Song For the Dead Arts, documentary Photograph (1985) Last dream no art at all, photograph, 1985.
 
Kamol Phaosavasdi is one of Thailand’s leading artists. He received his MFA in Intermedia Art from Otis Parsons School of Arts in 1985 and returned to Bangkok. Soon after, in his first solo exhibition, Song for the Dead Art at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, Phaosavasdi combined performance, installation, mixed media, and collaboration. Participating with a number of young artists Phaosavasdi attempted to explore the death of painting by demonstrating his views about the death of traditional art, an art that had failed to be part of daily life.
     
Filling the gallery with scrap and junk that he collected from construction sites around Bangkok, he wrapped himself in blankets and lay on the floor. During the action, he projected images on the gallery walls of Andy Warhol at work on his paintings. Paint was thrown at the projected images, while an assistant walked around the gallery reciting seminal modernist texts by Impressionist, Post Impressionists, Abstract Expressionist and Op art and Pop art artists. At the conclusion of the performance, Phaosavasdi exploded firecrackers as a gesture of defiance against the art establishment.  In the following decade, his interest in social and environmental issues was reinforced through works that questioned the psychological effect of urban life.
(GG)