Lale Tara, Innocent Surrogates, 2010. Medium : c-print Size : 90 x 120 cm, 127 x 190 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

It is often that the photographic lens exemplifies the artistic genius behind the camera as much as the subject that it photographs. That’s not to say that this process is inapplicable to any other form of art production. But if it is only for the pictorial expression of eternal spiritual truths that justifies the existence of icons (and idols), the photography of belief systems – because of its capability to record time and place yet simulate the real – inches towards the profane. Treading this fine line is Idols and Icons: New photography from Asia & the Middle East, a photography exhibition that examines tropes of faith, ideology and theology by producing what is presumed to be too sacred for reproduction.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Masters, 2009. Gelatin silver print. Installation View, Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

With Masters (2009), Manit Sriwanichpoom of the Pink Man fame returns with a photo series of cross-legged monks in meditation, modelled after those who situate themselves in Thai temples receiving alms from the Buddhist faithful. However, Sriwanichpoom’s lens deceives; the blurred life-sized portraits are amulet-type mass-produced objects readily sold in shops, akin to mass-marketed paraphernalia typically associated with cult celebrity behaviour. Masters unapologetically continues Sriwanichpoom’s acerbic photographic critiques of Thai contemporary consumerism, and suggests that the fetishisation of these idols – a non-existent tenet of Buddhism – pushes commonly held religious beliefs into a new, corrupted reality.

Ampannee Satoh, Burqa, 2010. Medium : pigment print on paper Size : 120 x 120 cm, 150 x 200 cm, 120 x 180 cm, 150 x 300 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

Issues of ethnicity and gender are equally prominent grounding anchors in the show. Ampannee Satoh’s Burqa series (2010) visually reduces the conflict to 2 symbols of opposing ideologies: burqa-clad women who stand against Parisian monuments endowed with an idealised republican rhetoric that finds itself reiterated these days (particularly because of the Islamic dress – a clichéd but key signifier of a clash of civilisations that separates public and private boundaries), in the French parliament. Shadi Ghadirian’s Miss Butterfly (2011) is a series of photographs in which a solitary woman weaves a web across several domestic settings, reclaiming the female agency’s dominance in the household while simultaneously suggesting its relentless and inescapable grip.

Shadi Ghadirian, Miss Butterfly, 2011. Medium : c-print Size : 70 x 105 cm, 100 x 150 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

While commonly employed as a discursive indicator of power relations, the feminine figure’s iconic status is far from formulaic. Outside the virtuous woman’s conventional role as the domestic exempla, Lale Tara’s Innocent Surrogates’s (2010) human-sized female doll-subjects inhabit the main frame of the photograph, located – not unlike a medieval tapestry or a painting – within a border of votive reverence. Almost sacramental, suitably dramatic with some measure of artifice, Tara’s dolls occupy, in good unheimlich fashion, conflicted and malaised positions of transgression that cathartically play out our own repressed enjoyments.

Idols and Icons will be on view at the Yavuz Fine Art Gallery until 27 August 2011.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Pink Man on Tour # 6 (Amazing Rice Field. Northern Thailand), edition 6 of 10, 1998, c-print mounted on aluminium – dibond, 40.6 x 50.8 cm, Singapore Art Museum collection

Satirical and documentary, the visual language of former photojournalist Manit Sriwanichpoom in Phenomena and Prophecies displays a certain perspicacity in recognizing urban conflicts and decadence in contemporary Thai society. Inspired by his memories of student-driven activism of the 1970s, Sriwanichpoom’s works appear to have been produced with the intention of critiquing the overwhelming hypocrisy of political processes in Thailand and the burgeoning capitalistic mindlessness in urban cities in the 1990s.

A former photojournalist and social activist, Sriwanichpoom’s work examines the necessity of interrogating the spaces between the recording, the construction and the reconstruction of history. This Bloodless War (1997) recreates a classic series of images from the Vietnam War and the bombing of Nagasaki – significant events involving Western conflict with Asia in the 20^th century – and decries the economic reality of globalization (possibly suggested to be synonymous with the influx of Western influences) and its debilitating effects on Asian cities. In an image that references Associated Press’s photographer Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of a child’s desperate flight from a Napalm attack on her village, Sriwanichpoom’s angst-ridden portraits of well-dressed figures seemingly flee a similar attack of unrestrained economic development and capitalistic trappings.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, This Bloodless War # 3, edition of 5, 1997, gelatin silver print, 50.8 x 61 cm, private collection

But perhaps it is the ubiquitous Pink Man that is Sriwanichpoom’s most well-known tool for social criticism and commentary on the dangers of overconsumption, played in its inception to crass perfection by Thai writer and artist Sompong Thawee wheeling a supermarket trolley down Silom Road – the opulent financial district in Bangkok – in Pink Man Begins (1997). Prophetically materializing in early 1997 before the onset of the Asian economic crisis precipitated by the fall of the Thai Baht, the Pink Man responds to uncontrolled excess through stylized and extreme behavioral imitation of those he saunters past. His presence is impossible to ignore, filling the exhibition space with sheer force of color rather than with (non-existent) charisma and glamor; his allure paradoxically lies in his ridiculousness and absurdity. Many unflattering adjectives describe his entire get-up and behavior: flashy, conspicuous, mad, tasteless, expressionless, obscene, self-absorbed – probably appropriately so, seeing the immodest manner in which the Pink Man celebrates materialistic success, accompanied by a pink shopping cart that is not unlike Sylvie Fleury’s gilded Le Caddy (2000).

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Pink Man Begins # 5, edition of 10, 1997, c-print mounted on aluminium – dibond, 50.8 x 61 cm, artist's collection

The reaction of the audience to the Pink Man is understandably varied but it is our speculative glances at the character’s purpose and our inability to look away from his garishness that consequently nurtures the Pink Man’s presence beyond the streets of Bangkok. Born to carry Sriwanichpoom’s discontent with the modern conscience to the masses in later exhibitions, the Pink Man razes through the hill tribe villages and rice fields of Northern Thailand (Pink Man on Tour, 1998) before journeying internationally on a European Grand Tour (Pink Man on European Tour, 2000) to wander the train stations, and pose with naked French women in Paris.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Pink Man on European Tour # 11 (Copenhagen), edition of 10, 2000, c-print mounted on aluminium – dibond, 30.5 x 45.7 cm, artist's collection

While Pink Man is, as curator Ark Fongsmut suggests, a “presenter of questions who travels to various places…appear[ing] when there is an incident of abnormal phenomenon and arri[ving] looking indifferently at his surroundings”, his indifference ceases in what could be considered the most provocative of the Pink Man series, Horror in Pink (2001). Pink Man appears once more, digitally slotted into photographs of the dramatic events of the 6 October Massacre in Thailand in 1976, where left-wing student protests were violently clamped down by the army and paramilitary forces that stormed the Thammasat University in Bangkok. Joining the lynching as a superimposed, amused spectator, Pink Man ironically builds into this reconstructed piece of history an increased, tangible sense of fractured identity, his vulgar presence heightening the disservice to justice and the instability of a political institution whose sense of democracy is at best, dysfunctional.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Horror in Pink series (2001), artist's collection

Manit Sriwanichpoom was born in 1961 in Bangkok, Thailand and has exhibited in shows such as the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial (2010), the 6th Gwangju Biennale (2006), the 1st Pocheon Asian Art Festival (2005) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Guest-curated by Ark Fongsmut and co-organized by the Singapore Art Museum and the Singapore International Photography Festival for the 2^nd Singapore International Photography Festival 2010, Phenomena and Prophecies runs at the Singapore Art Museum at 8Q until 7 November 2010.