Vasan Sitthiket

Biography

An exhibition of fifty paintings showing Thai politicians and military officers in compromising poses was due to open at Chulalongkorn University in 2000. Five days before the opening, the university cancelled it.

For Vasan Sitthiket this was neither the first nor the last episode of its kind.

He was born on 7 October 1957 in Lat Yao, in Nakhon Sawan province. His elder brother, Wisamanmueang Sitthiket, is also an artist and photographer. From 1975 to 1981 Vasan studied at the College of Fine Arts in Bangkok. He began working in the 1970s, and politics has been present in his work ever since. He draws on drawing, woodcut, ceramic sculpture, installation, performance and painting, and he also writes poetry, children’s books and political texts (more than ten books in all) and has staged three plays. One of his best-known performances used fake rubber breasts and buttocks to depict symbolic violence against the whole country. In painting he takes up corruption, inequality and capitalism. Among the titles of his 2009 paintings are “Profit is Evil” and “Bomb All Banks”; to my mind they show well his habit of calling things by their names.

In 2003, at the 50th Venice Biennale, he showed large portraits of the younger George Bush and other world leaders. The canvases were made with impressions of custom-made rubber stamps. He has had solo exhibitions in Japan (1989, 1990), Singapore (2000), Indonesia (2001, 2008), South Korea and Italy (2003).

For him politics is a subject of the work and also a form of direct action. At the 2001 election he announced the founding of the “Party for Me” (Phak Phuea Ku), a parody of the Thai Rak Thai party: its platform included “one district, one battalion” to form armed gangs, and the purchase of twenty squadrons of F-16s for the sake of commissions. In 2005 he founded the Artist Party with other artists, among them Chuang Munpinit, Naowarat Pongpaiboon and Angkarn Kalayanapong; its programme proposed confiscating the property of corrupt politicians, cancelling unfair trade agreements and providing free education. The project mocked the ruling party and Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Later Vasan supported the People’s Alliance for Democracy (the “Yellow Shirts”), which opposed Thaksin. His artwork was used as a backdrop for stages at rallies and printed on T-shirts, and he himself recited poems and performed music there. He also recorded music albums of political songs and performed at concerts commemorating the events of May 1992.

In 2007 the Ministry of Culture of Thailand awarded him the Silpathorn Award in visual arts. Among his exhibitions in 2010 was “10 Evil Scenes of Thai Politic” at the Number 1 Gallery in Bangkok.