BYPASS by Pakkawat Tanghom

Artist Statement

"We should use bypass road to avoid things that we don't want to meet"

-Dad on the road to Grandma's place-

The project is not a project and no need to be labeled as any special act. The life itself is the things I’ve been doing. I am not interested in the role as a story teller nor the messenger. Photography is the way to understand what I am looking as I believe and concern about. The camera is the most truthfully process of eye talk to mind and mind talk to eye. Though the meaning of all the elements that appears in the negatives and slides can maybe depicted accord to as any subjective thoughts that viewer free to go to. Me as a wanderer who tries to escape between blurred line of places in my memories and plastic real world. Me who tries to recollect all the thoughts once I had and had lost along the way my whole life has been through. The states of mind while I get to know about myself again are the mean urge that makes me keep photographs all these years. This I've known as Bypass, to avoid things that I don't want to meet in the present of living.

Curatorial Comment

Pakkawat Tanghhom’s first solo exhibition at MOST Gallery is curated by 1PROJECTS.

Special thanks go to Anothai Ong Oupkum of RMA Institute who discovered and introduced his photography to 1PROJECTS. Pakkawat’s photographic style reminds of American photography art of Stephen Shore during the 1970s only that his vernacular landscape photos are exclusively taken in Thailand. The artist’s eye sees the complexity and beauty of the mundane world. The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world. They show us the rough and raw grain of the present. In the compositions Pakkawat captures he rejects the highly aestheticized views of artistic photography and he does not shy away from imagery depicting debris, car wrecks, and abandoned buildings. Pakkawat’s photos, on the surface, show the ordinary environments of the suburban, back yards, gas stations, car wrecks, toilets, towels and other clutter of the mundane. Pakkawat sees beauty in broken things. The artist revisits and depicts exactly this beauty also of desolate places. It is these places with their prime time long gone and which are now forgotten that interest him most. He quickly and intuitively shoots to capture images that strike him with the feeling of the moment, sparked by a distant memory. He seeks to capture the atmosphere of the moment and wants the entire composition of the photo to impact the viewer. Beyond this Pakkawat is interested in the interplay of colours but he prefers faded colours. Ultimately, the real depth of the images lies in simply showing things as they are. As the Italian landscape photographer Franco Fontana once said “the purpose of art is to make the visible invisible”; thereby making the invisible visible. Viewers may at first resent the initial impression of lack of aesthetics that Pakkawat sees as pure and simple. He seeks to remove objectiveness and avoid romanticism even nostalgia. The striking bluntnessof the normality of his street photos and urban landscapes in the images can be deceptive at first, but they invite the viewer to linger and foreshadow what they might have looked like in their past lives. Similar to Robert Frank, the American photographer who, among others inspired him, he portrays places around Thailand that people don’t know or don’t want to see - essentially melancholic. Step into the world of Pakkawat Tanghom.