Thai provocateur Montri Toemsombat is one of few artists to overtly coalesce the realms of art and fashion. Blurring distinctions between his ‘costumes’ as catwalk garb and individual art objects, Montri’s arresting brand of multidisciplinary art explores the fundamental contradiction between rural life and rampant consumerism.

      At only 27, Montri has already brought his hybrid works to Albania, America, Germany, France, Hong Kong and Japan. He was selected for the 1^st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 1999, and in the same year picked up the Young Designer Award at Bangkok’s International Fashion Fair. His career reached new heights in 2003 when he was selected for Thailand’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

      Born and raised in the seldom-visited northeastern province of Chaiyaphum, much of Montri’s art pulls motifs from his upbringing, though he avoids slipping into sentimentality. Migrating to Bangkok to pursue his art education, the fledgling artist was instantly amazed at how the capital’s mushrooming mega-malls are striking testaments to the grip modern consumerism holds over a growing urban sprawl. 

       While still an undergraduate at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, Montri embarked upon his first project on consumptive culture with the 1997-8 Natural Born Consumer. Chulalongkorn’s location between two of the city’s premier shopping enclaves gave the quiet teen plenty of fodder for his work. Like so many of the world’s privileged youth, Thais in big cities spend much of their free time mall-stomping as a recreational pursuit. Regularly tagging along with window-shopping pals, the artist soon felt “bewildered and lost”.       

       “I come from a market-less village in the Northeast, where we produce most of the basic necessities we consume. So there’s no reason for excess. Bangkok was a stark contrast.” Montri started experimenting by cultivating rice on several manmade surfaces including Styrofoam boxes and, more intriguingly, on clothing. The rice series was shown in various guises as installation, catwalk, and video, under the titles One Day of My Life in the Box, Rice Book, Education/Factory (1997), and Rice/Life (1997-9). He donned and documented the foliated outfits in different seasonal stages from young immature shoots to lush green bushes and finally, coarse arid brush.

       By taking the costumes out on the road, the deliberate poses and settings look like a contrived fashion shoot. The artist also paraded his living vestments around the same shopping malls that were his inspiration; confronting the very same shoppers he was trying to converse with. As well as the consumerist theme in the series, there’s an overriding sense of the cyclical motion of nature and man’s attempts to exploit it for his own gain.              

         In 1999, Montri unveiled his latest spin on the costume-consumer theme, with the exhibition and catwalk show titled Cocoon: The Renaissance, which won him the Young Designer Award at the Bangkok International Fashion Fair. The project, which was sponsored by Thailand’s prestigious silk manufacturing company Jim Thompson, enabled Montri to recycle discarded, supposedly useless, silkworm cocoons into raw, semi-wearable fleeces. Delivering his artistic concepts via the catwalk rather than in a gallery is a more direct way of confronting a general, rather than artistic, public. And the glamorous stage setting of a fashion show is more appropriate in its sensational and immediate engagement of the viewer.

      The artist arranged mannequins coated in mulberry leaves, which worms were allowed to devour, spinning their webs and covering the dummies with thread – an eerie effect that makes them resemble spider-webbed cadavers. Documenting the process with video and stills, the mutant mannequins were imaginatively exhibited with video and performances at the Jim Thompson House Museum.

      There is a heavy sense of irony in an artist setting out to expose and, to some extent, ridicule fashion as a consumptive, exploitative industry, while at the same time winning awards from the very elite he is parodying. Obviously this doesn’t sit well with many people in both Thailand’s fashion and art circles, who feel he’s denigrating one or the other, even both. 

    The 2002 Bangkok instalment of Under Construction, entitled Sorry for the Inconvenience, was organised by the influential, female curator Gridthiya Gaweewong. From the outset Gridthiya has been instrumental in Montri’s artistic development, and it was no surprise to see his inclusion in the 10-artist exhibit held at Bangkok University. For his performance, video and sculptural installation, Bangkok Buffalo Boy, Montri used the dwindling number of water buffalo as a metaphor for the migrant worker. Like mistreated cattle, toil, hardship and the feeling of alienation, quickly supersede the lure of a better existence for these human beasts of burden. Many young men and women end up as prostitutes. Many more toil in sweatshops.

       Using wandering models wearing periscope-like full-skull helmets, Montri likens their outlook to a dark tunnel, narrow and obscured as they struggle to see the light of day. He believes these workers are in a similar predicament to his – “lost souls”.      

In the wake of Bangkok Buffalo Boy, it appears Montri is becoming even more asphyxiated by his adopted metropolitan home. This oppressive mood is apparent in the excruciating Barbed Wire Costume. It was painfully modelled for over two hours by the artist for his absorbing performance in Fake Me, held at the Japan Cultural Centre in 2002. The thorny, woven suit is dripping with wires, and Montri is trapped – almost sacrificially – within. “It represents the pressure boiling inside as I test the limits of my durability,” he said.

       The roots of Fake Me took seed during his six-month sojourn in Japan after being awarded the Japan Foundation Fellowship in 2000. Edging away from the consumerist ideology in his previous work, Montri intentionally used the bonsai tree as a metaphor for his own personal frame of mind: “My installation and performance are to be understood as a portrait of the artist as a young bonsai; uprooted from the earth and squished into a small pot, forced to live thousands of years in a made-to-measure universe, cradled in a peaceful and cold atmosphere. A step into the abyss…” He holds the rigidly manicured tree up as a symbol for the conformity and strictness in traditional Japanese, and to a lesser extent Thai, society.

       At the Japan Centre, Montri changed the shape and ambience of the compact gallery by installing a faux ornamental garden. A world away from the beauty and serenity of a typical garden, he lays corrugated aluminium sheets across the entire floor and erects a temporary tin-shack at the venue’s centre. In this environ within an environ, the interior of the tin-house is padded in fake, fuchsia fur, has a TV monitor imbedded in the wall, and a pink cushion to sit on. Atmospherically lit, with a video and sound melange of a classical violin player over top of rhythmic ocean waves, the overall effect is pacifying, like returning to the womb.     

      Back outside, the subdued mood is threatened by barbwire pervading the gallery, not only in the threatening, masochistic costume, but also by his mimicking of bonsai sculptures. The presence of barbwire has always been synonymous of repression, and of man’s greed as he stakes a claim over nature. In recent decades, metal and wire have replaced traditional building materials in rural Thai construction as modernity catches up with farming practices.

      Montri’s art is laden with particularly blatant Thai and Asian iconography – water buffaloes, rice, silkworms, and bonsai – though it’s his imaginative and sensitive treatment of each, which prevents his art from slipping into the obvious. The artist is also quick to dismiss what might be perceived as deliberate attempts to infuse his art with identity coding that may contribute to perceptions of  “Asian exotica” by international art seekers.

      Disdain for ceaseless consumerism has been fervently documented by such leading artists as Vasan Sitthiket and Manit Sriwanichpoom. While Montri’s underpinning philosophy about consumerism is easy to see, it is individualised by his sensitivity to the unconventional materials he adopts, and the ease with which he incorporates various media into his work. Furthermore, his ability to connect visitors with several emotional levels in one experience (in Fake Me pain, angst, humour, and calm were all present), and the way he runs a gauntlet between art and fashion, make the young artist one of Thailand’s hottest creators of today – and definitely a career to follow in the 21^st century.     

Fake Me, 2002 · Barbed Wire · Life Size Costume · Courtesy of the Artist

Rice/Life, 1997 · Rice Seedlings on Cloth · Life Size Costume · Courtesy of the Artist