Death in life and after

What you're seeing when you view Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s paintings and sculptures at the Numthong Gallery is the evidence from one man’s search for the meaning of life. Kamin, 53, has spent years perusing the “dharma puzzle” and shares his findings thus far in “Before Birth – After Death”, continuing all this week.

An established name in Thai art, Kamin travelled to Japan in 2008 to learn more about Buddhism from a Zen master. Week after week, the monk didn’t give him much to go on, merely handing him a blank piece of white paper and telling him to concentrate on the regimen of vipassana meditation. 

Kamin drew a skull on the paper. He was mulling his own mortality.

At the Numthong Gallery, the first thing you see is a massive skull formed by 1,089 more or less life-size skulls, all suspended from the ceiling, moving to and fro as if to underscore life’s instability, its impermanence. 

Each skull bears a message from the artist, a comment on Buddhist teachings. You have to walk inside the big skull to read the words on the smaller ones. Enter upon death, indeed. 

The smaller skulls have quite a story in themselves. Kamin came across a “street artisan” making dolls out of recycled plastic and hired him for this task. It took the artisan three years to collect the plastic for the more than 1,000 pieces.

The opposite wall looks at first like it’s covered by a vast mural, but in fact it’s 730 drawings – including the white slip of paper that the Zen monk gave him. Kamin draws every day, everywhere, keeping a diary in a way. He draws on anything that comes to hand – a magazine or newspaper or whatever arrives in the mail, even a household bill. The subject matter is also about daily life, but he reaches further, being interested as well in politics, economics and environmental and social issues.

One drawing was done on a copy of The Nation Weekender magazine, on a cover that featured former premiers Abhisit Vejjajiva and Yingluck Shinawatra. “The highest goal,” he inscribed on it, “is the public’s interest, not personal interest.”

Another piece is a Thai-language newspaper bearing the headline “Luang Ta Bua goes to Heaven”. Kamin has drawn a skull on the page and written, “No heaven, no hell, they are the present.”

When the show was being installed, a member of the gallery staff who admitted he was a red shirt asked Kamin what he was up to with all these skulls and false faces. Kamin assured him that the art didn’t involve politics, only the meaning of life.

In a quiet adjoining room, the two-dimensional drawings become 3D sculptures. There are suitably contemplative black-and-gold skulls made from bronze and coloured ceramic, rendered in the haphazard Raku technique (it means “happiness in the accident”). 

A large painting comprises layer of cream (for that white piece of paper), brown and orange. The contours of a skull appear on the white area along with notations from his daily schedule. 

A pair of sculptures depicts Zen monks seated in meditation, one of ceramic and the other bronze, and the latter has a skull on his back with the inscription “Teaching without Words”. 

“Since 2009,” he says in the show’s catalogue, “I have been working on this project so as to study and attempt to understand the transient condition of nature that occurs in every moment of my daily life. I have been doing this by observing daily happenings through objects like receipts, letters, tickets, postcards, brochures, articles I read and so on. 

“I have collected these artefacts from different times and spaces and made them into many collages, upon which I draw the contours of a human skull as a symbol of transience. Then I contemplate these occurrences, similar to contemplating Zen dharma puzzles, by practising vipassana meditation (the development of insight) to find factors of these causes. 

“There is a saying that ‘There is no teacher without a student.’ In my case, the teacher is my daily experiences, and the dharma puzzle is the question of what was the condition of existence before birth and after death. Afterward I write my opinions and perceptions on the drawing, and then I take those phrases and write them onto plastic skulls, almost every day. It’s a meditation to gain awareness of the meaning behind the words and experiences that occur. 

“Out of approximately 730 drawings, I would select only 12 pieces to be the prototypes for my bronze and ceramic sculptures. I believe this process can change my perspective of the world, to help me see it as it truly is, and not as how I am accustomed to seeing or want it to be. We can gain the understanding of truth by wisdom from reading and listening, rational thinking and direct experience practices.”

Kamin is attempting to “leave himself” behind. He long ago stopped signing his art. Instead, the Buddhist messages in his handwriting – and the skull too – have become his signature. 

His intentions are noble, his journey fascinating and the artwork that results is often as dramatic as it is provocative. But there are drawbacks in Kamin’s approach. The way he presents his philosophy is dense. Zen thinking is minimalist, but Kamin’s artworks are busy with drawings and tiny sculptures. For this artist, creation seems to be therapy.

He is still learning and still gathering the wisdom that will inspire his future work.

 

JAPAN IS NEXT

“Before Birth – After Death” continues through Saturday at the Numthong Gallery at 72/3 Soi Aree 5 (North), Phahonyothin 7, Phahonyothin Road.

In October it will be on view in Tokyo, at the Art-U Room. 

Find out more at www.NumthongGallery.com.