Paris project, a series of painting installations produced during an exchange residency at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, this body of paintings revisits scenes from the Hollywood musical 'The King and I'. Working from within Paris-one of the historical centres of orientalist image-making
—Chatu repaints these cinematic images using acrylic, a synthetic medium whose speed and circulation mirror the persistence of stereotype.
—Chatu repaints these cinematic images using acrylic, a synthetic medium whose speed and circulation mirror the persistence of stereotype.
The works slow down moments once embedded in film narrative, isolating gestures and compositions that shaped Western fantasies of Siam. Painted within a 19th-century building constructed during the reign of King Mongkut-the same historical figure fictionalised in the film-the paintings situate these images within the longer structures that produced them.
