One recent morning at Nopphrat Thara beach, the high tide flooded the lower part of a strange, interwoven structure. Rising from the blue water of the bay, it looked like an island, a new, unmapped island of Krabi visible from this popular spot where tourists visit and board tour boats to outlying islands.
No Sunrise No Sunset by Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Suriya Umpansiriratana is an aluminium container perched on a cliff on Ao Nang, a postmodern 'cave' with graffiti and mysterious drawings.
In the evening from the same spot, the structure stood on slushy sand as after the tide had ebbed. We entered it, this dome-like, porous, asymmetrical shape constructed from castaway sticks and fishing nets found at sea. This isn't an island, or not a real one, though in the real and imaginative worlds they're the same: The structure is Ghost Island, an installation piece by duo artists called Map Office. It's one of the highlights of the Thailand Biennale, a major provincewide art show in Krabi that began in November and runs until the end of February.
Thailand Biennale, organised by the Ministry of Culture's Office of Contemporary Art and programmed by Chinese curator Jiang Jiehong, is an expansive, ambitious visual art project that involved almost 60 Thai and international artists, with artworks placed in various environs -- beaches, caves, cliffs, waterfalls, forests, deltas, national parks, traffic roundabouts, a whole island -- and which yields mixed results. The theme for this inaugural biennale is titled "Edge Of The Wonderland", and there are several dramatic, effective site-specific pieces that maximise the geography and history of their surroundings. There are also reluctant works that one could easily miss; then there are pieces installed in obscure spots which required a visitor to hunt down and inquire a series of security guards, boatmen, volunteers, waiters and hotel staff for direction, like a quest for a treasure island. And there's also one video work that got censored and removed.
Ghost Island by the duo artists Map Office, made from sticks and fishing nets, rises like an artificial island in high tide and welcomes visitors to explore when the water recedes.
After hours of driving around in sticky Andaman weather trying to spot contemporary art, you're sometimes tempted to mistake a random crab figure on a footpath for a conceptual sculpture, or some garlanded roadside shrine as an abstract piece. But maybe that's the point: art placed in an everyday setting, the mundane and the aestheticised in vague unison, the high-minded and the barnacle-encrusted juxtaposed, their meaning at once heightened and blurred.
"What's it for?" A Chinese tourist asked innocently as she waded the toe-deep water to approach Ghost Island. "Is it used to trap fish," she said, "or to live in?"
Art as a quest
Krabi has never been known as an art destination, and the decision to pick it as the venue for the first state-funded Thailand Biennale is curious and yet welcoming. One would assume that beside Bangkok, Chiang Mai or Khon Kaen, places with artistic enclaves and propensity, would be natural candidates for the event, though again that would have been too predictable -- too easy. To spread art around is a form of decentralisation that, in principle, should be encouraged.
Spreading around is the right way to describe this biennale: One believes that promoting art in Krabi is deeply wedded with promoting tourism. Most of the pieces in the Thailand Biennale are grouped at popular tourist neighbourhoods, namely Ao Nang, Noppharat Thara beach, Krabi town, Koh Klang village, Khao Khanab Nam Cave, Phranang Cave and Railey Beach, Poda Island, Thanbok Khoranee National Park, and a couple more spots. Many of the pieces are easily accessible, out there in the open, and many demand your effort to find them (and to drive around as well as to hire a boat). Some of them become a quest -- you need to consult the GPS and ask the locals, who're helpful and knowledgeable. Some of them can even interpret the meaning of the work for you.
And some quests yield satisfactory returns. There are a number of outstanding pieces at the Thailand Biennale, mostly site-specific, contextualised works conceived with local history and tourism-heavy characteristics of Krabi in mind. Map Office's Ghost Island, a man-made geographical addendum assembled from ocean trash. Tran Loung's About The Hiding Of The Jellyfish is a sly, amusing, unobtrusive piece that creates a mock promenade next to the real concrete one -- as tourists walk along the beachfront footpath, they'll step on this artwork, which will sink and bob under their weight as if they've treaded upon an underground jellyfish. Norwegian artist AK Dolven's Did You Leave Your Island? is a blue bungalow snuck against a rock, a typical lodging for beach travellers looking out at the scenic beach while voices from a small loudspeaker read out snippets in Thai, English and Norwegian, based on the artist's conversations with Thai people who live in Norway.
Giant Ruins by Tu Wei-cheng puts a skeleton of a prehistoric giant in Khao Khanab Nam Cave, confounding fact and fiction, real and made-up history.
Vong Phaophanit's and Claire Oboussier's Gilding The Border sees a small rock outcrop near the heavily-visited Phra Nang Cave covered with gold, tampering with the natural scenery and questioning the meaning of the horizon. Adam Barthroll's The Perfect Beach, on Phra Nang Beach crawling with day-trippers, is a bright, ultra-vivid HD print of a tropical beach scene, and the superimposition of this mirage beach on the real, popular beach has an unsettling impact (it was moved away from the main beach while I was there).
These pieces look at how tourism and its overwhelming sense of voluptuousness -- the crowded, inclusive, sunburned humanity -- also beget loneliness and fatigue. Out on Poda Island with its beautiful beach 30 minutes from Ao Nang, a gimmicky, selfie-ready and shrewd work by Leung Chi-wo called Monuments Of Solitude features a phone booth with a log on its shelf instead of a phone -- it was set right on the beach of Poda, where a lot of people missed it, thinking it was a forgotten anomaly (sometimes it is put in the shallow water). Amid half-naked tourists and whiffs of sunscreen, the phone-log stands in solitude, in jest, in vain and -- as a favourite mode of contemporary art -- in irony.
Natural history, historical nature
Besides the touristic quality of Krabi, other artworks train their focus on history and the natural setting of the province.
Kamin Lertchaiprasert's and Suriya Umpansiriratana's No Sunrise No Sunset, hidden behind a low rocky cliff on Ao Nang, takes the idea all the way. A rectangular aluminium container whose surface reflects the seascape surroundings, creating a mirror-house refraction in broad daylight, this is a stunning set piece from first glance. Approaching it, you enter the oblong space and find a phantom staring at you: a figure of an old woman, set as if she was walking on water, the sea as her blue screen (she's Grandma Sa, awaiting her husband who's left to search for "ultimate truth", according to Kamin's description).
Two Visions Of The Wonderland by Kamol Tassanachalee.
The walls of the container are covered with graffiti -- random gibberish and drawings, including that of Phi Hua Toh, a mysterious red figure that appears on a cave wall littered with 3,000-year-old drawings and one of Krabi's historical attractions. Kamin's and Suriya's postmodern cave brings it all together: myth, folklore, futuristic time-capsule, and a yearning for something that has been lost. This stark structure looks like Noah's Ark at the edge of the wonderland.
Less conspicuous, seamless with nature and yet equally intriguing is a sound installation by French artist Felix Blume. At Klong Muang beach, we walked out on a scenic pier jutting into the sea, at the end of which a few dozen bamboo sticks rose out of the water where faint, whistling notes drift around in a sweet echo. Rumour From The Sea is an installation inspired by a fishermen's sea wall, but Blume has attached locally-made flutes on the tips of each stick and the wind produces the notes. This could well be one of the most popular works in Thailand Biennale for its simplicity and ingenuity -- and for the setting that doesn't scream out "art!"
Nature and history -- real or fictional, actual or imaginary -- take a more solemn tone at a group of installation works at Khao Khanab Nam, a mangrove forest dotted with rocky grottos, couched under the towering limestone outcrops 15 minutes from Krabi town by boat. There at Khao Khanab Nam Cave, a giant lies in a dirt pit: Taiwanese artist Tu Wei-cheng has created an "excavation site" in which a giant -- outsized skull and bones -- has been dug out of oblivion. This "historical find" comes with a glass box showing ancient stones and coins that were supposedly buried in the same period -- one of them, you have to look closely, is a Hello Kitty figure. Again it's the setting that lends an air of sombre authenticity to this high prank, this fictitious historical discovery -- a lot of unknowing visitors might mistake the giant as real -- especially because the cave features an actual, permanent exhibit about Japanese soldiers who fled and hid here during World War II.
This bit about Japanese soldiers led us to another non-existent work -- a black spot that scarred Thailand Biennale. Chulayarnnon Siriphol's video work The Birth Of The Golden Snail -- another fictitious account telling the origin tale of the snail princess and her shenanigans with Japanese soldiers -- was supposed to be projected onto the cave wall. But the authorities banned it because the film contained some nudity (very innocuous), and the strangest thing is that an official letter ordering the filmmaker to remove his work is posted on a sign outside the cave. In the world where everything can be art, is this a freaky conceptual piece, an artwork that kills the existence of another artwork? It is not; it is bureaucracy, which in a way is an antithesis to art. We hope Chulayarnnon, an upcoming artist with a strong following, will find another venue for his short film.
The bottom line
Monuments Of Solitude by Leung Chi-wo on Poda Island.
As an inaugural event, Thailand Biennale has enough showpieces to attract enthusiasts. As a long-term project to promote contemporary art outside Bangkok -- to put Thailand on the map of the world's oversupply of art biennales -- it still has a lot of philosophical and organisational work to do: Art, tourism, community participation (is this biennale for visitors or locals?), local ownership of an international event (there are Krabi artists involved, and schools have brought their students to see the pieces, but is that enough?). Apparently these issues have been taken into account, but the struggle to find the right balance is always challenging.
Perhaps choosing Krabi is the trump card: Because of this beautiful Andaman province, it's possible to combine vacation with art appreciation. And if nothing else, the locals, from boatmen to stall vendors, enjoy having more people coming down there, either for the art or the beach.
Ideally, you need at least three days to visit all the sites and see all of the 50-plus pieces. And you shouldn't feel hurried -- take your time, if you have time to take. During my visit in late December -- nearly two months after the event began -- most installation artworks still stand in their intended condition, while quite a few had deflated or were unmaintained. To look at two art pieces located in Thara Park in Krabi town that week, I had to walk through a boy scout's camp that had occupied most of the space. A video work called The Ambassadors, a 10-minute film recounting a visit of a Siamese envoy to London in the early 20th century by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers, were being installed at the Krabi Public Library while I was there even though the artists' names have been listed from the beginning.
The Thailand Biennale website has a map with GPS markings of all the artworks, which are mostly accurate. At some sites, there are volunteers to help you (if not, ask the security guards, who always do their best). A yellow sign marking an artwork is something you'll have to constantly look out for, in order to pick your way through the trap of reality to find this imaginative wonderland.
Adam Bartholl's The Perfect Beach is placed near Phra Nang Beach, a popular spot crawling with tourists.
Did You Leave Your Island by AK Dolven, a bungalow constructed on the edge of Noppharat Thara Beach, inspired by the Norwegian artist's conversations with Thai people living in Norway.