who has worked on this bright and vivid series for the past two decades. Her paintings either stem from a certain frustration or traumatic event which the artist had faced in her life and country. Two canvases of a sky on fire, for example, were from a nightmare she had after the May Massacre in 1992, and the angel with plucked eyes was from her experiences as an environmental journalist covering the controversial destruction of Maya Bay for the Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster The Beach.
"I was one of the first environmental writers in this country and you can imagine what kind of scars you can collect with such capacity," she said. "Because you always lose…[The Self-Blinding Angel] was directly from The Beach war. I had death threats. But worse is they can bury you alive by discrediting you. It's horrible. I felt like even the gods don't want to know. Even the gods don't want to see. They had lobbyists and PR companies and they basically went after us."
"It's my post traumatic stress I guess," she continued. "Maybe other people will do something else or start abusing someone on Facebook or whatever, but [painting] is my way, and you don't disturb anybody."
Painting, for Ing, is pure happiness, bliss and pleasure. Unlike filmmaking, where you're surrounded by people you have to take care of, painting is a solitary and contemplative practice that's both constructive and calming.
"You can cook with fire, or you can burn a house down. So I used it for cooking," she said. "And oil paints are very nice because you have to be patient. You have to wait. You put down one layer and then you have to wait a week before you can go on top. I like that process. Because by the time the week comes up you have a different idea about it."
Never having planned to even exhibit her works, Ing hopes that her exhibition would give people a sense of release just as she felt.
"Like an exorcism," she said. "I happen to be on the green frontline and the censorship frontline. I work it out by doing this so I don't have to scream at people or lose my mind or kill myself. When people see it I hope they also feel whatever they have gone through, because normal people feel it too. All these things that go wrong with the world, you don't have to be on the frontline to feel it. You know something's wrong. It's an apocalypse. It's an apocalypse but it's cartoonish, so it's 'Apocalypso'.
Apocalypso by Ing K
Exhibiting until Jan 13
Opening hours: Wed-Sun, 11am-7pm
Foundation Cinema Oasis
4 Sukhumvit 43, Bangkok
Tel: 097-929-5366
