Nawapol interacts with visitors with live screenwriting.
What’s not to like about director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s debut solo exhibition “I Write You A Lot”, which just opened last weekend at Bangkok Citycity Gallery?
Nothing. Still, one has to have some qualms when a film director takes over an art space, especially when his work has earned him both indie credibility (36 and Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy) and commercial success (Freelance).
We wonder if such a show as this is perhaps like tie-in photo books or products in box sets produced specifically to reap the harvest of those smash hits.
Is that the case of Nawapol? The biased answer is yes, and that’s understandable. Few directors have managed to garner so mixed, and sizeable, a fan base. Just this past weekend saw well over 1,000 visitors at this gallery on Sathon 1, an outrageous number considering the usual traffic in other Bangkok contemporary art spaces. Termed a “photographic screenwriting exhibition”, the show is separated into two main parts: three series of photographs with accompanying short film scripts and interactive features.
“It’s still storytelling, but in a different medium,” said Nawapol of the exhibition in relation to his films. The 32-year-old said that if he hadn’t been approached by the gallery about the show, he would have turned all these into a photo book anyway.
Nawapol said that these works are not sketches, that each story ends when it ends. While the 20-photograph and 10-photograph sets in the gallery’s small room have been shown before, in Singapore and Japan, the 19-photograph series is new and central to the show. They are impressively printed on light boxes and displayed in the dimly-lit main room.
A sense of alienation, at times almost tragic, permeates these new photographs. One photograph shows a girl lying asleep (or unconscious) on the rim of a fountain basin in Paris; another shows an ice cream truck parked in the middle of the night on an empty road.
The accompanying “scripts”, however, or the stories Nawapol imagined, often give these images a comical twist. That fountain girl was actually drunk in a Chiang Mai pub the night before, and she could neither remember how she got to Paris nor how her visa got through. The ice cream man is a fictional character named Christian Ma, and it’s only from midnight till 4am that he can come up with new flavours.
With feeble lighting, these images on light boxes, as Nawapol intends, are cinematic. Viewing these images alone brings to mind the incredibly quiet and prolonged shots from his debut feature film 36. Viewing them along with his scripts, it’s almost an assertion of power writing has over (or has to offer to) images — the power to create something out of nothing and manipulating the original stories passively told by the images.
In many cases, the colour Nawapol has given to these characters in his photographs is similar to that of his beloved character Mary Malony in his 2013 Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. In both cases, the characters are made to take up roles or dialogues at odds with the situations and environments they find themselves in, often resulting in deadpan and absurd comedy.
The interactive elements in “I Write You A Lot” are also an insistence on the authority a screenwriter such as himself has in storytelling. Sitting in cinema seats installed in the gallery’s small room, visitors are instructed to visit a website and play a short recorded film script in which, once again, Nawapol imagines a story out of the banal street view outside the gallery window.
The show’s main attraction, however, seems to be the live screenwriting by the director himself every Saturday. Nawapol hides himself somewhere in the gallery, and, through surveillance cameras, keeps close watch of visitors inside the gallery, coming up with short, often comical, scripts which projected in real-time on the wall.
“Inside Bangkok City Gallery. Daytime,” wrote Nawapol on the wall when I visited the space last Saturday. “A girl with sunglasses wonders why these photographs are so dark.”
Soon that visitor starts to smile, realising that Nawapol was watching her from somewhere and creating a script out of her.
“Oh, I am wearing sunglasses,” Nawapol wrote on, indicating that sentence as the girl’s voice-over, abruptly followed by: “The End.”
Once each short script is finished, it immediately comes out of a printer on the table in the centre of the space, and the gallery staff place these onto clipboards for visitors to browse.
While at the gallery, one of the remarks overheard was how the use of a clipboard is one of the most striking aspects of the whole exhibition, and I couldn’t agree more.
The scripts accompanying the 19 photographs are also affixed to the clipboards. With the temporariness of the device, one realises that perhaps Nawapol doesn’t intend to assume righteous authorship, even if the photos are his own. The real stories are, perhaps, in the eyes of the beholder.
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit.
One of Nawapol’s photograph/script works.
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.