“But in reality, in my personal experience as a transgender living in Thailand, it’s not true.” “People have a lot of myths, and people think that Thailand is a haven for LGBT people, that it’s safe for them,” Kath said. Kath Khangpiboon is a transgender rights activist and lecturer at Thammasat University in Bangkok. It’s an image the country has incorporated into its tourism marketing, with ad campaigns and local hospitality geared toward attracting queer, foreign tourists looking for a tropical destination suiting their tastes and lifestyle, safe from bigotry and violence.īut for LGBTQ people in Thailand, the reality of life is more complex. The conventional view of Thailand typically includes a nod to “ladyboys”, and others who either defy the gender binary or make a life away from the norms of biological sex. “‘Son, I have no clue what this art is about, but the fact that you’re doing it in a public museum, that you seem to have so much support, you must be doing something right’” Patrick Sun, founder of Sunpride Foundation, quoting his elderly father
“I loved her so much,” he said, “and then I was confused, because we didn’t have any kind of right education, as were maybe being conducted by this society based on heterosexual kind of ways.” She committed suicide when he was still young, but her memory lived on with Rungjang as he came of age, a gay youth in a place that had little understanding, and often little tolerance, of what that meant. Rungjang said the inspiration for his piece, entitled Welcome to my World, ‘Tee’, was a transgender woman he knew in his youth – a person who, for him, defined feminine beauty, with her original gender status irrelevant. Before Rungjang was a painting depicting a modern, gender-fluid Adam and Eve, gazing at their smartphones before a backdrop of war and environmental degradation.
Behind him were a series of traditional Chinese paper-cuttings depicting their creators’ coming-out story in colourful, fantasy imagery that seemed befitting of a fairy tale. Gay himself, Rungjang sat in the exhibition hall to explain the motivation of his piece. The exhibition, subtitled Exposure of Tolerance: LGBTQ in Southeast Asia, was billed by its organisers at the Hong-Kong-based Sunpride Foundation as the largest-ever survey of contemporary queer art from Southeast Asia and beyond. Rungjang submitted the video art piece as his contribution to the Spectrosynthesis II exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC), a grand, seashell-like building in the city’s central shopping district. Another frame traces the curve of her body against a couch, the silhouette of a feminine form against the empty space of the room in which she rested when filmed in black-and-white by Thai artist Arin Rungjang. In the darkened room, a woman lounges nude before a curious audience.ĭifferent screens lay her body bare from all angles: on one, her penis rests between her thighs for all to see.