Every night in the heart of Patpong, Bangkok’s oldest red-light district, The Strip opens its doors. In January 2016, Tiane Doan na Champassak met one of the managers – an American who was, by chance, a fan of photography – who asked him if he would be interested in making a book on his club. Tiane took the chance.
Since the initial photos were too explicit and risky for the club, Tiane used the scanner as a stylistic device and altered the images, taking The Strip beyond the limits between abstraction and figuration. His photographic experiment rejects immediate perception and builds on more complex visual and psychic structures, creating a dazzling narrative.
With its focus on blending contours and its chromatics that alludes to a kind of electric Fauvism,The Strip has the appeal of a metafictional visual story about an hypothetical infra-red-light district in Bangkok.
Tiane Doan na Champassak (1973) is a French visual artist. His photographic work explores the themes of sexuality and gender identity. The depiction of sexuality is an enduring theme in his practice in which he explores the relation between his own photographic production and appropriated images seen by the filters of anonymity and censorship. The sources are diverse and include the Internet, personal memorabilia and magazine cuttings, all of which are recontextualized in a new light. All his self-published artist books are released under the label Siam’s Guy Books.
Tiane Doan na Champassak’s The Strip photo-book was launched at Le Plac D’Art Photo (Paris, France) on May 25th 2017.
