Thinking of Rong Wongsawan, Thinkinf of the Heaven of Life

Wisut Ponnimit

Wisut Ponnimit is a "manga artist," a label so unusual and unique in Thailand that it has made him one of the most extraordinary icons of his generation. hesheit, the title of the manga series that brought attention to Wisutwas published monthly in a day magazine for over 5 years. Some have called his manga "arty" and "philosophical" because of its often radical and profound contents.

Wisut went to Japan in 2003 in order to learn more about manga in the environment where manga was created. His works caught the attention of the Japanese audience in less than three months and within about one year Wisut, at the age of 28, became the first Thai manga artist ever to have his work published and distributed in Japan by a Japanese publisher. The book is called Everybodyeverything, a collection of short comics originally published in Thai publications. Everybodyeverything is also published in Thailand by Typhoon Books.

Since then he has been a regular Typhoon Books writer.Banana Yoshitomo, the internationally acclaimed Japanese author said this about Wisut’s work: "I think (Wisut’s) beautiful spiritscan offer warmth to the exhausted minds of Japan."He is working on more books, animations, and installations. His big goal is to make a feature length anime.

Visit: http://web.mac.com/wisut/wisut/main.html

Check out Wisut-designed products: http://www.tamaribathai.com/

Many thanks to Typhoon (www.typhoonbooks.com) for the biography :-)

Chaipong Kittinaradorn

Chaipong Kittinaradorn graduated from the Faculty of Law, Thammasat University. He began his career at the International Red Cross and later switched to private businesses. He is now operating an apartment business in Bangkok.Despite changes in his professions, photography remains his steady “amateur” work. Starting with colour negatives, he later moved to slide film and eventually was drawn to black and white photography.

To fulfil his imaginary vision, he started to add colours onto black and white photographs. Now he is heading the budding hand-coloured black and white photography movement in Thailand.Chaipong also taught photography at Sripatum University and exhibited hand-coloured black and white photographs at Viengtavern Gallery in Bangkok as well as many universities in the south of Thailand.

He co-founded Black and White Rhapsodies Group (www.bwfoto.net) and recently photographed for Integral Buddha: The Life of Buddhasa Bhikku written by Suvinai Pornavalai which tells a story of Buddhasa Bhikku – a highly revered Buddhist monk whose zen-like teaching is admired and followed by wide audience.

His wife, Kasama, is a Thai medical doctor and handicraft exporter. His elder son, Chitpong, is a technology-oriented social developer working with the Thai Rural Net Insititute (TRN) and Thai Health Promotion Foundation. Rakpong, the youngest son, is an International Astronomy Olympiad winner and is now studying physics at Mahidol University in Bangkok. The family members meet up every week to share their stories, lives and passion.

Contact the artist at: chaipong.k@gmail.com

Supachai Ketkaroonkul

Chananun Chotrungroj

Sarinee Achavanuntakul + Angkrit Ajchariyasophon

Sarinee Achavanuntakul

A financier by training, Sarinee Achavanuntakul is currently a writer and independent academic who tries to regularly publicize new developments in social enterprises and "humane capitalism" via her personal blog at http://www.fringer.org and various publications including http://www.onopen.com and Prachachat Turakij newspaper. She also teaches an undergraduate course called "Business and Society" every year as adjunct professor at Thammasat University's Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy.

As independent academic, Sarinee has written a number of academic papers covering issues in the Thai capital markets, including "Capital Allocation in Thai Economy under Globalization" (with professor Kittichai Sae-lee) for Thammasat University, and "The Use of Nominees in the Stock Exchange of Thailand" for Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). Sarinee's final position in her former career as investment banker was Executive Director at Hunters Advisory, a boutique local financial advisory firm.

Prior to that role, between 2003 and 2006, she worked in Corporate Finance and Corporate Strategy departments at SCB Securities Co. Ltd., a local investment bank. Prior to joining SCB Securities, she worked as investment banker in Financial Institutions Group, Deutsche Bank AG Hong Kong Branch.She holds an MBA in finance from Leonard Stern School of Business at New York University, and a BA in economics from Harvard University.

Angkrit Ajchariyasophon

Angkrit Ajchariyasophon is a visual artist. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University. After graduation, he decided to go to Europe and stay there for six months in the hopes that he would be modernized and westernized. However, it did not work out as he planned (he thought that it must be because of his yellow skin).Disappointed, he headed back to his hometown.

Nonetheless, he remained excited to see foreigners do yoga or meditation; subsequently, he made an effort once more to become a perfect English gentleman.He now lives in Chiang Rai and owns a Chinese restaurant. He still studies English from fairy tales he reads his son, wishing that one day he would eventually become a true Westerner in both body and soul, so that he could become and ordained Western monk who practices yoga and meditation full-time in the last years of his life.

Rong Wongsawan

Rong Wongsawan, who has died aged 76 of a brain haemorrhage, was a pivotal and prolific writer, but also journalist, photo-grapher and actor who transformed the landscape of Thai literature through the topicality of his work and the originality of his language. He navigated limitations on free expression by metaphorical allusion. His style was frequently satirical, challenging repressive morality and exposing the hypocrisy of Thai society. The ironic humour and turns of phrase he invented have found their way into everyday Thai discourse.

Rong was born in Chai Nat province, the eldest son of a civil engineer, and educated at the elite Triam Udom Suksa school in Bangkok. Despite demonstrating literary promise, he was expelled after an altercation with a teacher and was obliged to seek employment, including spells as a ship's helmsman, log yard supervisor and model.

The legendary media magnate, writer and politician Kukrit Pramoj, who was Thai prime minister from 1975 to 1976, launched his literary career by taking him on as a columnist and photographer for the Sayaam Rat Weekly in 1954. Rong's photo-essay, with the evocative title Children of the Garbage Mountain (1956), which featured children scavenging for food, was the beginning of his rise to prominence. It exposed the dire poverty of Bangkok's underclass and spurred the government into creating a welfare programme.
In the early 1960s - against a backdrop of repressive military rule, rapid economic expansion under the umbrella of American anti-communist influence, and profound social transformation, including urbanisation and the first signs of the emergence of an educated middle class - he produced several ground-breaking novels. Sanim Soi (1961) addressed prostitution, a particularly sensitive area associated with poverty and neglect. Concealed beneath an artificial edifice of public morality are the "paid women" who service the sexual needs of society. In the days before Aids, this was the first Thai book to address sexually transmitted infection. Bang Lampoo Square (1963), named after the inner-city Bangkok district, was a semi-autobiographical account of a school dropout living among petty criminals on society's edge.
Although one might detect the influence of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in this hard-boiled sample of urban life, Rong did not discover the western world until the mid-1960s. By working as a barman in San Francisco during his prolonged stay (1963-67) as the Sayaam Rat roving US correspondent, he found a window from which to observe a very different cultural scene.

His commitment to promoting sexual liberation as well as his penchant for rock and dashiki dress was reinforced by flirtation with the Haight-Ashbury hippy movement, and his output from this period reflected a psychedelic lifestyle. His earlier novel Sanim Krungtep (the Oxidised Stain of Bangkok, 1961) had anticipated the permissive society by featuring an adolescent middle-class girl from a broken rural home who is lured to Bangkok by a playboy, but Long Glin Gunjah (In a Haze of Cannabis, 1969) introduced his Thai readership to this alternative movement.

Although he never became involved in Thai politics, Rong exposed himself to considerable risk by using his columns to criticise the counter-democratic actions of Thailand's military rulers, particularly in 1973 and 1976 when many unarmed pro-democracy student demonstrators were massacred by paramilitary elements.

He was most recognised as a writer, conversationalist, humorist and bon vivant, accustomed to media and academic celebrity, but he also landed a leading role in the movie Chuafah Dinsalai (Forever Yours, 1955). Three decades later he played the South Vietnamese foreign minister in Stephen Frears's TV movie, Saigon: Year of the Cat.

From the mid-1980s, Thailand's cultural elite were habitual visitors to the mountain retreat he designed himself near Chiang Mai, which also became a mecca for aspiring writers and poets, as well as unannounced pilgrims paying homage to their hero. The devotion of his public following was demonstrated by the success of his serialised autobiographical account of life during the second world war, Menu Ban Tai Vang (Menu at a House at the Back of a Palace, 1999).

Rong's entire output of more than 100 books and thousands of articles was tapped out on his favourite manual typewriter, even after the advent of computers. The critical acclaim of which he was most proud was his recognition as national artist in the field of literature by the National Culture Commission in 1995. He will be best remembered for his relentless exploration of the expressive potential of his own language, and as a writer who could approach topical and often unsavoury themes with a rare brand of insight, honesty and wit.

He is survived by his wife, Tim, and two sons, Leung and Joy.

• Rong Wongsawan, writer, journalist, photographer, born 20 May 1932; died 15 March 2009

Rong Wongsawan
Writer determined to challenge the hypocrisy of Thai society
Peter Leyland
Obituary in The Guardian, Friday 29 May 2009

Learn more about Rong Wongsawan's Life at www.tuneingarden.com

Tawatchai Pattanaporn

Tawatchai Pattanaporn is an independent photographer whose passion is in films and chemical solution in the dark room.

He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, King Monkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabung in 2003. Aiming to learn about documentary, he joined the staff of Kon Kon Kon, a famous television program. Another challenge came when he was asked by the writer Worapoj Panpong to work together on the book project about Southern Thailand. For a year the writer and photographer lived there resulting in the book ‘Tee Kerd Hed’.

Tawatchai believes in the ways of craftsman whose skills are trained and advanced through working. That is why he still enjoys the process of photographic developing and printing for it is the way to improve his ability.

At present, Tawatchai continues to work in documentary style.

Contact Tawatchai at tuche_t@hotmail.com
For black-and-white photographs’ lovers, please visit www.bwfoto.net

Dan Overturf

Daniel V. Overturf

Born in 1958 in Peoria, Illinois, USA, Overturf has been a photographer since his teens. Educated at Southern Illinois University, he received his Bachelor of Art degree in Photography in 1980 and a Master of Fine Art in Printmaking from the SIUC School of Art in 1983. After a one year teaching position in 1989 at Wichita State University in Kansas, he returned to Carbondale in 1990 as an Assistant Professor in the Cinema and Photography Department. Tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 1997, he assumed the Chairmanship of the department that same year. He returned to full time faculty status in August, 2000, began a semester sabbatical in January, 2001 and began concentrating on two separate documentary portfolios.

One is a long-term project that resulted in a book project released by the Southern Illinois University Press in April, 2008. Entitled A River Through Illinois, Overturf provided the 110 photographs and co-author Gary Marx created the text. A 40 print selection of his A River Through Illinois photographs is currently featured at the International Terminal at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago in an exhibit that debuted in August, 2008.

The second area of documentary concentration is a collaborative project that includes the work of a group of his former and present students. The touring exhibition, entitled “Working in the Seams: The African American Coal Culture of Illinois” opened at the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC in February, 2003. An updated version of the exhibition has been contracted by a combination of agencies in Illinois and will begin touring again 2008-09.

Over the course of his career, Overturf’s creative work has bridged two distinct areas of investigation. The most visible and recent examples come from the two aforementioned documentary projects. A second area, which is a continuing series started in 1992, includes work created with elaborate sets for individual narrative images that reference a wide array of topics and sources. In addition to his full time teaching at SIUC, he is also an active commercial photographer who specializes in editorial portrait, architectural work and art documentation.

In 1993 Overturf was involved in illustrating one technical manual, Photographing in the Studio by Gary Kolb and recently finished work on his own textbook. Released in January, 2009, Overturf and co-author Joy McKenzie’s Artificial Lighting for Photography is a comprehensive textbook on lighting published by Delmar.

Visit Dan's website at www.danoverturf.com