Queering Postnational Tendencies in Contemporary Art from Thailand

Any number of different approaches to Thailand as an object of study and general interest can be said to intersect at a recognition of the pre-eminence given to surface appeal within the range of Thai societies. Peter A. Jackson coined the epigrammatic term “regime of images” to discuss how appearances are widely monitored and policed within the country; among others, he quotes the earlier scholarly work of Rosalind Morris, who wrote of Thai modernity’s “overinvestment in appearances” and Penny Van Esterik’s claims for “The real is hidden and unchallenged. The surface is taken for real.”1 To this we can add more recent references such as Koompong Noobanjong’s The Aesthetics of Power: Architecture, Modernity, and Identity from Siam to Thailand and Philip Cornwel-Smith’s Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture.2 Koompong traced the way in which historical meanings of Thailand’s major architecture have been inscribed and re-inscribed by successive administrations and military juntas as a means of avowing authority rather than the coherence of political ideologies these forms would otherwise serve. Philip Cornwel-Smith’s populist account of Thailand’s famed capacity to appropriate and hybridise influences — across the range of visual and material culture—perceives the