Blue Fantasy

Plunging viewers into the whimsical world of Kamonlak Sukchai where the Thai traditional narratives and chronicles have been crafted as one of the core ingredients sprinkled on top of its contemporary social structure to control its belief system and enhance the authorities’ political power throughout history.

‘Blue Fantasy’ series continues to showcase her vibrant collages of photographs, collective images, letters, and historical documents intertwined together to reflect the complex layers of the system’s inequality and inequity affected by the frequently narrated classic annals devoted to glorifying and sacralizing Thai’s kingship. These archival fictions fracture and deform the mysterious historical truth while replacing it with its new distorted and curated version. The collage work examines and questions the definitions of writing ‘history’ which has formed and shaped our identities and senses of longing and belonging. As documentations of history have been manipulated, our identities and senses of self have been altered, controlled, and oppressed while living within this immersive theatre of political lies.

Kamonlak’s artistic argument in ‘Blue Fantasy’ is similar to Greek philosopher Plato’s ‘The Allegory of the Cave’ which describes how the projected shadows showcased within the cave became the prisoners’ reality without realizing the accurate representations of the real world. The prisoners are only governed, ruled, and controlled with fantasy narratives of the ‘puppet shows’ given to them by the oppressors. ‘Blue Fantasy’ is Kamonlak’s crafted trojan horse brought within such cave towards social justice and equality through unveiling and anatomizing the fanciful stories and supernatural narratives that magically sparkle and highlight the political power and significant meanings towards Thai’s constitutional history.