The Power of Life

By Kamol Tamseewan

10 November – 31 December 2012 (Exhibition Opening: 9 November 2012)

Kamol's latest series offers an expressive study of emotions amassed as a result of everyday human struggle. "The Power of Life" presents a bold and resolute declaration of the emotional life of local, ordinary folk, including farmers, labourers and villagers, who are confronted by concrete as well as intangible conditions and socioeconomic limitations exerted over their day-to-day strivings. The works bring us along the artist's journey and quest to discover how one might live free from such shackles, and unearth the true fountainhead of authentic inner freedom.

Hailing from the rural Mae Wang District, Kamol, as in his earlier works, looks to subjects close to his heart for this body of work. Its subjects are people he has grown up with and among, whose lives, feelings and experiences constitute the material he has undertaken to know and relay through his work. "My inspiration comes from living experience. I paint beings I have seen," says the artist. Like Affandi, the late Indonesian expressionist master he admires, Kamol's chosen struggle lies in becoming a human artist, to feel "enough as a human". Thus, his bold thesis: "Life's learning lies in expressing the life [lives] of other lives."

Hailing from the rural Mae Wang District, Kamol, as in his earlier works, looks to subjects close to his heart for this body of work. Its subjects are people he has grown up with and among, whose lives, feelings and experiences constitute the material he has undertaken to know and relay through his work. "My inspiration comes from living experience. I paint beings I have seen," says the artist. Like Affandi, the late Indonesian expressionist master he admires, Kamol's chosen struggle lies in becoming a human artist, to feel "enough as a human". Thus, his bold thesis: "Life's learning lies in expressing the life [lives] of other lives."