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Skowmon Hastanan was born in Thailand; raised in Bangkok and moved to New York City in 1973. She is a mixed media artist who received her BFA from NYC's School of Visual Arts in 1985. Her artwork reflects her interest in her native Thailand, in the proliference of western pop culture and a rising sex trade since the Vietnam war. Her love of all things beautiful: flowers, gemstones,women, classic Thai artwork, is interspersed with the horrors and inequities that exist around the world. Her work is a call to attention, to raise the collective consciousness. |
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Skowmon's art not only has a message that's important on a political and humanitarian level, but is absolutely gorgeous and perfect fodder for el Jefe's animations and graphic manipulations. The Jefemon Collaboratory, included herein, breathes strange new life, geometric patterns, and assorted mandalas into the original artwork. It's intensity personified. See Skowmon's full bio here |
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Photomontage Series "I explore the American male culture and its influence on the Thai's via recollections of my early childhood during the Vietnam War. Employing American military weapons and artillery, the seductive images of Western woman, to represent the invading modern culture that was visiting upon a Thai landscape. Thailand's current sex trade (export & import) and (domestic red light district) tourism are the direct outcome of this military experience. Negative public image and a subconscious, ambiguous self-image of Thai women had developed since. This piece is also intended to demonstrate my unresolved view and feeling towards pornography. As I child I witnessed these Western sexual images and saw them as spectacle wonder. I saw the naked display of women from another country, the "foreign bodies", the-to-be-ideal beauty and ideal sex object, to be imitated, envied and disgusted. |
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A Prince's Palace
Traditional Thai painting placed together with a Playboy centerfold as a new subject of desire along with a family portrait, and two F-16 fighters disguising as classical weapons carrying by the Ramayana tale invading foreign force surrounding outside the palace wall. (i.e. cross cultural voyeurism) Image Sources:
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Victory
of the Goddess
Image
sources: About
the Goddess: Shia Moen, Taiwan's highest paid model (c.1971).
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Roar!!! Miss Universe
Image Sources:
Apasra Hongsakula, the1965 Thai Miss Universe, |
Magnificent
Inheritance are
about simple things in life such as beauty, ugliness, illness; the internal
space-
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Les
femmes en route
Image
sources: ink jet figures
taken from Thai postage stamps, |
Ruby Journey 2001-2002 This Window on Jamaica Project at Jamaica Center
for Arts & Learning Inc.
Image
sources: Ink jet cut-outs print on clear self-adhesive |
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Fever Series 1999-2002
"Third
world and feminist perspectives are present in Skowmon Includes:
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