ART & ASIA PACIFIC
Montien Boonma at The Asia Society New York

It remains stubbornly problematic for artists from what we used to think of as the periphery to make a sustained impact in the old centres of cultural determination.  Asian artists like their Australian peers are less likely to be known or highly regarded than they often deserve to be.  While art institutions have become far more open to the 'other' since the late 1980s occasional appearances in biennales and theme exhibitions do not add up to significant presence in the popular imagination nor unfortunately to a meaningful place in the published history.  This retrospective of Montien Boonma that opened in The Asia Society & Museum on Park Avenue in Uptown New York is therefore an unusual and welcome initiative.

Montien Boonma was more successful than many artists caught up in the globalising tendency of the art market during the 1990s.   He very carefully positioned himself internationally while drawing heavily on his own culture.  At the time he was graduating from art school in Bangkok Thai artists were being torn between the options of State sponsored neo-traditional painting and the neo-classical European influence that had dominated the academy in the previous decades.  He made a conscious effort to find a different path, one that participated fully in the global mainstream while benefiting from those things he held dearest in Thai culture.  While he was a devout Buddhist even spending time in a rigorously ascetic monastery he was at pains not to be type cast as a Buddhist artist.  He need not have worried, the intensely material and sensory works he produced in his short life speak directly to an international audience conveying first his own human passion but also creating a healing encounter for the audience through the contemplative space and the herbal elements that in my own experience really lifted my spirits on a freezing wet day in New York.

The Curator and lifelong friend of the artist, Apinan Poshyananda has assembled scraps of video footage that he had personally recorded of the artist talking about his work.  This made a good introduction to the exhibition providing a very moving insight into the driving motivation behind Boonma's work.   One passage particularly stands out in which Boonma displays an agitation that I never saw him display in our meetings that were always very jovial and relaxed.  He was talking about an unbearable pain; he does not talk about his wife's incurable illness or about their long separation nor the Monk who pronounced their marriage inauspicious.  He was simply fighting his own overwhelming sense of helplessness; his hands slashed the air as he talked as if trying to cut through the bonds of fate.

 Some of the most moving works in the exhibition are built as sites of healing and finally the House of Hope built as a memorial to his wife while still holding on to the possibility of natural powers of healing.  Moving on from this video we encounter the earlier works, this is essentially a chronological selection of his art.  "A man who admires Thai art" 1982 is an ironic piece that marked his position as a recent graduate seeking a critical yet engaged distance from the clich�s of Thai culture.  He has coloured a photo of his own face with drawings suggesting a traditional theatrical mask.  His exaggerated smile under this design parodies the common tourist view of the smiling and ingratiating Thai.

Many of the works throughout his life used the imagery of the bowl.  The monk's bowl is held out empty to be filled by passers-by in an act of mutual exchange, by giving we receive blessings so the bowl was not in fact empty but brimming with positive potential.  Part of Boonma's attempt to heal his wife included giving alms at temples.  From 1989 there are a series of paintings of stupas.   These are loosely structured forms based on natural materials including brick rubble from actual stupas.  These images are made up from a number of separate framed paintings that are arranged to suggest the form of the stupa.   These installations of framed works acknowledge the organising principles of Minimalism and conceptual artists like John Baldessari but their material qualities reflect an affinity with certain European artists.  Whereas the purpose of the stupa is to house reliquaries these paintings incorporate them into the surface itself.   Boonma was deeply influenced by Arte Povera but most of all by Joseph Beuys and his belief in the power of art to heal.  Boonma's use of materials and objects for their symbolic and literal value, for example the healing herbs comes very close to the practice of European artists after Beuys including Kiefer and Wolfgang Laib.

Many of the later works take the form of enclosed spaces that invite the audience to enter them, to meditate and to be infused with the healing perfume of herbal mixtures.  'Temple of the mind " 1995 is in the collection of the National Gallery in Canberra where the exhibition will be seen later (July - September 2004).  This work consists of a stack of wooden boxes arranged in the shape of a stupa.  To walk in is to find a quiet and protected space.  The very shape of it inspires lofty thoughts and the herbs painted on the boxes and augmented by piles of fresh mixture sharpen the senses.  To inhale this strange fragrance somewhere between menthyl, fenugreek and anise is to feel instantly lighter, the sinuses clear and I will swear this is why I did not catch cold in spite of the terrible weather!

Three large moulds for Buddha heads stand on tripods at the centre of the exhibition.   The moulds are cast in aluminium including the external braces and other procedural elements of the casting process. The audience are invited to step inside these vast heads that are once again lined with herbs.   To stand inside the head of Buddha with your features aligned with those of the teacher is a very strange feeling.  Looking up you see a constellation of points of light like stars made by holes drilled in the skin of the mould.  This is an idea Boonma returned to often, sometimes the holes take the form of Ohm which is shaped like a question mark otherwise they are simply starlike.   This paradox of stepping inside to come under the open night sky seems perfectly aligned with the principle of going inside to discover the infinite.

In New York the memorial to his wife is placed in a room of its own.  Boonma's assistant has painted the walls with a mixture of herbs in a manner that is supposed to suggest soot and staining on a temple wall.  In this installation it also looks like a brooding clouded sky.   In the centre and virtually filling the room is a tiered platform made of wooden boxes.   This architectural form is similar to a stupa but is most like steps leading upwards.  It is not possible to ascend however since the entire object is enclosed in a square of beaded curtains made from fragrant herbal woods.  The hundreds of threads of perfumed beads fill the space making it somewhat secret but they also suggest gentle life bringing rain.  It is a brooding yet beautiful testimony to the artist's love and his personal struggle with despair that, as the title "House of Hope" implies, survives failure.

It is wonderful that this exhibition was seen in New York and that it received equal billing to Mathew Barney at the Guggenheim in the New York Times. However I wish the venues could have been reversed.   Barney did not warrant such a vast space but Boonma's stupas would have looked far better in the Guggenheim than they could in the rather awkward space of the Asia Society.  It may work better in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, I also look forward to seeing it in our National Gallery in Canberra but the National Gallery in Bangkok where the show ends is one of my most loved galleries with its great terra cotta tile floors, high ceilings, thick walls and stately 19th century ambience, I suspect it will be worth the trip.   

Anthony Bond
Head Curator AGNSW