Beyond the mirror : Tang Chang’s self portraits as anti-canonical resistance

Abstract

 Tang Chang (1934-1990) was a relatively obscure Thai artist until the 2014 Shanghai Biennale, his debut in a major international exhibition. Global interest has intensified since, with the lifelong Bangkokian’s inclusion in four more international exhibitions to date and the publication of new research into his place in art history. But that interest is confined to his abstract paintings, which have certain parallels with the practices of some American and Japanese artists in the 1960s, and on his poem-drawings, which are comparable to the international concrete poetry movement. The developing praxis of recent scholarship positions him as an outsider in his own country who had more in common with his international contemporaries, a premise which corroborates his relevance to the contemporary project of recognising hitherto undiscovered transnational connections and forgotten histories. However, such a narrative leaves no room to discuss how Tang’s best-known painting, a monumental self-portrait titled October 14 (1973), or the hundreds of other self-portraits he left behind, fit in with the rest of his practice. My dissertation begins by asking: why are Tang’s self-portraits hidden from view today? Examining primary materials in the archive and existing English-language writings about Tang, I argue that in the international academic and curatorial arena, his body of work has been decoupled from a locality seen to have limited contemporary currency, and selectively grafted onto an expanded modern art canon in a way that reaffirms sometimes problematic taxonomies (outsider versus insider, avant-garde abstraction versus reactionary figurative art, for example). This leads me to consider the critical subaltern perspectives in Tang’s practice which may help us write a new art history from the bottom up, one which takes into account the constantly shifting positions of “minoritarian cosmopolitans” in an age of globalisation. Such an approach will reveal significant gaps in our knowledge about Tang and suggest alternative jagged, rather than smooth, narratives about Thai modern art.