The interplay of the local and the global in contemporary Thai art, as artists strive for international recognition and a new meaning of the national. Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved international recognition, circulating globally by way of biennials, museums, and commercial galleries. Many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation; but “Thainess” remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In this book, the curator and critic David Teh examines the tension between the global and the local in Thai contemporary art. Writing the first serious study of Thai art since 1992 (and noting that art history and criticism have lagged behind the market in recognizing it), he describes the competing claims to contemporaneity, as staked in Thailand and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere. He shows how the values of the global art world are exchanged with local ones, how they do and don't correspond, and how these discrepancies have been exploited. How can we make sense of globally circulating art without forgoing the interpretive resources of the local, national, or regional context? Teh examines the work of artists who straddle the local and the global, becoming willing agents of assimilation yet resisting homogenization. He describes the transition from an artistic subjectivity couched in terms of national community to a more qualified, postnational one, against the backdrop of the singular but waning sovereignty of the Thai monarchy and sustained political and economic turmoil. Among the national currencies of Thai art that Teh identifies are an agricultural symbology, a Siamese poetics of distance and itinerancy, and Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of charismatic power. Each of these currencies has been converted to a legal tender in global art—signifying sustainability, utopia, the conceptual, and the relational—but what is lost, and what may be gained, in such exchanges?

Special attention is given in the early chapters to King Chulalongkorn, whose patronage played a major role in disseminating Western art in Bangkok, and to the Italian art teacher, Silpa Bhirasri, a pivotal figure in the institutional development of modern art in Thailand in the 1930s and 1940s.

'Flavours' offers a taste of the contemporary art scene in Thailand, a country with strong traditions but which is rapidly modernising. The text includes career profiles of 23 artists.

The paintings of contemporary Thai artist Pichai Nirand (b. 1936) are a vivid exploration of the interplay between Thailand's Buddhist roots and its modern aspirations and struggles. Pichai engages fully with the world and belief system around him. Accompanying the full-color paintings is an incisive examination of the Thai moral and social themes of Pichai's paintings in terms of the Buddhist cycle of life. Philip Constable's sensitive analysis of the social, political, economic, and moral dimensions affecting the artist, coupled with careful reference to other contemporary Thai artists, illuminates the deep meaning and expression behind each painting. This book showcases a celebrated Thai artist who has spent a lifetime providing a Thai Buddhist perspective on the dilemmas and contradictions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Over the last 20 years, intensive research has shed new light on Thailand's ancient pre-Tai era, a period that spanned from the 3rd millennium BC to the 13th century AD. This illustrated book, by a renowned authority on the subject, presents a survey of early Thai art.