Phantoms of Nabua is a film by Apitchapong Weerasethakul, a filmmaker and artist from nothern Thailand. This short film recently showed at Tokyo’s Scai the Bathhouse and i wrote a review of it for Art Review (HERE). I thought the film was a very strong work, casually mesmerising because of it’s use of simple symbols and actions – boys playing soccer with a ball on fire. I watched it on repeat in the gallery for over an hour. It has now travelled to BFI in London. You can see the film itself (which premiered online last year) HERE.

I said:

“With Weerasethakul, everything begins as a story. The Primitive series draws on his own memories: a firefly entering a room, his father’s death, a dead brother’s immolated body and a subsequent search for his reincarnated form (the identifying sign: a small black mark behind the ear). This tale is told in the opening pages of the artist’s book Cujo, also on show. If these memories invite quick, easily shelved (and forgotten) explanations via labels like ‘Buddhism’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘Eastern philosophy’, the work itself absorbs and transcends such categorisations, presenting elemental images and abstracted actions that echo Eastern mysticism but are really adjuncts to Weerasethakul’s personal and intuitive symbology.”

Many people are writing about Apitchapong now thanks to his recent win of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the showing of ‘Phantoms of Nabua’ at the BFI. But the most interesting and astute words i have read about the Thai filmmaker were written by David Teh, a researcher and writer on Thai film and video art. Much of my review was influenced by an email interview with David. The following excerpt is from a paper he wrote while at the National University of Singapore “A moving image that can remember its past lives…” By David Teh (National University of Singapore).

He said:

…The cinéphile commentary on Apichatpong has left many stones unturned. There’s a lot of what [Walter] Benjamin called “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious”; not much “profane illumination”. The worst gap, though, is an almost complete failure to contextualise these films that tell us, however undidactically, so very much about the people that are at their centre. Let me outline three characteristics of what I’m calling an ‘animate’ cinema – permeability, itinerancy and historicity. … I’ll confine myself today to the question of historicity, by way of a rough pre-history of cinema in Thailand – to which Apichatpong is more alert than most artists – but which should serve to introduce all three points…

…Part of the appeal of Apichatpong’s work in the west lies in its demonstration of the sheer permeability of the cinema – as against the sealed production spaces of industrial filmmaking – yielding a radical candour that can’t be reduced to the use of non- professional actors or the lack of scripts. Permeability traces many vectors:
- it’s architectural;
- it’s in the lighting;
- it’s textual (the texts are permeable to other texts;
- But most permeable of all are the people: the porosity between cast and crew; overlapping from one project to another. These collaborators are multi-channel mediums not just for storytelling, but also channeling other people, a spiritual permeability.
- and finally, the animation of the inanimate world, its transmissions, while rendered more subtly than our ghost festival, perhaps no less promiscuous…

… Apichatpong’s works are always studies of/in media, a reflexivity not lost on his early interpreters. This has lent confidence to auteurist accounts, allowing anchorage to canonical moments in art-cinema history, a dish then garnished with that je ne sais quoi, the surplus that exceeds the conventions of Euro-American film aesthetics and makes Apichatpong Apichatpong, cultural-exotic, Buddhist-transcendent, and so on. The problem is that this movement from formal (and international) base to aesthetic (and local) superstructure tends to confine the matter of a reflexivity about media to the medium of film, overlooking the many other media – and media genealogies – that inform his filmmaking. These would include (in the spirit of our ‘expanded’ mediumship): visual art (as distinct from film), sound and architecture; the ‘old’ broadcast media: TV, and radio in particular – its formats, its voice, so central to the imagining of national community in what is still a largely oral polity. He also taps the older oral and performance traditions – ghost stories (Haunted Houses), the Likay folk opera (Dogfahr) – whose memes have found such traction in electronic media.”

On the Internetworks (HERE) is a post i recently wrote about a visit to Moriyama House – a notable piece of Tokyo architecture built by Ryue Nishizawa before he formed SANAA with Kazuyo Sejima (who is the invited curator for this years Architectural Biennale in Venice). Above is the plan for Moriyama house, showing its modular, deconstructed style. The house feels like a regular Tokyo suburban home, reduced and abstracted to cubes, deconstructed into its constituent rooms and spread over a small park. But it was built a long time ago, the minimalism is getting a little dirty these days.

This is a photo of my cell phone and the new issue of Apartamento Magazine. Towards the back of this “Everyday life interiors magazine” is an interview i did with Japanese designer Midori Araki called “Use Beyond Function.” Mr. Takeshi Homma shot the photos for this article; he is amiable man and amicable photographer.








I like the idea of Apartamento – a magazine which documents lived interiors (messy homes; rooms and spaces which people actually use and live inside of) as an alternative to the typically affected and sterile presentation of interiors in almost all other interior magazines. But there is a problem here, because even normal life can become an affectation. Im going to write about this briefly below.

There are lots of complex issues embedded into publications like Aparamento; what is an authentic version of “everyday life”, why is a magazine about real, authentic “everyday life” desirable, successful and most confusingly – fashionable? I recently read a paper from 1973 written by Dean MacCannell about the tourist desire for authenticity. He spelled out the process of tourists seeking “real experiences” when traveling. Reading through the paper made me think of Apartamento and other magazines which give readers access to “back regions” (haha) – the hidden “authentic” areas of foreign places – and how those versions of real life might eventually become staged. MacCannell’s 1973 paper makes me wonder about wider definitions of ‘tourist’. It seems ridiculous to think we would want to see a magazine about the mundane and messy aspects of “real life” (has real life become so foreign?), and it seems even more ridiculous to think that such a magazine could become fashionable. Something interesting is going on here, but I don’t really understand what it is. Shots of some key paragraphs from MacCannell’s paper:




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Photos of Masashi Sawamura, a National Living Intangible Cultural Asset of Japan, making washi by hand on a recent trip to Mino for Papersky Magazine (HERE). The full article will be out in a few weeks – Issue 33. After he had finished showing us his workshop he led us into his trophy room and showed the box of handmade paper he had made for the Emperor. Supposedly the Emperor is hard to please – “he didn’t say anything.” Margaret Thatcher was more enthusiastic; she sent him a hand signed letter after visiting his workshop in the 80′s.

Sydney and Auckland have a lot of water nearby them. That proximity is one of the things i miss most about living in Tokyo, so whenever i go back home i spend a lot of time in, on, beside or under the Pacific Ocean. Struggling with coming back to Tokyo i found a solution to my waterless ennui by following this advice: “Even bowls of water with one or two goldfish, or a single water loving plant, can bring the healing benefits of water, and the understanding of its life sustaining nature, into a room.” (HERE).

Top image of Ella against the outgoing tide, bottom image of Manukau harbour from an aeroplane flying into Auckland.

Shizuoka fisherman gets tackle from the tackle box.