PHUKET, Thailand—Why do sex workers always figure in a scenography where they lean on the ledge of a balcony, their hair undulating in volume or in chaos, while smoking a cigarette? Does the smoke from the cigarette bear the air exchanged in the lip-locking kisses, the promises of romance, and the depths of intimacy, only to be blown away by the burning tobacco, drifting away into a cloud? Are sex workers smoking in such a scenography only to show that they are also disposing of the load of temporal romance, as if it were a kind of muck, or a dreadful memory, needing to be washed away?
Such questions crystallize in the form of what Patrice Maniglier calls the “problematic,” which allows me to marvel at and feel the poignancy of Sarnt Utamachote’s This one for tomorrow, an art installation found in the last stop of this huge exhibition, In Nobody’s Service, which he also curated.
In Nobody’s Service is part of the Thailand Biennale in the province of Phuket, which is on view until April 30. By marveling at this part of the exhibition, one is besieged by the presence of long hair whose length falls to the ground, glistening in the sunlight with a window frame layered by a translucent roof, and also accented by a pink ribbon, cigarette sticks slithering into the strands, along with a worn-out black leather sofa layered with a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray.
Raising such questions leads us to the problematic where the figure of the sex worker can be conjured and sympathized with as an oppressed subject and as someone whose presence is illuminated by a web of relations, mediated not only by the sexual services they render but also by their capability, similar to lighting a cigarette, to incinerate a network of expectations, traditions, and norms, burning everything to cinders, then simply allowing the embers to dissipate into a cloud of smoke.
In admiring such a moment in the exhibition, unbeknownst to most of us, the norms have been the long history of invisibility of sex workers and the oriental utility of sexuality and care for Western capitalism. Sarnt certainly confronts the oriental depiction of Thailand as a country known for openness in sex, and how its traditions have been warped by the rise of the US military industrial complex during the Cold War in the Pacific.
Thai massage
Such a critique of the history of sexuality in our part of the region deracinates my notion of history as bound within the frame of nationalism by allowing me to experience decolonization through the exhibition’s inter-Asian correlations. Rosalia Namsai Engchuan’s video work Energy Bodies offers a critical history of the infamous Thai massage, bringing me back to the ’90s televisualscapes of Thailand, such as the military bases and the rural areas, exposing how it has been possessed and manufactured by Western capitalism.
Thai massage is a local and cultural care practice, but the rise of the military complex mobilized the soldiers and the people of Euro-America to corrupt this sensual healing process into a commodity, a form of hospitality service within an industry that they also built, such as the sexual economy.
The exploitation of Thai massage into a capitalist labor commodity intensified the sexualization of Thai women, paving the way for the world to globalize them and sex workers as pleasing to the white male Euro-Americans’ Asian fetish. In portraying the sea change of a local traditional healing practice into a vital form of economic profiteering, Rosalia amplifies her protestations by pairing her video work with the art installation Bodies and Blooms: a massage bed draped in pink silk and, at the same time, a thread of wilting orchids.
With this installation, the video work becomes not merely a look back at the past; instead, it pulsates with the heartbreaking truth about our history as failing to make women blossom, only receding into a state of withering, turning the massage bed, not anymore as a healing chamber, but a place of respite for a continuing alienated body of a worker, being dried up across historical time.
The issues raised by Rosalia’s work pierce through the veneer of optimism of the emerging wellness culture. They show that this critique does not only wish to heal the wounds of Thai women. Rosalia and even Sarnt lead us also to seize it as an inter-Asian problem and crisis.
Trafficked women
Part of the exhibition is Krisanta Caguioa-Monnich, whose artistic practice is shaped by her linguistic competence in Filipino, which allows her to help women trafficked in Germany through the nonprofit organization Ban Ying. With such civic engagement and humanitarian aid, Krisanta translates the wealth of experience through a series of portraits: Me in the midst of changing times and societies, number one, and Me in the midst of changing times and societies, number two.
These two works juxtapose colored and black-and-white illustrations of Black and Asian women, whose presence and anonymity are traced through the use of acrylic on canvas and black-and-white drawing techniques. The works emerge as portraits of women who may comprise the oppressed population of the global south, and may have been fortunate to be reached by Krisanta’s Ban Ying.
However, particular in this organization is how Krisanta’s experience with Filipinos also appear in the documentaries shown by Sarnt in Manila and in Berlin, where the women are not portrayed as forlorn in their struggles. They have also been among the Thai women caught in the crisis of migration and trafficking. Krisanta’s portraits challenge our contemporary art scene, in which the Manila art market’s fascination with hyperrealism is something that, even for artists like her, is impossible to be drawn, such as the faciality of the trafficked victim, whether in Berlin, Bangkok, or even Manila. Their suffering and forced servitude can only be gleaned from the traces or contours of their bodies, a glimpse of them from behind, or through the letters where their authorship remains anonymous.
In this way, Thailand and the Philippines intersect, not only through their same regional belonging, or fandom for queer romance, but also through the kinship of women in the same fate of suffering, victimization, and the expectation to perpetually serve the Western world.
Migrant desires
The circulation of crisis among Asian countries like Thailand and the Philippines is almost like a cycle in which the women’s shared suffering and forced servitude can be seen as stationary and embodied in the very surfaces of their bodies. Universe Baldoza’s Between the Fold is Pink populates a dark room with different screens across, with the back of a body riding on a stationary bike, naked but for pink socks.
In the repetitive motion of this nakedness, the camera probes into the folds and pores of the flesh, allowing us to graphically and microscopically inspect the body and also to be virtually intimate with it, turning the experience into a highly sexualized journey of pedaling, yet unfortunately always in a stationary position. The irony displayed by this work is, for Baldoza, an attempt to explore the difficulty that besieges the online dating culture between the Philippines and Germany. It’s supposed to be mediated by the universality of desire, sexuality, care and love, but is troubled by culture, making everything mere touches, affections, and coital romances, yet universally in stationary motion, not evolving, held captive by racial difference, stuck in place, failing to make the ride transition and be fully mobile.
Queer romance or migrant desires may always appear to proffer the possibilities of a worldly reach, a boundless mobility, yet in Patpong Narcissus, Oat Montien offers a radical response in the form of a moving image. In putting some desiring bodies stuck in stationary motion, akin to a Sisyphean predicament, this video installation traps us in the lair of a beautiful queer Asian leonine. He lures us into his den yet remains elusive, seducing us to be entranced by him only to be abandoned, making our desires, attractions, and fantasies a victim of the fugitive beauty he performs.
While his narcissism unfolds, the film pays homage as well to the sex workers of Patpong, enabling us to feel that—as potential consumers of sexual services from these workers—we can purchase and even possess their bodies, beauty, and desire. However, the very beauty of Patpong Narcissus also ensnares such fantasies, while serving the very economy of sex, situating the customers as stuck in the same loop, the same chase, and the same yearning for such beauty.
But in wanting to possess and seize such bodies within the pervasive sexual economy across the region, Natthapong Samakkaew only allows us to touch the outlines, making our desiring capability tangential, everything being turned into a trace, a stroke, or a mere line. Samakkaew’s Thai Body Study is a drawing on blue paper that evokes a kind of nod to Henri Matisse’s line drawings, which trace the Thai body in its nakedness, in different sexual positions, angled from the projections of pleasure, and the freedom to give joy to oneself. The technique continues to appear in other works like Hello Guys #1 and Threshold 36, which display the bodies as lineaments that make the interiority of the body appear hollow, figuring through how the shadow and light contrasts illuminate a body’s presence.
Body parts
On the other hand, Manita Kaewsomnuk’s paintings, like Love doesn’t lie in the body, Flowering, and Shared Body, take a different turn: She chooses to pursue the figurative, making the body appear through one’s flesh, yet all of them are painted as incomplete, a part is bisected, as if the body is undergoing an amputation.
In such disfiguration, we get to see how the works also frame body parts as catalogued anatomical parts, detached from the woman’s body but also, at the same time, assembled. By having the woman’s sexual organ visualized as a blossoming flower, the curatorial ensemble of the paintings leads us to imagine such a state of the woman’s body, sex work, and the act of having sex as activities that make the body parts detachable, partitioned, and isolated from one another, but also naturalized, as if they thrive in such conditions, allowing them to reveal their nature.
These paintings lead us to realize that desiring in different circumstances will never make us whole, whether through sex work, pornographic imagination, coital fetish, and even romantic partnership. The desire toward a body will certainly lead us to the surface of another’s skin, a sight of another’s sexual organ, and a mere coital encounter. But despite being pleasurable, all must be accepted as impermanent, finding their end, and again only tracing upon the very outlines, contours, and margins of such experiences—making every sexual partnership merely passing through.
Thus, our sexual encounters amount to only our respective historical pasts. Precisely, as how all of our sexual intimacies and desires can also be forgotten, nestling precariously in the archives of our virtual memories, Her/your dreams shall come true, an art installation by Wisanu Phu-artdun and Sarnt, repels such a reality. It gathers recorded interviews with women on their experiences as migrants, the citizenship policies of state institutions against Asian women, and the crisis motivated by the gender and sexuality of women of color in parts of Europe.
Opposite to the sound archives is Why do Isaan women marry foreigner men?, a YouTube documentary film by Manika Tejepaibul featuring interviews in which the women talk about finding love with white men, which paved the way for them to build a home in Europe or in Thailand, or both. In traversing homes across the world, such conversations between sound archives and video interviews of Thai women married to Western foreigners lead us to a story of how Thai communities experience changes, such as class and economic mobility, financial and social independence, and cultural progress from old traditions, foregrounding the departure from an essentialist Thailand, leaving it in the past, getting erased by new loves, desires, and connections.
Destruction and making
Thailand and the Philippines, as a result, are both perpetual projects of destruction and making, and one crucial site of such a process is the place of love, desire, and romance. Crucial for this process to prosper is ensuring an immersive possibility, which can be experienced in the installation of Wisanu of vases with wine glasses that appear as accent pieces, and a comfortable living room space. In this immersive experience, the women serve as our mirror-images. The invitation to write on such mirrors is to also confront ourselves projected onto them, including the images of ourselves that we cannot accept, nurture, and welcome, especially because, like the wine glasses, we are very fragile.
The politics of the composition of installation resonates with Bussaraporn Thongchai’s works, such as Dialogue Series and Address unknown (moved), that are made like scripts, documents, poems, and other texts through the archives, documents, and the very language of a women’s shelter founded in 1989 in West Berlin, but scheduled to be destroyed especially for the infrastructure’s expiration.
The impending disappearance of a women’s shelter also evokes the possible decimation of the history and literature that sheltered women in Berlin. Instead of allowing such archives to be discarded or buried, this installation activates the archives as women’s experiences as migrants, wives, lovers, and family breadwinners, allowing them not only to live longer but also to make them palpably present. Their presence serves as a way of building connection with them and, thus, give them a language to communicate with us. But in exhibiting such dialogues, letters, and documents, the texts also end up concealing them—the letters are disfigured, fragmented, refracted, and redacted, disavowing the personal attachments of the very addressees, senders, and authors of the accounts.
In this case, whether in language or image, the women, the migrants, the sex workers, and the queer folks are compromised and concealed—an insight I borrowed from Kristine Reynaldo on the productive nature of invisibility.
Visibility
The invisibility, perhaps, is not the demand for the luminosity of their presence, but a kind of visibility through a palimpsestic form. Raksa Seelapan’s First time server, second time customer, third time dancer is a photography-installation where the artist appears ironically invisible as the work performs a body of a living canvas, which is made by placing oneself as mediated by social interactions, pressures from others, or the writings on a digital whiteboard.
Meanwhile, the site-specific installation with photographs, I like my pretty sexy clothes, but that doesn’t mean I am ready for sex, by Jasmin Werner, appears as an advertisement poster from Suriname that advocates for sexual will, while being punctured and foregrounded on the images of chaste tree seeds, a medicinal plant for women’s menstrual pains and hormonal imbalance, plus being surrounded by other movie posters.
These works are perfectly adjacent to one another, both galvanizing the role of visual culture, and also how such bodies—of women, sex workers, masseuses, queer folks, and migrants—are also buried under the tyranny of images and their relentless production. Yet under the weight of such images, these figures also become enwrapped, entangled, and rolled into a fold, making visibility also the frame of their forced invisibility.
The complex politics of visibility notwithstanding, if there are those made visible only to make the complexity and depth of their service invisible, these are the sex workers. Sarnt’s curatorial exhibition is a form of unwrapping such folding and rolling into a long history of servitude, where sex workers are not made visible for us to turn them once again into our serviceable ornaments.
Instead, drawing from how Richard Klein (who cites Immanuel Kant) describes cigarettes, the works are a “negative pleasure,” for they become “darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity.” And it is an eternity where the sex workers, similar to Sarnt’s installation at the end of the exhibition, may be looking at the clouds in the sky or the ground below from a balcony. They may be contemplating a future with a past behind them, having chronicles about their labor, desire, gender, and movement, all of which are figured as aesthetically dark, painful—and intimate. Yet in the same darkness where we marvel at their beauty, strength, mobility, and courage, they also make their services recognized as a work unto itself, not for any of us, but for themselves.
And this is where art achieves its autonomy: when the works, at some point, like the ones rendered by sex workers, perform, live and embody darkness and negativity for, after so long, they are always, and will forever be, in nobody’s service. CS
Jose Mari Cuartero is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, where he teaches Asian literature and creative nonfiction. He is also currently working as a research associate for “Sea of Love: A History of Movement,” which will represent the Philippine Pavilion at the 61st Venice Art Biennale with featured artist Jon Cuyson and curator Mara Gladstone.
This piece was updated to correct the title of an art work. — ED.
