Chris Coles

One Night in Bangkok in Singapore Chris Coles

The blinding neon and shady denizens of the Bangkok night are captured vividly in American painter Chris Coles' watercolor renditions of the lurid and colorful world of the Thai capital's notorious nightlife. Heavily distorted lines and strong, clashing colors dominate in these paintings which portray a chaotic, edgy noir world of colliding intention and misplaced desire, lives out of balance, sexual compulsion, alienation and disassociation, echoing the German Expressionist paintings from Berlin in the early 1900's as well as the Paris nightlife paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the early Picasso. Organized into twinkling street scenes, situational encounters and mesmerizing portraits of the girls, the boys, the kathoeys (ladyboys) and their clients, Chris Coles shows us how the Bangkok night isn't "only a sordid money-machine servicing the low-end of humanity", but "an authentic and unique setting in the ongoing cultural history of mankind".