Strangers on a train

Strangers on a train, 35mm B&W Film

On a 3rd class train from my hometown Bangkok to the northern city of Chiang Mai in Thailand, I met this stranger who was heading home after having served his time in jail as a drug offense convict.

This man left his home in a northern province to seek fortune in the capital city of Bangkok when he was only 15 years old. Like many young people in the rural parts of the country, going to the City was the only way out of poverty and the miserable future waiting for them in their neighborhoods. Most of them had heard tales about the opportunities waiting for them in the City and about how people like them could build themselves up, but many of them did not have to wait too long before the harsh reality woke them up from their dreams, and this man was one of them.

He told me how he tried to make a living by doing everything anyone offered him to do; dishwashing, working at the gas station or working at construction sites. Soon he managed to save up enough money to open a food stall selling skewed pork on the streets of Bangkok. Unfortunately, his business did not go well and he lost most of his money.

His failure drew him to the City’s infamous underworld of drugs. After losing all his possessions, he finally lost his own freedom when he was arrested while using drugs at his friend’s place and was sentenced to two years in prison.

While he was there he started to think back about the reason he left home and soon realized about what he had left: his life and his family. For the first time since he left his home, he wrote to his mother and told her everything. A few weeks later he received a reply from her saying nothing but 'Please come home.'

'This photo was taken with a Nikon fm2 model on a 35 mm B&W Film. I have a passion for street photography and thus prefer taking them on film. As a film addict, I just love the feeling after pressing the shutter, where you can do nothing with the picture except maybe praying for it to be a good one. So it depends a lot on your skills, determination, and a bit of luck. I have never tried editing my photographs as I want to leave it as it is as much as possible. Although some people might think otherwise, I do not believe that beauty needs to be perfect.'

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Statement

I was not interested in Art when I was a child. No-one in my family, including my parents, has ever done anything related to Art, or has even had any impulse to do anything artistic. Furthermore, most people in Thailand while I was young only see Art from a commercial perspective. The artists, who are truly ambitious to pursue their artistic dream, find it totally difficult to survive in this social world. I can’t see any other reason why I’m hoping to have a career as an artist today, but fate. It brought me the first introduction to the world of skill and creativity while I was in university. After that time everything went by in a flash, I was mesmerized and have been cursed by the magic thing called ‘Art’ ever since.

I graduated from Silpakorn University, with Bachelor’s of Arts, major Archaeology and minor Anthropology. These subjects mix history, humanity and art, later provided me a lot of benefit especially the wide range of knowledge to create artworks. Moreover, it also opened my vision to the world of aesthetic which I’ve hadn't seen exist before. That was the first time, my world started orbiting around the Art world. I went to galleries, met a lot of famous and anonymous artists who living in Thailand. I instantly found myself deeply in love with Art particularly artwork in the form of photography, film and video art.

What interests me most about the visual art is the way that the artist plays with the audience perception. After researching, reading and seeing a lot of artworks by several artists for a while, I began recognizing how great some artists are, from Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Yukio Mishima, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog along with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, everyone came to inspire me and I started trying to create my own work. I traveled around my country taking photographs, talking and interviewing the people who I met on my journey. I was passionate to go further by experimenting to create short films. Most of my works were quite raw but I enjoyed making them and desired to be an artist. I understand that moment as a turning point, which drove me to the world between truth and deception, love and hate, beauty and hideousness.

After graduating, I decided to come to UK to pursue my dream. Due to my interest in European Art Film style, I chose studying in England rather than America. I took an English course to develop my language skill, meanwhile I enrolled in a Film Directing course at Raindance Film Training. Although I was genuinely thrilled with my studies and managed to create another short film, I realized that I’d prefer to dive further into the deeper aspects of the theories and techniques in Art to boost the necessary conceptual understanding and skills. This encouraged me to apply for the BTEC HNC in Fine Art course at Kensington and Chelsea College, and I found that this programme which offers students a huge range of medium knowledge for producing artworks, affected my perspective about Art and motivated me to search for new encounters and ingenuity. During this time, I was introduced to work by Gillian Wearing, Peter Greenaway, Man Ray, Andrew Kotting, Pipilotti Rist, Mark Maxwell and Dara Birnbaum, all of these artists have given me an inspiration in term of experimental artworks.

I usually use my experience as an outsider to create artworks. During the autumn I made a video called ‘Unfinished Life’. In this work, I experimented with ways to narrate the story by presenting the reality of three women’s experience through an exploration of filmic language. This combines documentary interviews, used as voice-overs layered with manipulated motion footage. Unfinished Life urges the viewers to reflect on their own past while viewing the unfolding story of these three immigration women.

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'Unfinished Life'

'If you could go back in time and speak with your teenage self, what would you like to tell them?

Have you ever thought about something you did in the past? What you gained or lost?

What was your dream when you were young and what are you doing now?'

These are some of the questions considered in the video work 'Unfinished Life'. It encourages the viewer to reflect on their own past while viewing the unfolding story of three women; one homeless, one illustrator and one designer. 'Unfinished Life' presents the reality of their experience through an exploration of filmic language. This combines documentary interviews, used here as voice-overs layered with manipulated motion footage of anonymous crowd scenes, light and traffic in the urban environment.

The artist states that he tried to experiment in 'Unfinished Life' especially with how to narrate their stories. Unfinished Life allures the perception of the audience through the light and contrast between romantic visions of reality on the street while keeping the interviewer hidden.

Unfinished Life (Trailer), 2011, Jirawut Ueasungkomsate

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The Portrait of Continuity

The Portrait of Continuity is an artwork created by Jirawut Ueasungkomsate. This piece represents through 3 video installations, the aim to experiment with duration and continuity within film. The Portrait of Continuity was created to respond to Kevin Hagopian’s article ‘Time in the Cinema’ which said: “Even those films which use the so-called continuity system of editing to regularize viewers’ understanding of time and space within a narrative, count on the cognition of a skilled viewer to put back together the temporal fragments of real time that cinematic editing shatters. How real time unfolds, film asks, must time be the linear construction we’ve always assumed it is?”

Ueasungkomsate states that he tried to raise the question: “Will a story still be understandable if it is told in the form of a complex linear re-construction?” He also purposefully leaves space in these 3 videos to let the spectator be able to create and interpret the story using their own imagination.

The Portrait of Continuity, 2012, Jirawut Ueasungkomsate

The Portrait of Continuity is part of the exhibition 'Taking Flight', Mid-Year group show of emerging artists on the Fine Art HNC, Kensington and Chelsea College. Private View for 'Taking Flight' is on 15th March 6pm - 8.30pm at Hortensia Gallery, Kensington and Chelsea College and will continue until 23rd March 2012.

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