Sawasdee 2519
Sawasdee 2519
MOCA BANGKOK
Artists: Jitsing Somboon
5th August – 13th September 2023
Photos: MOCA BANGKOK
Sawasdee 2519, a solo exhibition by Jitsing Somboon, is not a retrospective. It does not follow the artist’s career or timeline but an interpretation and a reinvention of Somboon’s creativities. It refers to his works from various periods. Expanding on Somboon’s artistic sense, notion, and spirit, these works were recreated and reconstructed using contemporary media and techniques. This exhibition is a reflection of the past, to represent the present, the now, and future prospects.
Somboon’s artistic expression has no boundaries or limitations. He exhibits them across creative industries, from fine art and fashion to music. Many people might have known him as a bold designer for Greyhound and, later, the Creative Director of Playhound by Greyhound, where he has worked for almost 30 years. Nonetheless, his artistic journey originated in fine art—a manga drawing, to be precise.
Somboon received the first of his many art awards in a manga art contest when he was still a boy. This passion led him to an art school where his unique work has won him numerous awards in painting. Unlike many of his contemporaries, whose popular styles and subjects are mostly abstraction, realism (figurative and object composition), contemporary Thainess, and mixed-media, Somboon chose to compose a three-dimensional illusion from surrounding objects through various techniques and possibilities. He was drawn to colours spread on the floor or traces on the wall of the art studio in college, which has seen many generations of art students. He constructed images of a wooden table, sketch board, and cardboard, with a trace of pen and pencil, peeled tape, cutter’s slashes, and Nitto tapes that are partially attached and partially detached from the surface. All on a wooden flat plane, unlike other artists who normally used canvases.
A rebel against anything customary, he has always reached for something outside the norm and, once he had graduated and was working in the fashion industry, became one of the first Thai designers to apply a fine art approach to fashion design.
While working with Greyhound, facing one of the biggest economic crises, Somboon started to consider a life he could control and operate from his fundamentals. He started working in fine art, retaining hints of fashion and art combined. He created works that have become his signature, partial stripes and fragments that are connected and composed to form an image. Inspired by a stencil template used in graffiti, where its void and shapes connect to the environment, his work has a street feel, playing with lines, cuts, and space, using various materials, with the concept of a model and a prototype as an understatement. He has also collaborated with other creative fields and supported younger generations. In a past show, The Who, he acted as a producer for a young band which became another element in that exhibition.
Exploring his creativities since a young age, through fine art and the fashion industry, one has seen the recurrence of simple straight lines, a fragmentation to create an illusion of the whole form, a play on human vision and spatial perception, intentionally or not. This repetition and continuity seem to destroy the linearity of time, where each period in his career can act as an initial point.
Jitsing Somboon is fascinated by the passage of time. He perceives time not as linearity but as something that can move forward and backward, just like fashion and trends that can resurface. Traced layers of parts and pieces in his works are different from layers of events created by time. Sometimes, it is not possible to tell the part that comes first. Sawasdee 2519 does not mean to lead you back to celebrate his many decades in the art and design industry. Its focus is not on the past but on the present and the future that could have been foreseen and a reciprocal of the past.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/life/social-and-lifestyle/2632965/moca-captures-a-designers-creativity
https://www.facebook.com/iameverything.co/posts/777395241057047
http://fineart-magazine.com/sawasdee-2519/?fbclid=IwAR1j-6lVQfw-s9oHFjOVyL9NbdXldY8idx1GinI0ZHpGOAi9T9hre4h_QTY