This week Guru chatted with the local artist and photographer Dop Ameen. Originally from France, he began his artistic pursuits here seven years ago during a solo motorcycle/ photography trip around Southeast Asia. He fell in love with what he captured and he's been pushing artistic boundaries in this hemisphere ever since. He has developed a series called Bangkok Psycho, a deviant art concept that focuses on the paradoxical tendencies of Bangkok and its dwellers. You can observe his latest works, "Bangkok Psycho — The Bride Edition" (goo.gl/PXuJyn) from Jun 8-15 at Maggie Choo's.
What is your story? What attracted you to Bangkok?
I studied chemistry and physics and lately got an Executive MBA. I have always worked as an innovator in the fields of science in various industries. In 2010, I flew to Southeast Asia for a one year photography motorbike trip. I relocated in Bangkok early in 2011 to open an art gallery. This experience showed me that there is no proper art market in Thailand and led me to develop a B2B online market place to gather together Thai artists and businesses who need good quality for interior decoration purposes. Bangkok Psycho is a hobby. My real job is in consulting, project management and digital content production in the field of art.
What is Bangkok Psycho? Is there an overall theme throughout your work?
Neuroscience gives some tips about my artistic exploration (through photography). Bangkok Psycho is like dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centres. This molecule also helps regulate movement and emotional responses, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but to take action to move towards them. The presence of a certain kind of dopamine receptor is also associated with sensation-seeking people, more commonly known as "risk takers". Sensation-seeking is the tendency to pursue sensory pleasure and excitement. Bangkok Psycho is about exploring the human unrevealed deep inside.
What is the catalyst or inspiration behind your work?
After a personal erotic experience in Bangkok, I began to create a series of thematic photographs (in strong, black and white contrast), using the bodies of naked women to stage the images in bizarre environments, each woman wearing a mask evoking our primal fears. The main direction of my work is to explore human antagonisms, paradoxes, frustrations and moral barriers through sexuality.
How does the city of Bangkok fit in with the nature of your work?
A few months after I relocated to Bangkok in early 2011, I became fascinated by the paradoxical, extreme, bipolar, sexual and slightly perverse side of Bangkok, where, every day, millions of men and women of all sexualities cross paths and mix together; desire and hate each other; cheat on each other, lie, and consume one another; and, in the end, tell themselves that tomorrow will be another day. Bangkok is the capital of excess, of lies and of perversions. You can both love and hate the fascination that we have for this metropolis and the way in which it manipulates our fantasies. Bangkok itself is a bipolar city, split between the historical centre and the modern one.
What is the vision for your art? What do you wish to evoke from the viewer?
My ambition is to provoke in the viewer a hostile, instinctive reaction; a binary feeling of "fascination-repulsion" in front of images that are both erotic and disturbing. I am convinced that sexual disturbance leads to self-questioning.
How do you know when a piece is finished? When do you know when to walk away?
When the excitement is done and fortunately, this never happens. So, I never walk away from who I am. My artistic exploration is a never-ending story.
Is there a message behind your work?
I am truly convinced that human relationships are simply combinations of sexual urges that are more or less controlled causing everyone to arrange themselves in accordance with their conscious and unconscious objectives. Our social and sexual relationships, therefore, are simply arrangements resulting from our personal histories and momentary circumstances. I am interested in the human dark side, antagonisms and paradoxes. My message is no one is innocent. We all have to face who we are and it's all about identity.
What makes this exhibition unlike any other?
Bangkok Psycho - The Bride Edition explores the sexual aspects of the masculine identity in relation to fantasies, urges, desires, dilemmas, frustrations and other forbidden themes. The female body is represented as an object of desire; of conquest. In contrast, the mask of death which she wears is an interrogating mirror imposed on the man, the conqueror. It invites him to reflect on the motivations which push him to either submit to or resist his urges. For the woman, conquered by the man, everything begins when she gives herself over to him. This is in contrast to the man, for whom this signals the beginning of the end -- an age-old misunderstanding which is invariably still present today. Only artificial intelligence can let us predict if it will linger. The Bride explores these paradoxical concepts along a ridge line that will lead each viewer to examine their own conscience.
