Assoc. Prof. Pakorn Prohmvitak
Abstract :
Bangkok is the land of diversity. All walks of life have their own careers, some jobs are white collar jobs, some are blue collar, and some are pink. One of those jobs works very hard. They use their dignity. They use their body and they risking disease and crime. This is the job of a typical sex worker. People do this job when they are young. For this kind of work, it’s not easy to have clients when they are getting old. So every time they will think about their future. They think among the noisy music in bars or discotheques and among artificial lighst, neon lights or colorful lights. For them it is like psychedelic walk-in art.
When bars close at midnight and all the lights turn off, the silence comes and the surrounding areas get dark quickly. During that time, sex works go to someone else’s home and sell their body with to that customer. It is in the nighttime and it’s a silent midnight. When the full moon comes, moonlight shines. This feeling from moonlight creates a gentle sense, friendly and hopeful. They think, if the moon shines this bright, how bright would one thousand moons be? The light would be very bright, my hope and my life could be like those thousand moons shining at once.
This project examines the emotional brightness of one thousand moons with the light from the buildings which has many windows. After midnight on the full moon day, they are thinking of their life and look through these windows hopefully.
Objectives :
This project aims to provoke those who don’t understand the hardship of a sex worker’s job. Those who don’t understand that sex workers have no way out. But as a human being, they still have hope. The mood of moonshine among the thousands of high-rise buildings in big cities, especially Bangkok, creates an aesthetic that gives the uniqueness of this emotion. Viewers may be reached to understand the world of the hope of the low class people.
Conceptual Framework :
Use the intensity among the dim color of several high-rise buildings at nighttime. This artificial intensity mixes with the natural light from the moon. The lighting from the windows is artificial and the moons natural. All this intensity gives a sense of hope among these dark and dim colors. Using blue monochrome for the nighttime color, and using white for light, and using only these two colors white and blue. It is the symbolic of hope in the darkness, and the way out of poverty as light.
Process / Methodology :
- Survey the night time atmosphere surrounding sex workers at Soy Cowboy, Nana, Patpong, and Walking Street.
- Take pictures of high buildings in Bangkok, especially the area where the sex workers are.
- Create collages from the pictures to make the buildings convey the feeling of complexity in a big city with a large population. Display the hard work for survival of ten million people in Bangkok and three hundred thousand in Pattaya.
- Select the colors which depict the emotion of darkness. Take photos and digitize them. In the computer, manipulate them to be a deep blue.
- Select the blue stickers with sparkles, to represent the hope and also look like thousands of windows.
- Create several moons to shine deep in the blue sky. All the moons will give the intensity to the picture that can convey the message as the title of this art piece.
Techniques and Materials :
Photography, computer generated imagery, painting, mixed media: stickers, paper collage.
Result / Conclusion :
The outcome of the work reaches for the emotions that are normally ignored. These feelings can bring out this message and are seen when the viewer steps back and looks at the overall picture. Upon realizing that there are thousands of windows from countless buildings in the big city.
References :
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