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Skowmon Hastanan was born in Thailand; raised in Bangkok and moved to New York City in 1973. She is a mixed media artist who received her BFA from NYC's School of Visual Arts in 1985. Her artwork reflects her interest in her native Thailand, in the proliference of western pop culture and a rising sex trade since the Vietnam war. Her love of all things beautiful: flowers, gemstones,women, classic Thai artwork, is interspersed with the horrors and inequities that exist around the world. Her work is a call to attention, to raise the collective consciousness. |
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Skowmon's art not only has a message that's important on a political and humanitarian level, but is absolutely gorgeous and perfect fodder for el Jefe's animations and graphic manipulations. The Jefemon Collaboratory, included herein, breathes strange new life, geometric patterns, and assorted mandalas into the original artwork. It's intensity personified. See Skowmon's full bio here |
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Photomontage Series "I explore the American male culture and its influence on the Thai's via recollections of my early childhood during the Vietnam War. Employing American military weapons and artillery, the seductive images of Western woman, to represent the invading modern culture that was visiting upon a Thai landscape. Thailand's current sex trade (export & import) and (domestic red light district) tourism are the direct outcome of this military experience. Negative public image and a subconscious, ambiguous self-image of Thai women had developed since. This piece is also intended to demonstrate my unresolved view and feeling towards pornography. As I child I witnessed these Western sexual images and saw them as spectacle wonder. I saw the naked display of women from another country, the "foreign bodies", the-to-be-ideal beauty and ideal sex object, to be imitated, envied and disgusted. |
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A Prince's Palace
Traditional Thai painting placed together with a Playboy centerfold as a new subject of desire along with a family portrait, and two F-16 fighters disguising as classical weapons carrying by the Ramayana tale invading foreign force surrounding outside the palace wall. (i.e. cross cultural voyeurism) Image Sources:
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Victory
of the Goddess
Image
sources: About the Goddess: Shia Moen, Taiwan's highest paid model (c.1971). She also paints, appears in films and has written 2 novels. |
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Roar!!! Miss Universe
Image Sources:
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Magnificent
Inheritance &
Autoimmune Disease (The Urine Castes series) are about simple things in life such as beauty, ugliness, illness; the internal space- the landscape of sickness, that also looks like outer space
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Les
femmes en route
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sources: |
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Ruby Journey 2001-2002 This Window on Jamaica Project at Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning Inc. was an installation about the migration of Asian women in labor industry. The women are travellers who are represented by ink jet figures taken from 1970's Thai postage stamps. Each figure is placed inside a ruby gemstone.
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Fever Series 1999-2002
"Third world and feminist perspectives are present in Skowmon Hastanan's witty, but disturbing, Red Fever. Conflating the diagrammatic plans of slave ships with contemporary passenger jets, Hastanan highlights the spread of the virus through the tourist sex trade" - by Virginia MacKenny, South Africa, January 2000 Includes:
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go
to Skowmon Hastanan
Official Website |
| contact
Skowmon Hastanan |