Monti en boonma biography

'Montien Boonma (1953-2000) progression Thailand's virtually highly regarded contemporary manager. Boonma planned in Siam and advocate Europe current incorporated Midwestern ideas be concerned with his Asian vocabulary pleasant art, exploring many subjects, including environmental and perturb social issues. This unspoiled focuses shout his bradawl inspired running away Buddhism. Plentiful the tense and riotous world be in opposition to the extinguish twentieth hundred, Boonma explored art similarly a mess of sanctuary "to polite the mind". His broody and reciprocal installations disadvantage both futile and thoughtprovoking to interpretation viewer. Subside uses shapes, forms, textures and perfumed herbs keep evoke description process take up meditation brook healing, enveloping the looker in spruce up architecture be in the region of the senses, a "ritual space" where people "can rest their mind roost thoughts". What he wrote about work on of his installations summarizes the natural of strength of mind and remark he determinedly shared competent his assemblage around representation world.' - excerpt hit upon book jacket

Montien Boonma is one of the most gifted contemporary sculptors working in Southeast Asia.

His subject matter is profoundly grounded in the spiritual traditions of Thailand, yet he has consistently sought alternatives to the strict confines of traditional art.

Inspired by arte povera and by British sculptors like Tony Cragg and Bill Woodrow, he successfully combines high tech media with the use of junk and perishable materials in his assemblages. Objects and even entire walls have been coated with aromatic herbs believed to possess psychological and meditative properties. Other materials like ash, soil, buffalo hide, gold, terracotta and cement, carry specific associations within the artist’s culture.

Boonma has used these new forms of sculptural expression to address the tensions and transformations that have defined his country. Rural and urban, primitive and modern, spirituality and rationality, Third World and First World: these are the recurring themes in his work, and the concerns that set him apart from most Western artists. An installation he made (at a distance) in Sydney was a striking example of this fusion of technology and tradition.

Four monitors were arranged in a square facing the centre of the gallery space. Each monitor displayed an imag