Born 1961, Rayong, Thailand

Sompote Ang’s paintings show us a world far from the modern metropolis of Bangkok, a world of buffalo, flocks of egrets, coconut palms, dusty roads and distant mountains. It’s the world of Ang’s childhood in the village of Chak Yai, near Rayong on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand. Inhabited by poor fishermen and rice farmers, his village was a place where ghosts appeared in the evenings, their presence accepted as if they were fellow villagers. Walking the dusty road to school was a journey from one world to another, of distant possibility.

Inspired by the movie posters he saw in the village, and by scenic posters on the local minibus, Ang began to draw and paint. Travelling to Bangkok to study art in 1979, he entered a completely alien urban culture, where his pictorial style was rejected by his teachers, who espoused forms of western modernism. Discouraged, Ang returned to his hometown and gave up painting for twenty years.

The suite of fifteen paintings in Other Possible Worlds represents Ang’s personal renaissance; encouraged by an artist friend he took up his paints once again to record aspects of village life with gentle humour and compassion. But his most recent works reveal a much darker turn, a critique of the enormous class and wealth divide between rural and urban people. These paintings feature playing cards – the images of the King and Queen of Spades are a sharply satirical comment on Thailand’s rulers. A boy holding the Thai flag rides a buffalo – but he is going backwards, heading out of the picture frame towards the left, symbolising the fate of the nation. A man urinates while holding the King of Spades card down by his side. In a tragic indictment of the government’s failure to manage the global pandemic and protect their people, one work depicts a young boy seated beneath a palm tree beside the body of his father, who has died of Covid. Ang’s works may initially appear whimsical, but their undercurrent is bitter. They represent the stoicism of those whose lives go largely unremarked and unrecorded.