The Pink Man comes to Canberra

Seminar: “Pink Man and Other Adventures in Photography”
Manit Sriwanichpoom
Venue: Sparke Helmore Lecture Theatre 2
The Australian National University
Tuesday 1 April, 2008 5:00-7:00pm

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Thailand’s most internationally established photographer, will talk about the birth and development of his best known series, ‘Pink Man’, the fat Asian man in the obscene pink satin suit who pushes a matching obscene pink shopping cart. How did an idea for one street performance satirizing Thai contemporary aspirations become an indelible crossing culture mascot of consumerism? He will also share his thoughts on other critical and controversial work such as ‘This Bloodless War’, a series of black & white photographs reconstructed from Vietnam war news photos; and ‘In-Your-face’, a series of artist portraits which has suffered from odd forms of censorship, most recently when a shipping company refused to send the print to an exhibition in Germany, due to concerns about its obscenity.

Manit Sriwanichpoom was awarded the Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Prize 2007. His solo shows include ‘Bangkok in Pink’ at the Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan); ‘Pink Man in Paradise’ at Monash University (Australia) and Valentine Willie Fine Art (Malaysia); ‘Repertoire of the Innermost’ at the Plum Blossom Gallery (Singapore); and ‘Beijing Pink’ at the Highland Gallery (China). His works are held by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), the Singapore Art Museum and private collectors. In 2002, he was named one of the world’s 100 most interesting emerging photographers by Phaidon Press in their book BLINK.

Seminar: Screening of excerpts from Citizen Juling by Ing K
Venue: Sparke Helmore Lecture Theatre 2, The Australian National Univeristy
Date: Tuesday 1 April, 2008 5:00-7:00pm

Citizen Juling explores how a young idealist, Buddhist art teacher from the far north of Thailand ended up lying comatose in a pool of blood at a village kindergarten school in the deep Islamic South? Definitely not a straight enquiry into the Southern Unrest in Thailand, this strange documentary takes a deep-immersion trip into the country’s soul with all its surrealistic scenes. Ing K is a Thai writer, painter and filmmaker. She is best known in Thailand as ‘Larn Seri Thai’, author of the cult bestseller ‘Khanglang Postcard’ (‘Behind the Postcard’). As a filmmaker, she was the writer of ‘Thailand for Sale’ (1991), and writer-director of ‘Green Menace: the Untold Story of Golf’ (1993; broadcast in Australia on SBS’ ‘The Cutting Edge’), ‘Casino Cambodia’ (1994), and ‘My Teacher Eats Biscuits’ (banned by the Thai Film Censorship Board in 1998). ‘Citizen Juling’ is her first film in almost ten years. The film is about the South of Thailand and the problems emerging between Buddhist and Muslim communities there. She also writes regularly on film and poetry.

The National Thai Studies Centre is grateful to the Australia-Thailand Institute, La Trobe University and The Centre for Contemporary Photography for sponsoring Manit’s Australian tour.