Chris Coles
Chris Coles is an artist and author based in SE Asia and the coast of Maine. He paints in the Expressionist Style and is sometimes referred to as the Artist of the Bangkok Noir. He is a graduate of Brown University and the UK National Film and Television School.
Phone: 6178301871
Address: #420, Young Place, Sukhumvit Soi 23, Klong Toey, Bangkok, 10110, Thailand
Phone: 6178301871
Address: #420, Young Place, Sukhumvit Soi 23, Klong Toey, Bangkok, 10110, Thailand
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Books by Chris Coles
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
While my later paintings from the Bangkok Night feature larger more complicated scenes and a more complex use of color, some of them also becoming much larger acrylic on canvas images, these early watercolors have a lovely freshness, clarity and simplicity.
Alas, the actual everyday Thailand is far from exotic, not “Oriental” or alluring and definitely not exciting. Many of the beaches are hardly “unspoiled” and a large number of the females are working in Japanese-owned factories, huge construction sites, in the agricultural sector or cleaning toilets in hotel rooms....neither sensual nor smiling.
The Thailand reality, like most everyday realities, is basically mundane. Thailand is a mid-level developing country inhabited by about 65 million relatively low-income people and saturated with un-zoned, un-checked urban/suburban structures sprawling in every direction, especially along Thailand’s messy highways.
This book presents the everyday reality version of modern Thailand rather than the escapist tourism version that’s been so successfully promoted by TAT and the hundreds of escapist fantasy photo books that line the shelves of Kinokuniya and other Thai bookstores.
But then, as if that weren’t enough, blend into Bangkok’s actual Noir, the delicious artistic and fictional Noir found in the Bangkok novels of Christopher G. Moore, Stephen Leather, Tim Hallinan and John Burdett, in the Thai gangster films like the original Pang brothers’ BANGKOK DANGEROUS (not the remake with Nicholas Cage which turned into a marshmellow) and Smith Timsawit’s PROVINCE 77, in the edgy hiphop soundtrack of Thaitanium and in my own series of Bangkok Noir paintings and portraits, you get an explosion of Noir, beautiful and frightening and thrilling all at once, making the Noir side of Bangkok a sparkling treasure to be savored and cherished, even if not actually consumed.....
Liam loved art and used his fortune to became one of the largest collectors of modern art in Thailand, often using his Pratamnak gallery to showcase some of his huge and very valuable collection.
My show at Liam’s Gallery featured almost one hundred of my paintings from the Bangkok Night, spread across the gallery’s 4 spacious floors. The Opening Night was also a launch party for the Bangkok author Christopher G. Moore’s two latest books, each one featuring one of my paintings on the cover. A novel titled “The Corruptionist” and a descriptive book of his Calvino Series titled, “The Vincent Calvino Reader’s Guide“.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
Among the many things that I have always found interesting while spending time in the Bangkok Night is the vast variety of people and faces that one encounters just wandering about through any random selection of night venues drawn from the tens of thousands of Bangkok cafes, restaurants, music clubs, executive clubs, bars, KTV’s, Hostess bars, discos, pool halls, After Hours clubs and street markets.
During a night out in Bangkok, one can cross paths and interact with people from many countries, speaking many languages, of every ethnicity, age, skintone, professional level, attitude, religion, philosophy, point of view and destiny.
In addition to the tasty food, multiple overlapping music tracks, vibrant colors and infinite variety of faces....the relaxed and friendly ambiance...the neon intensity....the density of hundreds of thousands of people moving about in close quarters, lit up, excited and eager, the fragrant smoke from ten thousands of street stalls wafting through the warm tropical air.
But in addition to being an actual place with actual people, the Bangkok Night is also, in my view, an Idea, a kind of Metaphor for the World in general and the State of Humanity in our Present Era. The portraits in this book reflect this point of view and are a mixture of actual people I have encountered wandering around in the Bangkok Night as well as actual people I have imagined wandering around in the Bangkok Night and entirely imaginary people who I imagine would be at home in the Bangkok Night.
While my later paintings from the Bangkok Night feature larger more complicated scenes and a more complex use of color, some of them also becoming much larger acrylic on canvas images, these early watercolors have a lovely freshness, clarity and simplicity.
Alas, the actual everyday Thailand is far from exotic, not “Oriental” or alluring and definitely not exciting. Many of the beaches are hardly “unspoiled” and a large number of the females are working in Japanese-owned factories, huge construction sites, in the agricultural sector or cleaning toilets in hotel rooms....neither sensual nor smiling.
The Thailand reality, like most everyday realities, is basically mundane. Thailand is a mid-level developing country inhabited by about 65 million relatively low-income people and saturated with un-zoned, un-checked urban/suburban structures sprawling in every direction, especially along Thailand’s messy highways.
This book presents the everyday reality version of modern Thailand rather than the escapist tourism version that’s been so successfully promoted by TAT and the hundreds of escapist fantasy photo books that line the shelves of Kinokuniya and other Thai bookstores.
But then, as if that weren’t enough, blend into Bangkok’s actual Noir, the delicious artistic and fictional Noir found in the Bangkok novels of Christopher G. Moore, Stephen Leather, Tim Hallinan and John Burdett, in the Thai gangster films like the original Pang brothers’ BANGKOK DANGEROUS (not the remake with Nicholas Cage which turned into a marshmellow) and Smith Timsawit’s PROVINCE 77, in the edgy hiphop soundtrack of Thaitanium and in my own series of Bangkok Noir paintings and portraits, you get an explosion of Noir, beautiful and frightening and thrilling all at once, making the Noir side of Bangkok a sparkling treasure to be savored and cherished, even if not actually consumed.....
Liam loved art and used his fortune to became one of the largest collectors of modern art in Thailand, often using his Pratamnak gallery to showcase some of his huge and very valuable collection.
My show at Liam’s Gallery featured almost one hundred of my paintings from the Bangkok Night, spread across the gallery’s 4 spacious floors. The Opening Night was also a launch party for the Bangkok author Christopher G. Moore’s two latest books, each one featuring one of my paintings on the cover. A novel titled “The Corruptionist” and a descriptive book of his Calvino Series titled, “The Vincent Calvino Reader’s Guide“.
The subjects depicted by the Expressionist artists like Beckmann, Nolde and Kirchner were very often the creatures of the night, the decadent consumers, drinkers and customers of the bars, brothels and dance halls, the prostitutes, dancers and cheap street girls, all tired, weary, troubled, horrible and horrified. And apparently all having fun, or at least pretending to have fun, while the world was falling apart…Expressionism grew later into the abstract expressionism confirming perhaps that the more senseless the world is, the more abstract the art becomes.
The last we saw of Expressionism was, again starting in Germany, the Neo-Expressionist School of the 1980’s. And then – surprisingly, but not at all unlikely, another Expressionist artist surfaced in Bangkok. Chris Coles is an American painter who worked in a movie industry before settling in Bangkok in the late 1990’s – to paint. He is a member of the Bangkok Noir Movement and the only painter among the well known artists who gather around it, like the writers John Burdett and Christopher Moore.
Every artistic movement is created by a group of writers, painters, photographers, filmmakers, and lyricists. While they mostly work in isolation from each other, they draw from the same material, and their creativity combines into a larger force than any one of them. In the case of the Bangkok Noir movement, the idea of a noir community started to take shape as these artistic individuals began to assemble in ever larger numbers about ten years ago. A number of factors, social and political, have come together to form a critical mass, allowing for the noir movement to not only take hold but to gain international attention. Mass media and mass tourism has helped to make the developmental changes into the kind of perfect storm that feeds the instability and insecurity that creates noir.
Then there’s the mythic version which doesn’t really describe an objective reality but is more an entertaining yet hazy cloud of accumulated lore. Magazine and newspaper articles, tv reports, sensational and otherwise, pop music songs like One Night in Bangkok, stories told by friends and acquaintances, various newspaper reports or blog posts.