One Night in Bangkok
 Chris Coles

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Wednesday 5 August
7pm @ Forth Gallery
69A Pagoda Street
Singapore

The blinding neon and shady denizens of the Bangkok night are captured vividly in American painter Chris Coles’ watercolour renditions of the lurid and colourful world of the Thai capital’s notorious nightlife.

Heavily distorted lines and strong, clashing colors dominate in these paintings which portray a chaotic, edgy noir world of colliding intention and misplaced desire, lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation.

They echo the German Expressionist paintings from Berlin in the early 1900’s as well as the Paris nightlife paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the early Picasso.

Organized into twinkling street scenes, situational encounters and mesmerizing portraits of the girls, the boys, the kathoeys (ladyboys) and their clients, Chris Coles shows us how the Bangkok night isn’t “only a sordid money-machine s ervicing the low-end of humanity”, but “an authentic and unique setting in the ongoing cultural history of mankind”.

Exhibition runs until 16 August 2009.