Phaptawan Suwannakudt: Thai Vision, Australian Painter
Phaptawan Suwannakudt came to Australia six years ago with three languages: Thai, English, and the complex but entirely legible vernacular of Thai Buddhist temple painting. Phaptawan grew up in the Thai language, imbibing it, you might say, with her mother’s milk; then, following the wishes of her father, she studied English at university in the early 1980s. Thai temple painting, however, was not part of the usual cultural inheritance of a Thai woman, despite her devout Buddhism, nor was her decision to practice it according to Thai custom. In becoming a renowned temple painter, leading her late father’s team to fresh achievements and new audiences through the 1980s and 1990s, Phaptawan Suwannakudt became a Thai anomaly: an independent woman responsible for the interpretation of the sacred texts in public places, liaising with clients from the communities of monks and businessmen, and directing the work of men. Out of an entirely orthodox Thai matrix, Phaptawan Suwannakudt has emerged as an artist of compelling originality.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s new paintings are once again profoundly innovative. For while she continues to work with the supple language of Thai temple painting that she inherited from her father, the celebrated Tan Kudt, Phaptawan is now putting it to unexpected purposes in a new country. The years in Australia have greatly influenced Phaptawan’s painting. This is not an inevitable effect, nor a simple searching for new subject-matter. This change in her personal circumstances has prompted the artist to actively examine her inheritance from her parents and from her culture. Phaptawan is a loving and dutiful daughter: she continues to learn from the precepts of her father and from the example of her mother. But she applies both precept and example to understanding her own life, making her art an exploration both of her personal situation and her current preoccupations as a citizen of the wider world. The paintings of the last two years directly address the circumstances of her life in suburban Australia, as the mother of two very young (bi-lingual) children; and they are, for the most part, profoundly different from the works she showed last, in 1999.
Phaptawan’s exploration of personal concerns is manifested through the greater prominence of women in her work. In earlier works, she adapted the Thai Buddhist myth of the Nariphon girls–tempting girls fruits hanging from forest trees–to pointedly rebuke the sale of girl children by impoverished families in rural Thailand. Just as Phaptawan uses Buddhist narratives as templates for daily enlightenment, she also takes her mother’s life experiences as exemplary tales that illuminate the situation of women. Here the artist’s mother is pictured as a devout woman practicing Buddhism, and her experiences considered. The two panels entitled My mother was an nun 1998-99 document Phaptawan’s Buddhist lineage apparently quite straightforwardly; yet taken with other images of her mother’s time as a volunteer nun, they critically interrogate the practice of Buddhism in contemporary life. Phaptawan records the bitter disappointment of her mother, who hoped for the peace of meditation as a nun but was obliged to do domestic work, just as she had at home.
In her work in Thailand as the leader of a team painting cycles the Buddhist narratives for temples, Phaptawan often chose to present a woman’s perspective on episodes from the canon. The great six-panel painting of Buddha’s Lives and his Enlightenment, 1997 [not shown in Melbourne] at the centre of this group of works is also –because of and also despite its apparent orthodoxy–focused on the place of women in Buddhist doctrine. Its significance in this context is that in the sixth panel it includes an episode from the Buddha’s life relating to his mother, Queen Maya, who died only seven days after he was born. In the full narrative the Buddha is later seen visiting his mother in Heaven and preaching to her, before descending again to earth. The descent after preaching is shown in the smaller, recent piece Buddha descending from the Tavatsima Heaven. The narrative thus acknowledges the Buddha’s indebtedness and devotion to his mother. Thai Buddhist ‘readers’ of the paintings would immediately understand the emphasis that Phaptawan is offering here. The painting is are exquisite but it is pointed.
Three individual images of archetypal women from the Buddhist canon underscore Phaptawan’s radical revaluation of the role of women. They are the beautiful Queen Maya Devi, the mother of the future Buddha, who figures as the loving, maternal and supportive woman; Sujata, shown here offering the first food to the Buddha after his fast, kneels before the Boddhisatva as the figure of the nurturing and attentive woman; and finally Thoranee, the unpredictable and powerful Earth Goddess who created the world when she washed her hair and shook the water from it. Thoranee is evidently pre-Buddhist (and pre-Hindu); as a manifestation of an earlier Mother/Earth deity, she continues to offer a powerful alternative to the masculine emphasis of the Buddha story and to the masculine dominance of the practice of Buddhism today.
Importantly, each of these personae/archetypes is shown singly, rather than in her place in the narrative of the Buddha’s life. Each has been singled out, and thus her crucial role in the great scheme of life emphasized, in a remarkable departure from usual Buddhist painting practice. If one compares these individual images with the large panel painting, the radicality of Phaptawan’s move immediately becomes apparent. The Buddha descending from the Tavatsima Heaven shows a great many figures moving through a sequence of events, across a panorama that is both physically extensive and doctrinally complex. In these paintings, Phaptawan has exploded the miniature scale of traditional Buddhist narrative painting to increase the size, and thus the focus on, individual feminine personae. This is a highly significant move; it claims space and attention for the figure of ‘woman’, and perhaps even more remarkably, for the perceptions, agency and value of women.
Phaptawan now addresses Australian life through the eyes of a Thai painter. If her vision is idiosyncratic and her project self-directed, nevertheless she applies Buddhist precept (dhamma) to her personal circumstances in a new country, adapting Buddhist narratives and seeing fresh truths in them. In Under the lotus shelter, for instance, her two young children are seen, in their innocence, standing among the flowering lotus, their feet still in the mud and slime at the bottom of the pond, their heads like tender blossoms amongst the redeeming beauty of the flowers. The lotus pond is one of the most powerful images of Southeast Asian Buddhism, a persuasive metaphor for the possibility of human goodness arising out of darkness and filth. For this reason Thais always grow lotus and water-lilies near their houses: the living lotus, in its pond, is a spiritual image and an encouragement.
This is a dangerous world, however, and there is evil in it: Phaptawan herself is pictured confronting the vile and furious beasts of the forest. Walking home in the dusk (Portrait with three beasts) was inspired by a real-life experience in the suburban streets near her Sydney home, when the artist was robbed. Its more general message, however, is that life obliges one to respond with dignity to hostile challenges that may arise in the most unexpected quarters. The woman pictured here is not angry, nor apparently fearful: she regards the beast with detached interest and perhaps with a degree of sympathy, striving, according to the best precepts of Buddhism, to achieve harmony and serenity in the faces of life’s difficulties.
One final note: the great significance of Walking home in the dusk (Portrait with three beasts, like Phaptawan’s other ‘Australian’ paintings, lies as much in the instatement of a Thai vision in the Australian imaginary as in the importation of ‘Australian content’ into contemporary Thai painting. Phaptawan Suwannakudt offers a double achievement: she pictures familiar scenes and subjects–the suburbs, her young children–differently. Once seen, her paintings enter the great unruly stock of Australian images and may not be refused. And by teaching us the Thai pictorial language, Phaptawan enables us to understand both the time-honoured beauty and power, but also the contemporary relevance, of Maya Devi, Sujata, Thoranee, and of the Thai Buddhist world of her father and mother. It is perhaps not Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Thai painter, who has learned a new language, but just possibly we other Australians, who are now looking at her paintings.
Julie Ewington
Brisbane, May 2002
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