Series
Year
Details
Blow-Up
2023
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Blow-Up is an ongoing project in which Tiane Doan na Champassak investigates the “optical unconscious” of the image by re-enacting visual epiphanies (“apparitions”) he collected over the years: a vintage photographic postcard depicting a Thai Buddhist temple, an original letter by Eugène Delacroix, or a tiny votive image found on the streets of Mumbai.
Archival inkjet prints on Japanese Awagami paper
Various sizes
Edition of 3
Archival inkjet prints on Japanese Awagami paper
Various sizes
Edition of 3
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Persuade everyone to see all the pictures that make you feel joyful
2023
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Using a vintage collection of Western nudes of mysterious origin – all acquired from an antique dealer in Bangkok – Tiane Doan na Champassak challenges the limits of censorship by covering his anachronistic muses with minimal brushstrokes. His pictorial gesture is both ironic and self-ironic, condensing a long history of censorship to an innocuous aesthetic sign as cheerful as the untranslatable, yet inviting, Thai title written on the original set of printouts: Persuade everyone to see all the pictures that make you feel joyful.
Etching ink applied on 45 archival inkjet prints
Japanese Awagami paper
Japanese stab binding and plexiglass backing board covered in wood by Laurel Parker Book
Unique copy
41.3 x 37 x 1.5 cm
Etching ink applied on 45 archival inkjet prints
Japanese Awagami paper
Japanese stab binding and plexiglass backing board covered in wood by Laurel Parker Book
Unique copy
41.3 x 37 x 1.5 cm
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Tamarind Ghosts
2021
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Back in the day, most prostitutes in Bangkok plied their trade around the Sanam Luang Park under the watchful gaze of the Royal Palace. As they waited for their customers beneath the branches of the tamarind trees, people started referring to them as Tamarind Ghosts. In this unique piece from 2021, Tiane Doan na Champassak revisits one chapter of his eponymous book by rephotographing 24 gelatin silver prints from his collection of vintage Thai erotic photographs. This fragmentary composition of archival pigment photographs encompasses not only the aethereal appeal of the tamarind ghosts but also the ghostly quality of the gelatin silver prints altered over the decades by the humid climate of Southeast Asia.
24 pinned archival pigment photographs
printed on Japanese Awagami paper
58.5 x 81.5 x 4 cm framed
unique
24 pinned archival pigment photographs
printed on Japanese Awagami paper
58.5 x 81.5 x 4 cm framed
unique
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Time
2021
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While working on his iconic Periodicals in the late 1960s, the American artist Robert Heinecken claimed: “These pictures do not represent first-hand experiences but are related to the perhaps more socially important manufactured experiences which are being created daily by the mass media”. Back then, Heinecken had literally and figuratively taken apart various American weekly news magazines such as Time and printed several pornographic figures in negative over the torn-out pages, which were further reassembled as magazines, always keeping an original cover from Time. Since most of these articles are now irrelevant, Tiane Doan na Champassak decided to revisit Heinecken’s performative “magazines” fifty years later and reveal the people and the stories behind the negative images by inverting all the pages from Time (1st group, November 28, 1969, edition of 16). This inversion is an allusion to both the art of darkroom printing, which is now obsolete but was very much part of Heinecken’s practice, and to the notion of time. An appropriation artist himself, Doan na Champassak pushes to the extreme his practice by not only altering an already appropriated material but also recontextualizing it to the times we live in.
C-Print: Fujiflex Crystal Archive
44 x 60 cm
C-Print: Fujiflex Crystal Archive
44 x 60 cm
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Forms in Color
2021
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In this project of appropriation and variation, Tiane Doan na Champassak restages an obscure treasure found in a flea market in Turin: a collection of negatives from the late 1960s belonging to an anonymous photographer who shot in black and white the colorful instructive pages – animated by feminine nudes – of a photography magazine titled Forms in Color. The peculiarity of his negatives resides not only in reproducing the highly colored images in black and white but also in their compositional rawness as they often contain details such as the angle of the table on which the magazine was shot or the fingers of the photographer while spreading the magazine for the shot. Triggered by the intertextual nature of these apparently clumsy photographs, Doan na Champassak pushes forward their intrinsic mise en abyme by enlarging the negatives in the darkroom, developing them as silver gelatin prints, and then mounting them on vivid-colored boards that recall the chromatics of the original photographs in the magazine.
Unique matted gelatin silver prints
50 x 60 cm
Unique matted gelatin silver prints
50 x 60 cm
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Taking Off
2020
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In 2018, Tiane Doan na Champassak published “The Veil of Maya 1”, a copious 2000-page volume, edition of 35, consisting of images of layers and layers of posters covering the streets of Kolkata. One year later, he revisited the Indian city and took off – literally – chunks of these posters. Doan na Champassak uses the techniques of décollage and détournement to transform the “flayed skin of a city” into 15 museum pieces meant to work as an installation.
15 multi-layered scraps of posters torn away from the streets of Kolkata
47.5 x 31.5 x 4 cm each, framed
unique
15 multi-layered scraps of posters torn away from the streets of Kolkata
47.5 x 31.5 x 4 cm each, framed
unique
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The Veil of Maya 3
2020
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"The Veil of Maya 3" can be easily subscribed to the tradition of the so called acheiropoieta, a Greek notion that generally defines the "icons made without hands". The mysterious images composing this series consist of found contact sheet prints from the 60s on top of which random negatives got stuck, mainly due to storage, time and humidity. This appropriated material builds up a constellation of its own: floating in their ethereal appearance, the feminine nudes decompose their transparency in sibylline conjunctions, revealing themselves as desirable "icons" miraculously conceived.
Diptychs, 45 x 45 cm each print
C-Print: Fujiflex Crystal Archive
Diptychs, 45 x 45 cm each print
C-Print: Fujiflex Crystal Archive
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Copy That
2020
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Tiane Doan na Champassak digs into the culture of the copy by investigating the elusiveness of authenticity and the boundaries between originality and imitation. In this para-photographic experiment, he enlarges a collection of found photographs from the 1970s showing Western pin-ups to be used in the Thai market of erotic magazines. On top of these reproductions, Doan na Champassak stencils – in a military-inspired font – thirteen aphorisms stated by well-known personalities, from Pablo Picasso to Coco Chanel, in which the notion of “copy” is deified.
Unique stencilled archival inkjet prints on Japanese Awagami paper
33 x 45 cm
Unique stencilled archival inkjet prints on Japanese Awagami paper
33 x 45 cm
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Double Positive
2018
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Using a peculiar collection of negatives and contact sheet prints found in a flea market in Bangkok, Tiane Doan na Champassak reenacts the vintage charisma of 14 nude studies from the 1960s. The artist reinterprets this photographic corpus by blowing up each negative and cropping it out according to the original instructions. He then “echoes” the enlarged silver gelatin prints by clipping the corresponding vintage contact sheet on top of each photograph. In this conceptual reactivation of the studio nudes, Doan na Champassask subtly triggers the desire through his own interpretation of the Lacanian “mirror stage”: the double positives.
Unique gelatin silver prints
40 x 50 cm
Unique gelatin silver prints
40 x 50 cm
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The Strip
2017
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January 2016. Every night in the heart of Patpong, Bangkok’s oldest red-light district, The Strip opens its doors. By an exceptional favour granted, Tiane Doan na Champassak seizes the most unsettling ballet.
8-colour lithographs printed in Paris by Idem
BFK Rives paper, 270 grams
Edition of 50, signed and numbered
68 x 100 cm / 26.7 x 39.3 inches
8-colour lithographs printed in Paris by Idem
BFK Rives paper, 270 grams
Edition of 50, signed and numbered
68 x 100 cm / 26.7 x 39.3 inches
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Corpus
2009
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Printed on 17th and 18th century-old paper using the Fresson printing process, these unique works made between 2005 and 2009 reveal parts of the human body as abstract forms.
Direct carbon process made by Atelier Fresson
Various sizes
Direct carbon process made by Atelier Fresson
Various sizes
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