BY NANCY ELSAMANOUDI | The New York art world is both wonderfully local and wonderfully international. Artists come here from all over the world to work, to dialogue with the other artists and to show their work.
Attasit Pokpong is one such artist. Pokpong is a rising art star in Thailand who has also shown extensively in Europe. In Thailand, Pokpong’s iconic signature portraits of Sino-Asian women are readily recognized and often imitated.
Pokpong recently came to New York and set up a studio at the famed 56 Bogart building in Bushwick for about six months in order to focus on a new body of work. Some of this new work is now up on view at his solo show, “The Blooming of a New Sense (Self),” at SFA projects, on Lower East Side, until April 7.
The painting “My Lady #1,” one of the first works you see as you enter the gallery, is a prime example of the type of portraiture that helped solidify Pokpong’s reputation in Thailand. This stunning piece highlights Pokpong’s great facility with oil as a medium. He is a virtuoso who can paint in thin, translucent layers of glaze with Catherine Murphy-like precision one minute and throw down thick, lush juicy paint the next. His incredible feeling for light is subtle and understated.
In “My Lady #1,” Pokpong dazzles the viewer with a superb, mostly gray portrait of a beautiful woman either standing in the rain or looking out a window covered in raindrops. This painting has a real presence in the intensity of the woman’s gaze. She seems to be staring at someone or something. The intensity of the her gaze, the tension, the psychological charge of this painting is amped up by its limited, Film Noir-like color palette.
On another wall at the gallery hangs a magnificent, grand-scale painting, “My Lady.” This painting also has muted mostly neutral colors and its understated palette makes its subject of a self unraveling even more unsettling. The color and the surface of the raw linen superbly underscores the Francis Bacon-like perversity of depicting a beautiful pink-lipped head gloriously imploding behind a sandy background. It’s as if the woman in the painting got herself dolled up to go to the beach, and then when she got there, her head exploded.
Meanwhile, “Collage Mix Marilyn and My Lady” is a painting of a strikingly badass woman in bright, purple lipstick wearing Marilyn Monroe’s signature coif. This small piece explodes with loud urban punk color. The fierce, pointed grit of this painting is really satisfying, and this gem calls to mind other contemporary artists that Pokpung seems to be in conversation with, such as Wangechi Mutu.
When I first saw this painting, there was a moment in which it shifted for me and I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a woman or man wearing a woman’s wig.
Here, Pokpong seems to be saying, “Well yes, my 21st-century Marilyn has an Asian nose, a crazy Hollywood do, and impossibly sexy lips.”
“The Blooming of the New Sense (Self),” at SFA Projects, 131 Chrystie St., until April 7.
