The PoMo Artistic Movement in Thailand : Overlapping Tactics and Practices

Modern Thai art and its historical development are not a symbol of modernism restricted to preconceived Western notion. But modern Thai art has its own genealogy whose complexity and system of meaning signify an expression of an ethical need to embody the denseness, structure and complexity of moral experience. Believing in this conviction causes Modern Thai artists to dig deep into materiality of their medium to find forms combining of matter or signs of solid substance. Accordingly, it becomes a yearning process of heroic aspiration to secure Thai artists’ identity, and, somehow, the identity and ethical structure of the nation. Therefore works of art in Thailand have been produced not for the sake of aesthetic pleasure, but for moralistic contemplation within very established institutional domains. In turn, Thai contemporary artistic movement after 1990s has been inclined to suggest some emerging alternative of creative competency quite differently from artistic progress in the prior periods. This creates a political dialogue that can be critically understood in terms of the process of cultural hybridity that gives rise to something different, something new, transitional and unrecognizable – a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation taking place in a third space. This kind of space is politically practical because it is a productive space of the construction of culture as different, in the spirit of alteration or otherness embedded in everyday idioms of artistic practices in various fashions. From this perspective, artistic practices in this period become a new terrain of practice as a site of contestation. Furthermore, in my study, the research methodology will encourage epistemological overlapping terrains for interrogating that of foundational dualism, which implicitly underpins the study of the social constitution of reality rigidly bounded on cultural identities of Thai nation state.


Introduction
According to the conventional point of view, Thai visual art, as a cultural artifact, helps unify Thai society, binding even the most disparate elements together while reinforcing the myth of Thainess by emphasizing cultural purity and homogeneity.Believed to be an integral part of "khwampenthai" (being Thai), or Thainess, Thai visual art then signifies the identity of Thai people and their culture.Within this ideology, Thai traditional painting, for instance, is portrayed as integrally related to the essence of a combination of particular people, places and times.It is seen as a producing pure type which attains archetypal status, and which is distinctive, indigenous, and authentic.In relation to arts as well as nations and ethnic groups, a common quest is for what is believed to be essential or 'true' identity, in the process ignoring or downplaying the messiness and inconsistencies which pervade their ordinary worlds.
In contrast, by accepting that Thai culture is not a pure and homogenous culture, it follows that the belief in Thai art as a manifestation of the "true identity" of its people being unique, indigenous, and genuine is a misconception.
Thai visual culture functions as representation: a system of signs, a culturally and socially constructed artifact, instead of an object existing in its given nature.The making of Thai visual art is indeed part of a construction of national and cultural identity, as well as an exercise of political power.
Productions of artistic practices in Thailand have been confined significantly to Thai national imaginary.The national imaginary has been homogenized within a historical narration through linear timeframe.In this sense, a definition of art, regarding to both traditional prestige and heritage, local and indigenous cultural identity, and also modern art, are used to celebrate historical continuity of the nation.Moreover, Thai society is essentially portrayed as a peaceful and united community.This gives Thailand a portrait of the nation homogenized national history within an official version, which is seldom challenged (Chanrochanakit, 2006 135).In addition, the national image of Thailand is always produced and reproduced through popular media -such as films, novels, soap operas -and also, indeed, through mentality of artistic practices -such as, in traditional craftsmanship, and visual arts -whereas the notion of Thainess is, accordingly, exhibited.Ultimately, the historical imaginary of Thailand is remembered and reanimated as a site of discursive practices of cultural symbolic representation.Similar to what Jonathan Crary deliberated in his book "Techniques of the Observer", the productions and political operations of symbolic representation by Thai state function as a technique of controlling over its suppressed subjects, which creates a location of observing as a field of discursive visual culture.Through its technique of observation, procedures of state power, and its institutional forces confine, and, some how, subjugate cultural models of living at large -within a hierarchical structure of hegemonic domination.In other words, artistic practices in Thailand in the past were an integral part of the 'politics of aesthetics', which were used as a tool corresponding to an idea of 'governmentality' in Foucauldian sense, embed deeply in a level of value judgment in multiple general forms of lifestyles.A cultural identity of Thai artistic production was believed that it was rooted profoundly at the core of its national origin, and authenticity.
Due to the complexity of cross-cultural situation related to the globalization context, it is accepted recently that a study in a search for correlation of cultural identity rooted in a certain confined culture has been more difficult.Unavoidably, this causes even more problematic in finding an explanation on development of identity in contemporary artistic practices in Thailand, which are taken for granted that they are an integral part of the continuity of the cultural heritage from the past.In fact, it is because the terms "culture" has been brought into academic argument where the terms has lost its clarity.Culture as a space of coherence, where its structural order plays major roles in consciousness configuration and identity formation, which gives a sense of stability to individuals for their cultural activities and artistic practices, has been put into dispute.Consistent with the movement of globalization, the definition of culture and its old school academic proposition have changed in consequence of significant alteration of contemporary cultural lives.
In the present, contemporary culture is no longer understood as a result of process of unification and homogenization deriving from an origin or authenticity of the antiquity.Rather, since the emergence of globalization, new spaces of heterogeneity and creative opportunities of alternative formation and reformation of identity occur -where potential forms of cultural mixing and hybridity of cultural activities also give rise to critical debates on definitions of culture in the contemporary stage.In the recent years, it has been inclined to the fact that 'being contemporary' suggests a notion of different temporalities where everything comes to exist in a very emerging stage, and goes.In this sense, it gives an experience of how time is lived and flows, which it constitutes a 'notion of structure of feeling' where ideas of impulse and restraint are relevant.
Eventually, the rise of contemporary artistic practices is intertwined with a recent idea of contemporary culture.Not only does this effects practices in the Thai contemporary art, but it also puts a challenge against important hypothesis addressed by positivism and essentialism on the ontological level about how we do a cultural work.While a new framework of epistemological and methodological orders is needed, a restricted sense of Thai national culture and its boundary is unavoidably questioned.
Prior to the contemporary society of the present, Thailand had crossed the threshold of the modern world by its own domestic desires and conditions different from other countries.Unlike modernism in the west, there was no clear movement against rationalism, pragmatism, imperialism, and traditionalism.Modernism (khuam khid samaimai) in Thailand was considered as a mode of thought by a few elite individuals to promote a new political form of life styles.Inevitably, this formulated an institutional creation and its configuration of Thai modern society in its own terms.Modernism in Thailand perceptibly refers to the way of living and thinking characteristic of modern times, which its changing phase takes place politically according to the institutional categorization in multi-faced fashions of social norms and of cultural practices imposed upon the populace.However, 'being modern' in Thai society has never been reached the international agreement on the use and significance of the term.This takes the 'modern' onto the imaging stage proposing 'Thai modernism' (khuam kid samaimai bab thai thai.)Therefore, to understand modern Thai society and art it is necessary to trace the stages and layers through which modernism in the Thai context developed and dispersed.
In general, modernism constitutes the notion of progress, development, and prosperity of nation-state wealth.In Thailand, the established Buddhist doctrines have implicitly motivated, inspired, and been used, in a response to the monarchical hegemony, and modern state control, to conduct directions of ideas about development of the nation in multi-dimensional aspects -economics, politics, culture, art, education, sciences, technology, and etc.In this regards, for 'Thai Modernism' (khuam kid samaimai bab thai thai), the value of assets that Thai nation state gains are made quietly possible by forces of two major institutional logics -the monarchy and Buddhist monkhood (sangha.) The growth of the nation is unavoidably predicated by institutional politics whereas political procedure and its power relation of the nation-state and Buddhism are interrelated.Buddhism has been integral part and the central component of the life of Thai people for it is the root of the traditional cultures -and Thai society has been situated by it under specific political circumscription.The relevance of Buddhist and monarchic institutions to Thai society fabricates not only configuration and re-configuration of the normative hierarchy of cultural prestige within which economical, political, and a belief system are detained, but also standardized foundation of value judgment embed in lifestyle and artistic practices captivated inside institutional spaces and their disciplinary constrains.
Works of art in Thailand has been kept in the imposition of the homogenous imaginary in terms of identity.To understand an idea of construction of national cultural identities articulated through artistic languages of expression, it is necessary that such identities need to be placed into political debates.It is true that the relationship between people's notion of space and their past is always correlated to an account of memory.Space memory is essential both to identity and to politics.Nationalist institutional forces, in this case Buddhism and the monarch, crucially play major political roles on people's sense of belonging in a certain concept of space and memory (Note 1).This gives great effect to landscape of living, and more or less controls a standard pattern of value judgment -in cultural works, in art, and etc.
By this means modern Thai art and its historical development in Thailand are not a symbol of modernism restricted to preconceived Western notion.But modern Thai art has its own genealogy whose complexity and system of meaning need to be deliberated.The nature of Thai modern art is an expression of an ethical need to embody the denseness, structure and complexity of moral experience.Believing in this conviction causes Thai artists to dig deep into materiality of their medium to find forms combining of matter or signs of solid substance.Accordingly, it becomes a yearning process of heroic aspiration to secure Thai artists' identity, and, somehow, the identity and ethical structure of the nation.Therefore works of art in Thailand have been produced not for the sake of aesthetic pleasure, but for moralistic contemplation.

Thai Art Paradigm and Methodology
This study is to examine critically the 'politics of aesthetics' as a mode of controlling by Thai institutional forces taken place since the beginning of the development of modern Thai art to contemporary visual culture in Thailand.Eventually, a crossroad of new artistic movement emerges after the 1990s, which creates a third trajectory where a criticism of the existing national discourse is made possible.
In order to ground a discussion of contemporary Thai art within the parameter of the homogenous national imaginary and its hierarchical cultural structure in terms of identity politics, a critical demonstration on development of Thai artistic practices since the period of modernism to contemporary era will be considered as a point of departure, and be situated with regard to an exploration of discourse analysis on Thai national imaginary and history.Therefore, it is emphasized in this study that both forms of practice by the national discourse and by artists since the modern to contemporary period are explored and inspected as the units of analysis in order to understand a potential gap where a new terrain of artistic movement takes place.
However, it should be noted here that to address a notion of social agents and locate them into spaces of practices in this study is not necessarily to reiterate an academic tradition regarding to arguments on the subjects, which are, pretty much, dealing with research methodology at the level of intentional, and reflective approach.Rather, this study will emphasis on ideas of collective subjectivities, and place them on the methodological level of constructionist approach where theories of new social movements are used to elaborate new forms of small social criticism.

Basic Assumptions of This Study are as Following
1) Works of art in Thailand were cultural products of their cultural construct, so as to Thai artists were culturally confined, and later invented within their own social environment.Both works of art and the artists were driven and manipulated by various political classes in the field of cultural production (Bourdieu: 1993) since the period of the absolute monarchy, the coup d' etat on 24 June 1932, the Phibun's regime, the political upheaval in the 1970s, and recently globalization where institutional power allocation is managed dissimilarly, and is put into a new structural relation.
2) All the way through historical development, Thai society has defined variable substances of cultural heritages of the nation by duplicating repeatedly different concepts of 'Nation-Religion-Monarch'. To put it into another way, Thai national heritage embed in Thai cultural root is not essential, but it is amended by a certain historical path from time to time, which shows no contact point of continuity.This gives un-intended consequences to modern art in Thailand, which we cannot find continuum of its style and content development in a chronological order.Moreover, it is adapted in eclectic styles and languages of expression to suite well patchy changes in history, and is unavoidably framed by a pre-given value judgment under the discourse of 'Nation-Religion-Monarch' periodically.
3) 'Being contemporary' is not universal, but always 'becoming' contemporary in particular fashions creating a sense of contingencies and uncertainty.Accordingly, various forms of practice move beyond to new terrains.From this perspective, Thai artists after the 1990s are inclined to develop their 'overlapping tactics and practices', which constitute new forms of social movements and shifting experiences whereas the notions of Thai institutional power and discourse are arguable.

The Art of the Nation and Nationalist Aesthetics
Since the beginning in the nineteenth century, King Mongkut patronized Thai art, and during the second half of the century particular attention is paid to King Chulalongkorn, whose patronage played a major role in disseminating Western art in Bangkok.Not until in the 1930s and 1940s the institutionalization of Thai art took place as a government tool to state building that was an era constituting the first page of modern Thai art.Adaptation of indigenous themes to Western art styles as well as the re-examination of an authentic Thai cultural tradition came about in the 1950s.A period of exciting artistic activities corresponded to the school of abstraction burst onto the art boom in the 1960s following by the period of non-figuration related to Buddhist concept.Abstract art operates as a shifting network of practices designed to block the commodification of visual culture: it constitutes a synthesis of core values that function to guarantee the integrity of artistic communication as a cultural-ethical act; it comes into being to oppose the threatening forces of social reality.In this context, abstract art becomes a tool of self-meditations for artists to experience the relation of artistic space and ethical matter.What is being lost in this context is the idea that social meaning can be fully determined, experienced or represented.Modern Thai art begins to be confined within its own institutional de facto.
The impact of social and political events in the 1970s made a drastic shift to significant roles in development of Thai modern art.Accordingly, mythology and the re-invention of Buddhist perception, as well as political and propaganda art were maximized -at the same time that cooperate bodies, banks, non-profit making institutions, and galleries played leading roles in setting standard, and then they became new influential patronages.The revival of traditionalism and the search for national identity in the 1980s and 1990s, endured the consequence of the prior period, showed the effects of a consumer society within corporate capitalism on practices of Thai artists (Poshyananda, 1992: xxiii -xxiv.)The logic of abstraction as a form of confinement in non-representational art is assimilated into the visual languages of multinational corporations, and many Thai traditional symbols are added into various forms of art works.As a result, the Thai modernist artifact has become part of the logic of late monopoly capitalism.In its geometrical and grid-like forms, the semi-abstract art of this period implicitly integrates all together social, governmental and financial networks.In fact since the invention of the principle of perspective in Renaissance, geometry is an instrument of social control.The geometric form has become the dominant image of surveillance.The grid-like form has become a monument of an endless circulatory nature that allows the abstract flow of goods, capital and information.Accordingly, public space has been hollowed out and private space has collapsed into a zone of endless, empty consumption.Therefore a claim that modernism is a search for absolute visual purity is no longer innocent.Instead of modernist art's association with idealist aesthetics, works of art connect with the imprisoning spaces of consumer capitalism and its politics.

Thai Culture at the Cross road
Hybridity of globalization creates transnationalism.It is a negotiating process of the global and the local reciprocity.In Thailand, the emerging synergies between commercial and official discourse of transnational capitalism since the mid of 1980s played a major role in Thai contemporary cultural production.The aspect of cultural production involved complicated context of changes in Thai socio-economic conditions.In fact, the situation of Thai contemporary art since the 1970s during the time of economic boom indicated the multiple intersections between local and global trajectories of production, consumption, representation, and new ideology.The cultural hybridity, developed in this particular juncture, 1970s -1980s, shaped the socio-historical context, where the prolific national discourse of Thailand was integrated with the world economic system and global community.This interlinked with the domain of everyday practices, and, of course, also affected mentality of artistic practices and cultural activities at large.By the rapid transformation in Thailand from an agricultural to an industrial society, Thai art had faced a dilemma in the ideal of national unity and racial homogeneity, which the government so actively promoted.However, throughout the historical development the meaning of Thainess is always various and it can be found in the heterogeneous elements and eclectic styles in Thai art in the multi-layered definition, and ethnicity -race, language, class, religion, and regionalism.Moreover, a feeling of urbanization consisted of multi-cultural ways of living creates accordingly alienated, nostalgic, and dualistic envisioning of the lonely self-absorbed-ego.Faced with such a situation, Thai contemporary artists after the 1990s onwards have put great attempts to set themselves free from the restrain of the artistic practices in very conventional senses embed in the domain of national imaginary and culture.So doing they have tried out some ideas of creative act taking place outside of the 'institutional space', and also have struggled to escape from the 'Nation-Religion-Monarch' discourse.

Creative Process at the Liminal
From this process, the Thai contemporary artists are able to shape a space of the unbounded in the nothing place where a new interpretation of culture is possible, and a deconstructive idea takes place accordingly.As a result, the institutional formation and its discourse loose their authoritative confinement, and somehow they are appropriated.Practices of this kind can be found in contemporary artistic practices, and are considered as new social movements (Note 2), related closely to contents of social daily life, whereby its political question is raised.As addressed by Habermas, new social movements operate in sub-institutional, extra-parliamentary terrain located at the 'seam' between 'the system' and 'lifeworld'.And, somehow the new social movements challenge 'the boundaries of institutional politics' by tearing down the traditional dichotomies between institutional and non-institutional action, private and public life (Habermas, 1981).Thus, what happens in the area of contesting in daily life is an attempt to escape from or to negotiate with the control of hegemonic power at the middle ground of the discourses.Similar to this process is what Foucault calls an 'art of existence' in "The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality" (1985).He describes an 'art of existence' as producing subjects who "seek to transform themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre."Engaged in the art of existence, this subject is both crafted and crafting within a discourse.
Before the 1990s art-life paradigms had never been mediated in Thai society.They were never corresponding to one another.It was because modernist tradition that everything had its own disciplinary domain securing firmly in what was inherent.In addition, the political project to constitute Thai national culture confined artistic practices to the 'institutional space' and the 'Nation-Religion-Monarch' discourse, whereas contents of life of the populace were always voiceless.Art was, then, kept always in the opposite side to life.
In turn, many Thai contemporary artists after the 1990s have recognized some alternatives for the creative process to allow a middle ground where experiences and contents of life should be more dynamically contemplated.It is a kind of space where everything is able to intersect -in between.It exemplifies a sort of contemporary understanding about locationing and functioning of space, so called transitional space, a place of pause, a place to wait, to test, and then to move beyond.(Jacob 2004: 164) In the space of no-clinging boundary, the process of transformational experience constantly continues in flux -whereas the binary of art and life is discontinued, and the dichotomies between the institutional and non-institutional, private and public have gradually become blurred.There were many impulses those constituted a critical fracture in Thai art scene at the beginning of the 1990s.

From New Social Conditions to the Beginning of New Artistic Movements
Due to consequences of the world economic boom in the beginning of the 1990s, the international art market had expanded.In Asia Japan and Australia were in the lead of the matrix of the world art marketing investment.Bangkok, like other capitals in Asia, had become a rapidly expanding metropolis.The Thai government put great efforts to direct the national development policies and all their orientation towards material prosperity and quantitative growth with its emphasis on economic development based on science and technology.Evidently, Thai society had faced several negative results, such as social and health problems and environmental problems like pollutions of soil, water, and air.Accordingly, this created a dilemma of excessive consumption result in the decline of traditional culture and spiritualism of the Thai people.
As a result of it, some under current social movements took place quietly to raise questions regarding to arguments on concurrent devaluation of human qualities regarding moral and ethic issues.On one hand, many Thai young artists felt obliged to maintain there sense of national unity and racial homogeneity.On the other hands, many of them had striven to catch up with the international art of the first world.Clearly, many of them believed that there should be a universal modern art that can be appreciated by all classes and nationalities.We have seen that since the Bhirasri and post-Bhirasri periods this dualism of trying to be international as well as expressing Thainess has been extremely difficult for Thai artists to reconcile (Poshyananda, 1992: 190 -191.)According to the art world market expanding to Asia at the beginning of the 1990s, many of Asian artists at the time -mostly from China, Japan, Australia, and India -had opportunities to be invited to step into the international art arena with some puzzlement of modern and tradition.International publishing in art magazines had enlarged in numbers.Art Asia Pacific has its hub office in Australia as well as Asian Art News in China.Asian artists had a chance that their works were reviewed by both international art presses, and ones based in Asia.Inevitably, Thai art society had viewed such media, and been affected by ideas, concepts, and artistic creativity coming along with them.What become evident in the art publishing circle that many Thai young artists experienced was that being a professional artist could become a career that offered benefits and fame -not just only with in the national bounded, but on the international stage.
Experiencing a sense of international happening, many Thai young artists could be able to see different styles and techniques of contemporary art current.They were inspired to find new languages of art expression to consent their ideas to be recognized.It was also a challenge for them to come across new topics in their art projects, which, some how, surpassed artistic creativity of the Thai artists of earlier generations that still closely depended upon the notion of white cube.A variety of new art projects were inclined towards ideas of social criticism -such as environmental devastation, urban intensification, gender, human rights, and etc -and took place in public spaces.
At the same time, new ideas were motivated by the educational reinforcement.Some important individual artists came back home after cultivating their educational experiences in school, and gaining their art experiments from oversea.Those figures such as Montien Boonma, graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supereieure des Beaux-Arts and the University of Paris, and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, graduated from Hochschule Fuer Bildende Kuenste, Braunschweig, Germany, started to exhibit their new works and teach at the Faculty of Fine Art, Chiang Mai University.Mit Jai-in, who spend 8 years in Vienna, accompanied his fellow, Uthit Attimana, who also taught at the department of art, Chiang Mai University.Their classes at the school encouraged Thai young artists to survey experimental practices emphasizing greatly on ideas and thoughts, not just only the 'ism' of art style.The Faculty of Fine Art, at the time, had become actively alternative art school, which promoted new ideas of making art differently from what offered by Silpakorn University in Bangkok.In fact, there were other art schools -at Chulalongkorn University, Prasarnmit School of Fine Art for instance -and individual artists whose practicing roles were to raise questions regarding to characteristics of contemporary Thai art under an influences by Silpakornian school.There were numerous unorthodox art movements so actively emerging in the beginning of the 1990s.And, the most important movement in this period was a project entitled "Chiang Mai Social Installation" which became a kind of a hub gluing together those who were in a wonderment of the new page of contemporary art era.For my dissertation, I would like to use Chiang Mai Social Installation, its initial is CMSI, as a point of departure to explore such demonstrative ideas of contemporary Thai art practices mentioned earlier.

Chiang Mai Social Installation
CMSI was initiated by a group of artists and art students based in Chiang Mai.The lifetime of this project existed for 8 years.The first CMSI took place in 1993.Chiang Mai city had turned to be a presenting space for the project.Essentially, the CMSI each year had different durations of the show time.But actually took place between December to February, and sometimes ran until March.The formation of project works in very loose manner as so that ideas of place, space, and time are very flexible.Actually, temple, crematorium, bridge, street, canal, storefront, hospital, museum, community, taxi, tuk tuk, Tapae gate, prostitute house, department store, market, and etc. were occupied by not just only visual artists from the local and the international, but by project participants from various backgrounds -such as artists of various kinds, prostitutes, monk, intellectual, university professor, doctors, tuk tuk drivers, NGO workers, cultural activists, political protesters, ordinary people, homeless, and etc -to address their ideas to the public.CMSI was a kind of open spaces for some extent.
The very starting point of CMSI began during an on going discussion among artists who were facing some frustration of Thai art society and the colonization of influential international art festival in relation to existing social problems in very multiple levels and dimensions of certain kinds.According to Mit Jai-in and Uthit Attimana whose performing roles inspired their peers of CMSI, it had become a conspiracy project that mainstream art in Thailand (Silpakornian) and also the stage of art at the international arena no longer hold a critical position valuable to the society at large, excepted people in these art community were taking more and more advantage from the world, and society they lived by.And artistic practices were separated out from life, and then from the society.Art had become a site-specific space where creative acts had been dismantled, and allowed political obedience to take shape.Influenced and reinforced by Joseph Beuys' ideas of "social sculpture", CMSI was aimed at a notion of "social installation." According to Joseph Beuys' fundamental messages, delivered again and again in lectures, interviews, and artworks, was that human beings can and must learn to be creative in many different ways.His famous slogan "Everyone is an artist" was not meant to suggest that all people should or could be creators of traditional artworks.Rather, he meant that we should not see creativity as the special realm of artists, but that everyone should apply creative thinking in their own area of specialization--whether it can be law, agriculture, physics, education, homemaking, or the fine arts.Beuys imagined that an expanded application of human creativity--and the broader definition of "art" that would follow--would result in something he called "social sculpture."While the term encompassed many things for Beuys, it might broadly be defined as a conscious act of shaping, of bringing some aspect of the environment--whether the political system, the economy, or a classroom--from a chaotic state into a state of form, or structure.Social sculpture should be accomplished cooperatively, creatively, and across disciplines Given that as a springboard, the initial CMSI crews decided to do something to orchestrate critical voices in which many people could be able to engage.However, ideas of place and space had become a serious discussion to house CMSI demonstration.

The Art of De-terrialization
A particular mode of production of space under the control of specific group introduces spatial stress.Especially, spatializations of the culture of capitalism are central to cultural hegemony and dominant ideologies as well as we might call dominant practices, which compress the social construction of reality in very specific manners.Yet spatialization and dominant ideology are interrelated, the spatial problematic draws attention to politically discounted symbolic and distorted forms of resistance practiced through the spatialization itself: eruptions of instability through the carefully spread net of the Cartesian three-dimensional grid of rationality and homogenously empirical spaces of canonical modernity.Yet space and disruptions of the normalcy of this modernist spatial system becomes themselves at once the medium of compliance and resistance to objectification and to the relations of ruling and dominance which characterize economic exploitation (Space & Social Theory, 1997: 186-192) In CMSI the social spatialization is quietly deformed recast, and then contested.It creates de-territorialization of objects, activities in space where as it allows the possibility of asking questions.In this context the established social order is altered, and somehow disrupted.As yet the social spatializations are contested at new terrains of practice, the meaning of living in space is re-mapped and re-imagined, and thus it causes the erosion and destabilizing of authoritative and concrete quality of social control -namely it arouses some rooms for public intervention.Moreover, this spatial is a neglected and highly significant field for resistance and transformative interventions in social life.The aim of resistance is not revolution but the preservation of the potential for significant social change at a time of confused praxis and rapid restructuring, spatialized forms of resistance through the tactical appropriation and re-functioning of urban public spaces, and through contestatory compartment and spatial practices in public cannot be dismissed from the repertoire of provisional and immediate responses to totalizing developments by creative actors.In many ways, social boundary is transgressed, and authoritative territory is de-territorized.In this context, many projects of CMSI create mobility of the politics of fragmentation taking place within the homogenous terrain of dominant discourse that is reinforced by institutional power and the logic of unity.
From their critical stand, artistic practices in the mainstream art world are clearly part of the integrating cultural de facto where as art has collapsed to maintain any ideologies.Art has become the art of collusion while the life of the artist matters very little.It is because art now offers career benefits, rewarding investments, glorified consumer products, just like any other corporation.Art has definitely lost its privilege.(Baudrillard, 2005: 11) The burden of all art is its inescapable attachment to tradition and custom; and that it is somehow radical to criticize those conventions that claim to represent external reality and its techniques for encoding, framing and organizing the world.It is because representation of art is related to some pristine state of being in nature, rather than culture; thus artistic compositions are imprisoned by some inherited codes that shape a pattern and a frame of visual systems from which it is impossible to escape.In this sense, the representation of art is repeated as the same way that the idea of nationess is recurred.Representation and repetition go hand in hand in both artistic practice and nation building.This indicates the relationship of representation of art and state power, which are intertwisted -so that representation of art in relation to state power is off concerned and unquestionable.Neither work of art, nor state power is part of social production.Therefore, work of art in Thailand is never related to social space, but it is exhibited in special and imaginary space, namely ideal space as the same way where state power is located.Art and politics in Thailand thus are the governmental task in the field of specialization operating by a handful group of people.

Public Intervention and Practices at the Interstice
Andre Breton, influenced by Freud's unconscious and Benjamin's arcade project, addressed an idea of imaginary world resided in the city.He believed that the city has its own unconscious hidden away in the forgotten spaces, in the arcades, in the gardens below the surface waiting to be uncovered, and in the process of finding spaces as such, a resistance of the suppressed world would possibly emerge.According to such an idea, those spaces, holding numerous projects in CMSI, create a leeway where variation and deviation of ideas and practices take place.It becomes a sort of a middle ground where everything can intersect -in between.In this sense, the city space in Chiang Mai, which consists of numerous types such as bureaucratic institutional spaces, capitalist and commercial spaces, conventional spaces, and etc, have been re-positioned and been re-defined in a sense by un-certaintified activities where symbolic ambivalence is materialized, and where an alternate social ordering appears.
CMSI associates the denseness, structure and complexity of public experience with the impenetrable nature of the matter of historical evidence, which implies a sense of the inarticulateness of ordinary experience and as a disruptive moment of the systematizing necessity of high modernism in general.Many projects of CMSI had been a complex of stylistic and critical concerns that eventually created an erosion of a coherent movement.What happens in this situation is that the mundane practices are juxtaposed upon what seems to be restricted, and people in these practices are keen to explore its ambiance -where as representation of art works incorporates fragments of display, which its irreconcilable forces arose social experiences, and allow a construction of cultural politics and its debate.These practices share in common is a fascination with the multiple conditions in which common experience enters into the realm of aesthetic and disrupts the hierarchical and classificatory procedures of the mainstream art.Various kinds of movement enable the ideal body of the CMSI to attack the mandarin nature of national art practice, and then be able to enlarge the productive range of visual culture with energetic attempt to grapple with the social landscape of modernism and politics of modernity at large.Such spaces of art activities are defined by the heterogeneity of the living reality of everyday life, where they display forms of resistance and creativity against the backdrop of the capitalist and bureaucratic institutions of modern societies.(Hetherington,67) In this sense, similar to Breton's idea, representational spaces involve making use of sites within everyday life that has been left behind by modern world, and obviously such spaces are appropriated by participants of CMSI.

Tactical Practices
As for a nature of the CMSI project, everyday life is considered as the focus and a terrain for a politics of identity and resistance essentially requiring tactics.It is believed that tactics are the practices carried out by people in their routine everyday lives, dissimilar to strategies, which are created by institutional power.In this sense, everyone can be an anonymous artist in their own terms, as long as they are able to keep some distance away from strategic power by institutions, or keen enough to play within it.
Ideally, participatory projects in CMSI create a kind of juxtaposing space, in between space, or space of liminality.Insertion into those spaces requires tactical participation, and art activities become part of that matrix.
It allows possibilities to ask a question unfamiliar to what one might already understand without presenting an answer.It also gives a sense of moving and transcendental experience by meditating on practices, which one can speculate, not providing, about their own social setting.CMSI provokes very critical dynamic dilemma of art and life as something predictable versus ideas of engagement to open questions.
By questioning modern art practice and its commitment to the idea of beauty as truth, which constitutes the idea of the governmental agencies of art, CMSI contested the established cultural orthodoxy of art practices and developed a number of different critical tactics in very iconoclastic manners.By raising questions as such, the ideal body of CMSI helps crafting the realm of creativity and criticism that make artistic practices speak against the institutional languages which frame understanding in art.In this context, CMSI addresses the relationship between the accumulation of different forms of state authority, status, prestige, power and property of the national claim over the history of Thai modern art.
In this sense a refiguring of the mythologies of national culture is revealed and turned into a violent, dynamic expressionistic style that hovers between the mythic and the autobiographical embodiment of Thai nationess.The endless number of projects taking places in CMSI over the course of 8 years signifies a compensatory substitute in areas of life, whereas participation takes the formlessness, which allows its ideal movement to spread out like rhizome, or a weed, whose intrusion critically reflects creative capacities of resistance by deploying tactics, and overlapping them.

Nomadic forms of the Movement
There are nomadic forms of project in CMSI that reject the uniformity of established national art.And, such nomadic forms essentially lack character and do not hold heroic attitudes, but rather create the virtuous humbleness of the weak art consisting of the hybrid nature of social and cultural inquiries, and of life processes.Moreover, as the CMSI 's idea is nomadic by its rhetorical performance, the idea of an unmediated individual authority and artistic creativity are situated, thus the mythological status of authorship is obscured.In this space of practice meaning is generic rather than specific in multiple forms of social projects.This allows interpretation and access where ordinary experiences become also rhetorical performance rather than real action.
As the nomadic performances in CMSI take a foamless model, for which its value cannot be speculated economically, or cannot be merchandized, they are a critique of idealist modernism in relation to consumer capitalism.In this context, common experiences invade the sanctified realm of abstraction to declare that it is itself a prison, or a zoo in which the residual forms of everyday life are trapped, suspended and consumed.Finally, the geometric form in the established art practices is challenged and invaded by the weak art practices and the audience's leisure experiences.
Since the beginning years CMSI has inspired not only alternative understanding about how one would think of artistic practices, but also there are numbers of interesting social collaborative projects occur accordingly -Midnight University, Poiluang Constitutional Reformatting Installation, Asiatopia, The Land Foundation, for instance.The outcome of CMSI does not come about concretely right away.But it has been developing in time and giving great inspiration to emerging artists and cultural workers of later generations to consider their practices critically in relation to the art paradigm at the very contemporary stage.

Discussion and Conclusion
Due to continual acts by contemporary Thai artists since 1990s, the process of art creation has become the ritual of life, which allows them to develop, cultivate, and improve their self-awareness in process.They are struggles for 'the reappropriation of time, of space, and of relationships in the individual's daily experience.This acting process sometimes happens politically within, or be superimposed imaginationally upon the existing institutional confines.It implicitly also gives a critical voice toward power discourse of the mainstream art world and its institutions, which more or less associate with the national discourse of Thailand and its national imaginary building project.
However, what happens there should not be simply considered just in terms of a power / resistance dichotomy.But it can be more interesting to think about it in a sense of things in between at a liminal stage, where the mix of interdependent relativity of actions stimulates an interstice of the confined.From this perspective, contemporary Thai artists have made a great effort for their existence in a zone of very instability to sustain their transformational experiences in the terrains of practice.To move beyond what seems to be constrained to them, contemporary Thai artists are inclined to explore some alternative artistic competency by employing ideas of 'overlapping tactics and practices.'And, if we would be able to find an explanation of tactics and practices of these kinds theoretical frameworks used in this research are supposed to be also overlapping, not binary.
In conclusion, it has become a dialogue that Thai contemporary artistic movement after 1990s has been inclined to suggest some emerging alternative of creative competency quite differently from artistic progress in the prior periods.This, dialogue can be understood in terms of the process of cultural hybridity that gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable -a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation taking place in third space (Note 3).As said by Homi Bhabha, this kind of space is politically practical because it will help us to see that it is a productive space of the construction of culture as different, in the spirit of alteration or otherness embedded in everyday idioms of practices in various fashions.From this perspective, perhaps a new terrain of practice as sites of contestation (Note 4) should be open.Furthermore, it will also encourage an epistemological terrain for interrogating that foundational dualism which implicitly underpins the social constitution and policing of rigidly bounded cultural identities.Not surprisingly, more inquiries and subjects of social research on artistic practices today are waiting to be realized in a moment where post bureaucraticism extends its lifespan under the new current of post nationalism.We are in the battle zone of media war.

Notes
Note 1.The politics of place, on one hand, is rooted in the construction of collective identity, and on the other hands involved ideas about the politics of resistance.Often, this influence of the 'politics of place' is misrecognized as not being a separate process but as one feature in the politics of identity and resistance.Nevertheless, place politics is a clear process in which the meanings and sense of place are shaped in the interaction of people and the 'spatial'.In the politics of place, people, identity and place become together as consequence of the interdependent nature of social and spatial spheres.See more in Michael Herzfeld's "A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town" Note 2. Many new social movement theorists argue that the field of social conflict has shifted from the political sphere to civil society and the cultural realm.They say that new movements are transforming civil society by creating 'new spaces, new solidarities and new democratic forms'.It is in the context of these 'liberated' spaces, where alternative norms and values guide social interaction, that new identities and solidarities are formed.What happens accordingly is the multiple points of antagonism that have emerged have led to the expansion of the political through the proliferation of political spaces.As social conflict expands into new areas of social life, the field of politics is enlarged.These new movements are contesting the state's redefinition of the public and private spheres and thus transforming private issues into political issues.Note 3. The third space is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a productive, and not merely reflective, space that engenders new possibility.It is an 'interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative' space of new forms of cultural meaning and production blurring the limitations of existing boundaries and calling into question established categorizations of culture and identity.(Bhabha, 1994) Note 4. De Certeau has analyzed the 'terrains of practice'.He argues that terrains of practice refer to sites of contestation and the relations between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic powers and discourses, between forces and relations of domination, subjection, exploitation and resistance.Terrains of practice contains an interwoven web of specific symbolic meanings, commumcative processes, political discourses, religious idioms, cultural practices, social networks, economic relations, physical settings, envisioned desires and hopes.