Published by 11C, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY

The glare of colored neon from Thailand’s favorite convenience store chain-illuminated strips of orange, white and green anchored by a logo – is an image as ubiquitous in the Thai urbanscape as the daily sunset. In Ruangkritya’s A Convenient Sunset | A Convenient Holdup, the bright, crisp, hyper-vivid images of near-identical 7-Eleven stores taken during the golden hour arrive with an unlikely soulmate: a set of rough, grainy, pixelated CCTV screengrabs documenting robbery attempts of 7-Eleven stores by helmeted desperadoes, knife-wielding petty thieves or armed and hooded muggers.

The juxtaposition of the tranquil, properly composed photographs of the stores at twilight with the messy, newspaper-y images of those stores in their helplessness forms the conceptual backbone of Ruangkritya’s new book titled A Convenient Sunset | A Convenient Holdup. At once precise and dreamy, placid and absurd, inviting and eerie, A Convenient Sunset | A Convenient Holdup teases our expectations, provokes interpretation, and above all hints at the inevitability of chaos even in the environment as controlled and manufactured as those brightly-lit stores frequented by almost every Thai every day.

A Convenient Sunset
148pp
200 x 200 mm
Paperback, perfect bound
English
Printed by Dominie Press
2019

196pp
200 x 200 mm
Paperback, perfect bound
English
Printed by Dominie Press
2019