Very Thai author Philip Cornwel-Smith will take part in a panel discussion in the symposium for the 1st Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) on 28 January 2019.
He also wrote an essay in the official BAB catalogue book, ‘Scary Monsters & Super Happy Art’, which touches upon the influence of popular culture as an increasing subject matter of Thai art.
Tags: #academic #art #Bangkok #culture #events #exhibitions #international #photography #popularculture #talks
Thailand’s first ‘Ideas Festival’, Bangkok Edge, will feature talks, workshops, music, film, tours and an exhibition, along with food and other entertainment on Feb 13-14, 2016.
On Feb 14 at 1-2pm, Very Thai author Philip Cornwel-Smith will host one of the panel discussions, ‘Where is Bangkok’s Leading Edge‘, with three Thai figures who are moving the culture forward. the talk will be at the Rachini School venue in the Tha Tien festival enclave.
Philip will look at how Thai trends emerge, become hip and then get accepted into the mainstream.
Pongsuang ‘Note’ Kunprasop the founder of Dudesweet nightlife theme party phenomenon will discuss changing fashion in the context of music.
Kongdej Jaturanrassmee, the film director of Tang Wong and Snap, among other acclaimed films, will look at the situation of art film in Thailand.
Alex Face, one of Thailand’s most prominent graffiti artists, gives his take on creating artistic space in public view.
https://www.facebook.com/bangkokedge/?fref=ts
Tags: #academic #art #Bangkok #culture #events #fashion #film #graffiti #music #nightlife #talks
Here is the full schedule of Bangkok Edge, Thailand’s first Ideas Festival.
Among all the talks and events, look out for Very Thai author Philip Cornwel-Smith, who will head a panel on the ‘leading edge’ of Bangkok’s popular culture on Sunday Feb 14 at 1-pm.
For details see:
https://www.facebook.com/bangkokedge/?fref=ts
Tags: #academic #Bangkok #culture #events #festivals #international #music #talks #Thailand
National Museum Volunteers Lecture series talk by Philip Cornwel-Smith about how popular culture artefacts have eventually come to be displayed, exhibited and treated as a serious aspect of Thai culture.
At the National Museum on Thursday morning of Nov 26, 2016, following a talk by Steve Van Beek on Thailand’s water culture.
Tags: #academic #culture #events #musuems #popularculture #talks #Thailand
Philip Cornwel-Smith gave a talk to the IDEA Group, an informal gathering of expatriates who regularly meet to discuss topics about Thailand with a guest speaker. Philip spoke on the topic ‘Very Thai, Very Volatile: 20 years of change in Popular Culture’.
A roundup of Bangkok’s art and creative scene, with one of the quotes from yours truly. Thanks for doing this David Fernández, we need more coverage for Bangkok’s arts to flourish. The article’s done for the Asia Europe Foundation, which could explain why the title sounds like bureaucratic filing system category: ‘By people / In cities: Bangkok | city profile’. File Bangkok under ‘Creative’.
http://culture360.asef.org/category/magazine/profiles/
By people : In cities | Bangkok | city profile | culture360.asef.org | culture360.asef.org
Posted in: Blog,
Tags: #academic #art #BACC #Bangkok #culture #design #e-magazine #exhibitions #features #interviews #tcdc #website
Staying true to type. BITS MMXIV – Bangkok International Typographic Symposium is happening on November 15 & 16 at BACC, plus a workshop day on the 14th. Speakers from local and international foundries tackle letterform issues from glyphs and the digital landscape to femininity in printing and typography as social activism.
Get inside the loop – go along.
BITS MMXIV International Conference
15 – 16 November 2014
BACC
—————
15 November 2014
Wee Viraporn
10.00 -11.30 am.
“Reflecting myself, according to others, through type”
To compare my relationship with type to a person, it is like having a very good friend. He’s been around me since before I became an art student. Even though we haven’t become best friends or business partners, he has always been there for me whenever I need help or need someone to play with.
In this experimental project, I will ask this friend to help me with expressing myself, according to how other friends see me.
—–
Catherine Dixon
11.30 -12.30 am.
“Hands-on: typography as social activism”
With more and more of modern daily life now managed for us digitally, so a converse fascination with the analogue in typography and lettering practice has grown, especially in relation to letterpress printing. So great is current designerly enthusiasm for such hands-on approaches that many educational institutions are now seeking to reinstate letterpress technologies alongside their digital contemporaries. This talk explores the social potential of engaging with typography in this hands-on way, from both a UK educational perspective and beyond – featured projects including a workshop in a Brazilian slum where an old press is helping to build community, and the vibrant political activism evident in design studios in Buenos Aires and Barcelona.
—–
Julius Hon-Man Hui
2.00 – 3.00 pm.
“In between the East & West: Dalton Maag’s Chinese type design”
Those are challenging years to people at Dalton Maag – they have been worked out giant size font projects that cover almost all the scripts in the world, notably the Nokia Pure, HP Simplified and Intel Sans.
Chinese is one of the most challenging scrips for DaMa people – huge character set, complex structure, loose system, a completely different aesthetic to western type, and lot of different industrial standard to fulfil.
Font developer and Chinese script project lead Julius Hui will share DaMa’s experience in tackling Chinese script’s design problems, including many the many perspective of Latin-Chinese matching, which should be the very first time to most BITS audience.
—–
Danh Hong
3.00 – 4.00 pm.
“Khmer UI font for Small Device”
UI font is designed to reduce the overall body height of text, and allow Khmer to have descender and ascender-lines closer to other scripts. It also allows their use in UI components where vertical space is a premium.
—–
Bruno Maag
4.00 – 5.00 pm.
“Type in a digital landscape”
The presentation explores how the tone of voice of a typeface can be expressed in a medium that has broad parameters, asks how technology hinders or assists the reproduction of fonts, and asks if fonts can be responsive.
The discussion topics are set against a background of Bruno Maag’s experience creating fonts for digital usage as far back as 1995, and Dalton Maag’s more recent experience working on projects with Ubuntu, Nokia, Intel and HP.
—————
16 November 2014
Roger Black
10.30 – 11.30 am.
“Your type is your brand”
Business people still think tat their products and services are their brands. A little industrial design, a little packaging, and the brand emerges. But in the new information economy, services are digital, and products are displayed on flat screens, with type. Customer experience becomes user experience. Content is king. So that makes design . . . queen?
Considering the amount of interaction with customers that involves fonts, it’s a wonder that more enterprises have not invested in unique typefaces. Custom fonts. Most still make do with the great number of typefaces available in the analog world. It’s possible to create an individual look in print, on products, in stores and advertising, but only a fraction of the the fonts are available as web fonts. So we see a lot of Georgia and Verdana . . . and Arial.
Roger Black talks about some of the history of type branding. He recounts case studies in publication design, where a particular voice and personality has been achieved through a typeface or typographical style. He shows examples of custom fonts used for an entire brand—from the logotype to the digital UI. And finally he takes up the issue of Unicode type branding, where the design has to combine glyphs for Latin, CKJ, Hindic, Arabic and the so-called minority scripts.
A brand, it’s been said, is what people think of you when you are not there. Black shows how type branding can endure.
—–
Thanarat Vachiruckul
11.30 -12.30 am.
“From user to producer”
Although, trial and error experience is an old story that have been told many times over in type design field. This version will be slightly different in his own right. From choosing and applying fonts to the layout to designing and publishing his own fonts worldwide; the story of a Thai type designer who utilizes research and knowledge in creating fonts and turning them into a full-time business as a partner of Katatrad Foundry. The stuffs along the way are always more interesting than the outcome.
—–
Georg Seifert
2.00 – 3.00 pm.
“Why does Glyphs support Thai?”
The story why I started making Glyphs, why it was easy to support Asian languages and what I learned on the way.
—–
Piyaluk Benjadol
3.00 – 4.00 pm.
“The Story of Yaw Ying (ญ): How Learning Alphabet relates to Thai Femininity Discourses?” แกะรอย ญ หญิง: การเรียนรู้ตัวอักษรสัมพันธ์กับวาทกรรมความเป็นเพศหญิงของไทยอย่างไร?
This design research explores 114-year history of one letter out of 44 Thai alphabets, Yaw Ying (ญ), in pre-school alphabet primers as the main visual resources. As a language learning tool before we can read, write, or speak, we become familiar with each letter by memorizing its shape, the sound of its pronunciation, its accompanying word, and the image illustrating the meaning of the word. Occasionally, the rhyming words are attached in order to make them easy to be learned by rote. The relations between texts and images, as verbal and non-verbal codes, in these Yaw Ying (ญ) learning tools lead us to understand how these design artifacts construct the meaning of women through their visual representations. The in-depth investigations of Yaw Ying (ญ) primer pages along with other graphic design works, such as posters, book covers, and advertisements, reveal patterns of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of visual languages representing social discourses about Thai women. Considering this design research as a case study, its process of visual deconstruction can be used as a model for designers, design curators, or design educators to understand how other design artifacts contextually related to cultural and social issues.
—–
David Carson
4.00 – 5.00 pm.
“Trusting Your Own Intuition”
How to be truly original and deliver your best work while having fun doing it. Where to find an inspiration and how to convert it into your work. This lecture is a fly over tour through out personal archive of his own work. David will share his experience on how to push yourself to the limit and still make the work enjoyable. He will unveil the work process that delivers the visual sensation that we all know. The audience will get to hear the in depth explanation on why things look the they way they are.
Posted in: Blog,
Tags: #academic #BACC #book #culture #design #events #international #Thailand
Thailand’s ‘indy’ subculture now spans two decades. Its impact on film, music, fashion, media and the arts have been tracked throughout by writer/editor Philip Cornwel-Smith, in Bangkok Metro Magazine, Time Out Bangkok guidebook and his book Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture. The ‘From T-Pop to Indy’ chapter from Very Thai was reproduced in a book by MTV about Cool Asia; the chapter’s revision in Very Thai’s 2nd edition shows how indy has changed over time. In this talk, Philip addresses the status of Thai indy as a cultural movement, and questions whether it has declined or matured.
The talk is in Lecture Theatre 762, Top floor of building 7 above BUG (Bkk Uni Gallery), reached by the entrance off the intersection of Kluaynamthai with Rama IV Road.
It’s open to the public but within a fixed student time slot, so it’ll start promptly. See you indie fans there!
Tags: #academic #art #Bangkok #events #indy #talks #Thailand
Philip Cornwel-Smith will give a talk on July 1 at Thammasat University to the students of its to the International Programme. Very Thai is one of their set texts. The talk will be a variation on the phases of Thai popular culture that Philip has witnessed during the past two decades in Bangkok.
Tags: #academic #Bangkok #book #culture #international #talks
Philip Cornwel-Smith will give a talk on 6 March 2014 at The National Museum for the National Museum Volunteers’ postponed Lecture Series. The talk was about the phases of Thai popular culture that Philip has witnessed during the past two decades in Bangkok.
Posted in: Events,
A contemporary art exhibition by lecturers from department of printmaking, painting and sculpture, faculty of fine arts, Chiang Mai university. Ajarn Kade made Very Thai book his exhibit contribution to an exhibition of works on paper about Thainess.
A copy of Very Thai mounted on a utility box was Ajarn Kade’s exhibit at this international exhibition of works on paper.
Posted in: Events,
http://mundoexchange.org/2010/10/books-readings-for-thailand-volunteers-and-travelers/
Mundo Exchange volunteers and interns in Thailand have created a list of books and reading about Thailand and Thai culture. Some of the works included are fiction, others are about history, the arts, and the cultural ways of this Thai society. Travelers, tourists and armchair anthropologists may enjoy some of these writings. Our goal is to include more, so if you want to recommend other Thai related readings let us know at info@mundoexchange.org. Enjoy they reads! (*Other books and readings, not listed here, will be available for Mundo Exchange volunteers during your cross-cultural training and orientation.)
An endlessly entertaining book full of photo essays explaining the simple yet fascinating quirks of modern Thai culture: from toilet paper napkins to ghost stories, and from drinks in a plastic bag to temple carnivals, this book brilliantly sheds light on the everyday popular culture in Thailand that is so mystifying to its visitors.
Tags: #academic #blogs #book #culture #international #reviews #website
http://photoartcmu.com/sites/default/files/medifoto.pdf
I don’t have a date of this exhibition and posting. If you know, please contact me. Thanks.
การวิพากษ์ถึงความล้มเหลวและความผิดพลาดของคนอื่นคงเป็นเรื่องสนุกสําหรับปถุชนคน ทั่วไป คล้ายกับคนในอดีตชอบดูถูกคนอื่นถูกลงโทษ ถูกตัดคอประหารชีวิตในที่สาธารณะ ณ จัตุรัส กลางเมือง ถือเป็นความบันเทิงของคนในยุคนั้น
ผู้ที่มีสิทธิ์วิพากษ์คนอื่นได้ น่าจะเป็นคนที่มีความประพฤติและจิตใจอยู่เหนือกว่าคนที่เขา วิพากษ์ เช่น ไม่เคยทําผิดเลย ไม่เคยล้มเหลว ไม่เคยโกหกตอแหล หรือเคยน้อยที่สุด ผลงานชิ้นนี้ต้องการนําเสนอให้ความผิดพลาดเป็นครู เพราะ ขึ้นชื่อว่า “คน” คนเรามันพลาดกันได้ ตัว ข้าพเจ้าเองก็เคยพลาดตั้งหลายอย่าง “กิ้งกือยังสะดุดเท้าตัวเอง”
ภาพบรรยากาศภายในนิทรรศการ
Posted in: Blog, Events, Reviews,
Tags: #academic #art #book #culture #exhibitions #Thai language #Thailand
เช่น วัดพระศรีรัตนศาสดาราม งานจิตรกรรม ปฏิมากรรม ช่างสิบหมู่ งานศิลปาชีพ ดนตรีไทยเดิม หนังเรื่อง ตำนานสมเด็จพระนเรศวร สุริโยไท ฯลฯ
สามารถแบ่งแยกย่อยออกเป็น อดีต – แผลเก่า, ลูกอีสาน / ปัจจุบัน – แหยม, วงศ์คำเหลา ฯ
สามารถแบ่งแยกย่อยออกเป็น อดีต – บ้านทรายทอง, เก๋าๆ / ปัจจุบัน – รถไฟฟ้ามาหานะเธอ, พลอย, เป็นต่อ, บางรักซอย 9
เกาหลีร่วมสมัย, Cosplay, พารากอน, ฯลฯ
‘…the fabulous book, Very Thai, by Phillip Cornwel-Smith which explains all those wonderful and wacky details that make Thai pop culture so interesting and so much fun.’
Tags: #academic #blogs #book #culture #endorsements #international #reviews
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Academic Year 2009
Posted in: Reviews,
Tags: #academic #book #culture #features #interviews #reviews #Thai language #Thailand #tradition
A talk at Siam Society on 15 September 2005 by Philip Cornwel-Smith
The author will give an insight into the value of everyday contemporary things in building a more inclusive, up-to-date picture of Thai culture, society and history. Exploring his passion for all things Thai, Philip Cornwel-Smith traces the origins of what you find in the street, the home, the shop and the bar and on TV.
Admission B150, or free to Siam Society Members.
Tags: #academic #Bangkok #culture #events #SiamSociety #talks
Philip Cornwel-Smith has written a very refreshing book about Thailand, so true and so well illustrated with photos that have captured real life in chaotic Bangkok. One cannot suppress a smile on seeing a photo of entangled electric cables on a street corner.
From a McDonald’s plastic mannequin doing the traditional “Wai” to the white skin obsession, all is said and shown to give the reader a real grasp about what is Thailand in 2005. Among the 17 small photos on the cover of “Very Thai” are contemporary interpretations of traditional folk customs like Buddha images (in plastic), wooden bracelets (with painted Hello Kitty faces) and monk basket offerings (miniaturized). They hint at the scope of this book, which, as author Philip Cornwel-Smith explains in his introduction, “celebrates the miscellany of Thai life, whether folk or formal, pop or ethnic, homegrown or imported.” Longtime Bangkok resident Mr. Cornwel-Smith covers as much as 65 topics. “I wanted to get to the root of things rather than just write observations and anecdotes,” explains the British-born author, who from 1994 to 2002 edited the capital’s first listings magazine Bangkok Metro before moving on to edit Time Out’s hugely successful Bangkok city guide.
“Very Thai” rewards the conscientious reader with astonishing details on subjects like pink napkins, soap operas, ghost stories, truck & bus art, recycling tyres into chairs and garbage bins, and more, and more… Each chapter is its own mini-course on Thai history, sociology, anthropology and politics.
The book has plenty of interviews and quotes from a variety of sources plus 500 colorful photos taken by Mr. Cornwel- Smith and John Goss, another longtime resident.
“Very Thai” is a must for visitors, longtime residents and anyone anywhere interested in what makes Thailand “Very Thai”
**Available in the library
