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Published on December 27, 2007

Somsak Raksuwan - launched to fame aboard a controversy rocket three years ago with paintings of nude women posed with demon masks - returns to torment us with "Political Monsters".

Bangkok's Jamjuree Art Gallery is hosting the satirical lambasting of politics in post-coup Thailand. There are 15 self-portraits, garish in their colouring and frightening in the truth of their implications.

"Politics and society's illnesses have interested me for years," says the Trang native who has truly left behind his beautiful impressionist landscapes in favour of disturbing social commentary.

Somsak's 2004 collection, "Do Not See a Demon as a Lotus", with its nudes and masks, infuriated the Religion Department and other conservatives and quickly disappeared from the walls of the National Gallery. Somsak went along with the general interpretation and portrayed himself nastily in a series called "Angel and Insane Demon".

The latest paintings are just as direct and the self-portraits still as devilish, his fiendish leer enhanced with the upturned tusks of a wild boar. The demon masks linger as well. This time Somsak is joined on the canvas by symbolically altered visions of Government House, the Democracy Monument and soldiers' flower-plugged weapons.

In "Guns and Roses" he crouches with a grin among the barrels of automatic rifles that blossom with roses. In "The Honorary Monster Riding on Turtle on Super Highway" - a bash at the interim government - he sits hopefully astride a motionless tortoise while the world rushes by.

In "Vulture - The Honorary Monster - and the Parliament House", Somsak is a giant in a jacket and floral tie peering into the roof of the seat of government while birds of prey gather expectantly.

The "honorary monster" next embraces "Fragile Democracy" - the monument's wings have become butterfly wings, and again, vultures loiter.

Corrupt politicians are monsters in Somsak's eyes, towering ogres "looking to cheat the Kingdom, like these vultures".

The scandals that plagued the opening of Suvarnabhumi Airport are addressed overtly in one painting and implicitly in another, "Interview with the Monster", which places Somsak before an array of press microphones, but you read into it a snapshot of Thaksin Shinawatra.

"A Share of Fraud" is alone in depicting someone other than the artist - a generic businessman at the dinner table, wolfing down a plate full of high-rise buildings while monitor lizards wait for scraps.

The time-honoured tradition of selling your vote to the candidate who bids the most will never die, Somsak says, but it does take new forms. In "Same Old Approach" he's eating money. In "Saleable Democracy" he's feasting on the Democracy Victory.

"Our democracy is very young," he says sadly. "A lot of Thais got so fed up with the corrupt Thaksin government that they were pleased about the coup. I don't understand.

"Through my paintings, I'd like viewers as well as politicians to rethink what good governance really means."

"Political Monsters" continues until January 3 at the Jamjuree Gallery on Rama I Road, near the Siam and National Stadium Skytrain stations. The gallery is open weekdays from 10 to 7 and weekends from noon to 6. Call (081) 841 7738 or (02) 218 3709.

Phatarawadee Phataranawik

The Nation