Chris Coles

Portraits from Bangkok Chris Coles

Some years ago, when I first encountered Bangkok, I remember constantly staring at people's faces. Such a variety of faces, so many "looks", so many skintones, so many shapes and sizes. It was as if I was looking at a visual record of the last two thousand years of Mainland Southeast Asia's incredibly complex history of people, relationships and constant movement. It seemed every available DNA/Gene element in the world had, at one time or another, found its way to the great Thai trading centers of Ayutthaya and Bangkok where they all eventually blended together. The geographic space known today as Thailand has always been a crossing point, a center of interaction, a kind of international vortex where almost all the people, cultures, religion, beliefs and behaviours in the entire world have collided, mixed and mingled. Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Burmese, Indians, Arabs, Iranians, Mongolians and Europeans. Hoping to capture some of this visual splendor, to preserve it, to learn it, I started doing this series of pencil/graphite portraits. Nothing too ambitious or spectacular or wild. Just trying to record what was there in a kind of simple realistic style. Later on, I veered away from realism into distortion and crazy colors, which I felt better conveyed the actual ambiance and feeling of nightime Bangkok and all its rich variety of characters and extreme situations. These early portraits were my starting point.......