Tuk Tuk dress revs up Miss Universe then runs out of gas

This piece originally appeared in Fah Thai, the inflight magazine of Bangkok Airways. Khun Aniporn did not go on to lift the worldwide title, making the top 10 cut but not the final five for Miss Universe 2015. Her dress, however, stole the show, winning Best National Costume, adding to the legend of Thailand's loved and loathed icon, the tuk tuk. 


"Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory." —Coco Chanel

This sage advice from the greatest fashion icon of them all should be easy to heed as Miss Universe Thailand Aniporn Chalermburanawong gets ready for the biggest beauty pageant of them all - Miss Universe 2015.

Miss Aniporn will take to the stage at the Axis Theatre, Planet Hollywood Resort in Los Angeles dressed as a tuk tuk, complete with handlebars, working headlights, rearview mirrors, chromium accents and racing stripes, flags and streamers, tights in a tread pattern to resemble tires, a klaxon ‘ahooga’ multi tone horn that plays the Thai National Anthem, and a mobile smoke machine that shrouds the entire stage and auditorium in a thick, choking smog.

OK, I made the last two up. But the rest is all absolute fact. The ‘Tuk Tuk Dress’ will be worn by Aniporn in the “national costume” round at the pageant in December in the United States. It was the winning design from 356 entries in a contest held by Miss Universe Thailand.

The Miss Universe Thailand organization announced the winning design on its Facebook page recently, praising the outfit’s metallic look and use of 3D design technology. “The tuk-tuk dress will flash lights like a real tuk-tuk,” said Kaveerat Kunapat, a spokeswoman for Miss Universe Thailand. “It will be one of a kind.” She said a five-member panel of judges that included fine arts professors, fashion designers and Miss Thailand herself wanted to break from the past style of traditional Thai silk dresses and present something ‘eye-catching but still representative of Thailand’. Comments on internet forums have been less kind, with one critic notably describing it as ‘something out of Transformers’.

The man responsible for this two-stroke of genius, which has been lauded and ridiculed in equal part in the fashion crime courts of the internet, is Hirankrit Pattaraboriboonkul 35, a cultural scholar and aspiring designer, who denies he nicked the idea from George Michael’s ‘Get Funky’ video, which featured Thierry Mugler’s famous handlebar bustier dress, later adopted by Beyonce for her 'Sasha Fierce' schtick.

“I created this dress to make our representative more visible on stage and different from our past costumes with its pop-art design,” said Hirankrit. “I thought it was time to make a break from the past with a fresh and direct pop approach.

“I spent three days designing this dress and researching national costumes from previous years,” he said. “This is my first year joining the competition.” Apiporn agreed the costume would help a foreign audience recognize she is from Thailand.

Should she fail to bring the title back to Thailand, it might also facilitate a fast getaway.

Tuk Tuk Bang Bang. Digital painting. © Jason Gagliardi 

My iPad Wants To Kill Your Mama: a wordsmith talks pictures, Insta-art and keeping it surreal

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This is the full interview I did with Dusit Hotels' Eight magazine on my new passion, digital art, for its latest issue, themed 'Renewal'. I have written for Eight before, most recently my essay on the colour red, but this time the tables were turned. After a lifetime spent asking the questions, it was a bit odd being the interviewee, not the interviewer. Then again, a writer who spends all his spare time creating images on his mobile devices is pretty odd too. This is much longer than the piece that was published. Contains all sorts of opinion, rants and detailed stuff about apps, so be warned. 

Where were you born?

A city in Australia called Brisbane, but referred to by its inhabitants as Brisvegas, 

Where were you raised?

I was raised in Brisbane and then Townsville, which is North Queensland, a nondescript army town in my day but a nice town these days by all accounts. Did all my high school in Townsville, then hightailed it for three days on a bus to Melbourne, to take up my place at the Australian Ballet School. After injuries and a lack of talent convinced me I would not be the next Baryshnikov, I returned to Brisbane and slunk into journalism, on a suburban weekly and then the Courier-Mail, one of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited papers. 

What do you do full time? 

I have sold out more thoroughly and convincingly than most, having gone from journalism not straight to PR, where most washed up hacks go for better pay and a bigger expense account, but via the equally soul-staining wastelands of advertising, where the only truism worth knowing is that you can’t polish a turd. 

What pants, shirt, shoes are you wearing right now? 

Slightly frayed boxer shorts. A faded Batman t-shirt. No shoes. I was working at home today you see. But I still got dressed up for this interview.

What kind of phone and model do you have?

I have the latest iPhone, 128G 6S and I have the latest iPad mini 4 and have been looking with beady eyes at the new iPad Pro, a great outsized thing that will work with the iPencil, Apple’s about turn and middle finger to Steve Jobs’ refusal to entertain anything to prod your screen with other than your fingers. I’ve tried various styluses (styli?), both low tech and (allegedly) hi tech ones that pair with some apps and allow pressure sensitive strokes, but I keep going back to my right index finger. Call it Neo-Pointillism. 

What apps do you use to do your insta-art, or what are your favourite apps

Well, increasingly I spend most of my time using Procreate, which is the sine qua non of digital painting applications. It’s just brilliant. Really well thought out, with the brush and opacity sliders and colour picker at your fingertips, a beautiful interface and a dazzling array of brushes, with an engine that makes painting seamless and just like the real thing, except for the lack of mess and the one huge advantage of digital painting: the back button. I also used Art Studio a lot for painting. You see often start out with only the vaguest idea of where I’m going, and I might begin by mashing two pictures together using Union, part of the Pixite family and the best for photo blending, masking and mashing up two images together. 

Mummy and Daddy Are Drinking Beer Again 
 and There Are Monsters in the Bookcase 
(© Jason Gagliardi. Digital painting in Procreate).

Pixite also make some of my other favourites, like Lorystripes, a series of elegant and whimsical stripes and ribbons and things you can insert into images and move around in 3D, Fragment, which is amazing when you have run out of ideas, sometimes I use that on shuffle and see what it throws up, it’s all kinds of geometric shapes and complex prisms and organic forms overlaid onto images with many adjustable parameters Tangent is a cute one the do which lets you do simple graphic design overlays and patterns and such. Matter is for inserting three D objects into images with masking capabilities. And their latest I’ve been messing around with a lot, Assembly, which is a naive art almost childlike thing which lets you build up intricate images from building blocks of shapes. 

 
Steampunk Butterfly Boots  (Painting in Procreate)

Some of the apps which throw up weird and amazing ideas I never would have thought up staring at a blank piece of paper include Circular, which gives images a great swirl, and Glitche, which does unspeakably weird things to pictures. I use various depth of field apps, mostly Tadaa lately, which can keep some of your shot in focus and blur out the rest, like a SLR camera can via its depth of field. I take my shots with a mix of the native camera in the iPhone, ProCam, and VSCOCam. Stackables is a go-to for beautiful overlays and textures and lighting, which has replace Mextures as my go-to app for that sort of thing.

 Filterstorm Neuea and Polar have nifty filters and effects. IColorama is another standout, just amazing manipulation effects. Snapseed is probably the best all round photo editor, very versatile and has a great feature most lack, which is the ability to adjust contrast, saturation and brightness just on a piece of an image that you highlight, not the entire image as well as use a brush to change saturation, exposure, dodge-burn and temperature on just the bits of a shot you want to tone down or emphasise. 

Tuk Tuk Bang Bang   ©Jason Gagliardi (Painting in Procreate)

 I did use a lot, it changes a photo into a bunch of

different painting styles, but these days I’d rather paint myself. The computer painting apps that do it for you always look a bit weird, as the computer doesn’t know what its subject matter is, it’s just following algorithms. Enlight is another good all-rounder. Big Photo can bump up the size and DPI of images, handy if printing out big. 

A Short History of the Human Condition
©Jason Gagliardi (Procreate painting, based on earlier photo mashup)

Reflect is a cool app, allows you to put reflections in various water  bodies and shiny surface. Glaze gives good glaze effects, decimate is a weird one but never quite warmed to it, prefer Glitche. Path On is cool, lets you draw a path onto an image and then put text in the font, size, style, colour etc into the image along the path you drew.That probably covers my key ones. Some pieces I might use 10 of those apps in combination. Others I might just paint onto a white ‘canvas’ on my ipad from a photo I took. Paintings can take a while … a couple of days, or a long all-nighter. I regularly find myself crawling into bed at 5am gasping at the time, as painting becomes like a meditation, you get so focused and wrapped up in what you are doing. 

Which is your favourite app and why? What's your technique? 

Faith Reinterpreted. ©Jason Gagliardi  
 Piece for Mobitog, classic albums recovered

Argh. So hard to pick one. Procreate for it’s amazing seamless painting experience. Union is my workhorse. And Circular, Fragment and Glitche are great for unlocking creativity and summoning weird stuff you might never otherwise have dreamed up. I often noodle around, blending images, distorting them, and then something will appear that gives me an idea. And I might use painting over an image to bring out what I saw a bit more, or I might paint from scratch using a photo or photos of mine for inspiration. I also do straight iPhone photography, justediting with filters and the usual editing parameters. 

I do everything from (fairly) straight portraits to weird and surreal stuff that is not easy to describe and can’t always be explained. I do love surrealism, looking at the world through a skewed lens and holding up a cracked mirror to the absurdities and mysteries of life, although I’m not sure I agree with Andre Breton’s contention that the only surrealist act is to walk into the street with a gun and shoot random people. Dali’s melting clocks are more my speed, or his Lobster Telephone. 

Cross Road Revisited.
 ©Jason Gagliardi for Mobitog challenge

The Pixies are my favourite band, all things considered, Frank Black’s crazed lyricism and loud-soft-loud aesthetic are perfect for his meditations on matters like surrealism, aliens and obscure Californian cults. Debaser, on Doolittle, arguably their best album, is the first song, in which he starts shrieking about slicing up eyeballs, the opening scene of Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Great stuff. Inspired. I had a project to make an Insta-art piece for each of the Pixies songs on their four great timeless albums. So far I have done two (I Bleed and Motorway to Roswell). I am going to do something similar for local electro band Wasabi Bytes - an album cover and an illustration for each song which will become part of the liner notes.

What got you interested in digital art? What themes in today's digital-first society inspire your imagery?

It’s my thesis that the smartphone and tablet revolution has fundamentally changed art, by making all of us artists, or at least much more aesthetically aware. Whether you are slapping a retro filter on your holiday happy snaps or painting elaborate abstracts on your iPad, these little tools in our pockets and bags have led to a big shift in making us all more attuned to design and art and creative acts. There’s also a disposable Warholian aspect to it. Warhol said in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. I think in our future, everyone will be famous for 15 seconds - the span of an Instagram video.

Has art always been free? 

The Ace of Spades: RIP Lemmy
©Jason Gagliardi (Painting in Procreate)

No, it’s often been very expensive, when you consider the profit margin on a rotting shark carcass and a couple of aquariums, which is all Damien Hirst needed to rake in the moolah. Well, that and a nifty title. One of my theories on art is that it’s all in the title and blurb. There’s a brilliant thing I came across called the Arty Bollocks Generator. You put your name in and it generates an instant artistic statement. Here, I just looked it up and got one: 

My work explores the relationship between Pre-Raphaelite tenets and unwanted gifts. With influences as diverse as Rousseau and John Lennon, new variations are crafted from both mundane and transcendent narratives. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the traditional understanding of meaning. What starts out as vision soon becomes corroded into a manifesto of distress, leaving only a sense of decadence and the inevitability of a new synthesis.

Angel in the Room
  ©Jason Gagliardi (Painting in Procreate)

As spatial replicas become frozen through frantic and diverse practice, the viewer is left with an insight into the edges of our era.” 

The same site offers an ‘Artist Certificate’ approved by the Artistic Practice Licensing Authority. The holder must agree to produce occasional works of art, or at least talk about doing so, study treatises on real artists to understand how hopelessly short of their standards you fall, constantly compare your work to others and question whether you are good enough to be a proper artist, and constantly mutter about how someone will expose you soon.

That is hilarious. Describes my feelings about the whole thing quite well. I don’t know if mobile phone art is art per se. Depends on your definition. I’m sure artists who slap real paint on canvas look down their noses a bit at the digital painters. I DJ a bit, and there’s a snobbery and pecking order, like DJs who came of age beat-mixing on Technics decks with vinyl records tend to look askance at those who never knew anything but the MP3 and the autosync button. 

You've managed to find some success from digital art, how do you think that local people can benefit from being able to create works of art on the phone. Do you think that you are influencing local people in BK to do the same? 

Well, how do you define success? I put my stuff on Instagram because I need the little hits of approbation from random strangers, although this business of being spammed to within an inch of your life by cretins flogging fake instagram followers is bizarre and wearing thin. I’ve had two modest exhibitions, the latest being the illustrations I did for a book, Slave to the Bean by Bill Barnett, a Phuket-based hospitality consultant who writes columns on the horrors and inelegances of modern travel and hotels. In a nice post-modern twist, he was the consultant to the owner of the hotel where the exhibition is, Ad Lib in Sukhumvit Soi 1. Another hotel in Pattaya that will launch early next year has plans to put my stuff in its 90 or so guest rooms and lobby. I’m working on some more Thai-flavoured pieces for that. But I’m not fielding calls from MOMA or waving Charles Saatchi away as he tries to shove blank cheques in my face. 

Enter With Drag On Fly ©Jason Gagliardi  (appstract and painting in Procreate)  

I just do it because I feel compelled to and because it clears my mind and makes me feel better, following a year or two of personal upheaval after my wife of 15 years decided to disappear, along with all my savings and worldly possessions. Art as therapy is not to be sneezed at, cheaper than a shrink and at the end of the day you have something to show for your time. It is also a great procrastination technique.

I’m not sure my stuff would influence anyone for the better, although I suppose there might be a cathartic release or at least some schadenfreude for anyone looking at my stuff and thinking, wow, things might be tough but at least I’m not in that guy’s head.’ Would it be beneficial for Bangkokians to get into smartphone art? I suppose so. It would be more beneficial that wearing coloured shirts and killing each other. 

My tastes run to surreal, as I mentioned. One recent piece I titled Vagina Dentata Santa Meets the Grinch, which was in a quite abstract style which begins with a loose idea and only really takes shape as I go along, and ideas begin to crystallise. I love this approach … being open to where a piece takes you. As long as it turns out well. I am also obsessed with photographing Bangkok streetscapes and the spaces between the Skytrain platforms and the streets and buildings, slivers of street life glimpsed through dramatic vanishing points. I covered the entire Asok intersection with Sukumvit in about 60 of my shots of Chinatown for one piece. I recently painted an image of the late Lemmy of Motorhead fame, as some abstract thing I was noodling with suddenly looked like Lemmy seated on a great skull throne. And that led to a more serious portrait attempt too.

Welcome to Nana  ©Jason Gagliardi  (Painting in Procreate)

You mentioned how everyone will have 15 seconds of fame, which echoes Andy Warhol, and his quote "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."  Andy's art was also technical with silk screens and he in a way he modernised art. Do you see his as an inspiration? If so, to what extent? 

Warhol was an inspiring figure and also a rather insipid, weird and tragic one. Anyone who can make soup cans into art is all right by me, but you won’t catch me sitting through his movies that involve watching paint dry or one shot of someone sleeping for 12 hours.

What's the art scene like in Bangkok?

Asok Chinatown. ©Jason Gagliardi. (App-stract). 

I don’t know. I am not part of it. There is a pretty cool burgeoning scene around Charoen Krung Road, with places like Speedy Grandma, Serindia and Duangkrit Bunnag’s Jam Factory across the river. There are art-hopping walking tours done regularly around those galleries, which is cool. I went to S Gallery in Sofitel Sukhumvit the other night for the opening of Genii Loci, a mixture of painting and installation pieces. A very interesting chap with his finger in a few artistic pies runs that, Martin Guirly . 

If you could, how would you renew the art industry in Bangkok?

Free iPads for all! And do away with the greedier commissions some galleries gouge from artists. I’ve also been toying with the idea of starting a regular night say, once a month, for Insta-artists, with DJs, big screens or projections with artists creating stuff in real time and showing their process, a themed challenge for the night, prizes, collaborations. Oh, and let’s turn all the go-go bars into life drawing classes, and all the short time hotels into art installation venues. 

What's your favourite colour?

 I don’t really have one. It depends on my mood. I recently wrote a 1,500 word essay on the colour red, which can be read here:  http://twocountriesonecistern.blogspot.com/2015/02/red-ink-essay-on-colour-red.html. A lot of my stuff does tend to be very colourful. 

Does all your phone editing eat up your battery and what do you do about it?

Yes, it’s ridiculous that we have these ultra slim phones then have to carry around a bulky battery charging pack to keep it from going flat in less than a day. I go through my battery in half a day sometimes if I’m doing a lot of work with my iPhone. IPads last longer. Mine is often good for days. 

Monumental Victories ©Jason Gagliardi (Painting in Procreate)

What are the exact dates and name of venue and addresses of your next show? 

Current one is Slave to the Bean, and it’s at Ad Lib, Sukhumvit Soi 1, until the end of the year.

I also had a one-night exhibition of my stuff at the last Sunn party, at Live RCA, which was a techno party about 1,000 peoople came to. I had a whole wall to show my stuff on, so used that as a chance to test the waters and see how people responded. 

Other than instagram, what social media sites do you go on to look for inspiration? Where do you post?

Canned Reef. ©Jason Gagliardi (Painting and appstract)

I am a member of Mobitog, which is a global group of smartphone photography and art lovers who take part in competitions and challenges, critique each other’s work and discuss all matters mobile phone and tablet art related. It’s very supportive and there are a lot of talented people on there. There are different competitions, like one for black and white or mono shots and edits, a themed abstract contest, and fun stuff like redoing classic album covers. 

Sathorn Rouge.  ©Jason Gagliardi  (appstract) 

I also watch a lot of tutorials on painting, Procreate has a great forum and youtube is full of stuff. I used to paint badly in oils as a youth, ambitious and quite awful copies of Turners and Constables, apart from a brief obsession where for about a year I painted nothing but pictures of KISS, the rock band. I then painted nothing from the ages of about 18 to 48. So there’s a lot to learn but the painting aspect is what I find most rewarding and challenging. I bought a set of acrylics recently and have had a couple of goes at painting with real paint. The best thing about digital painting is the undo button.

Instagram is a double-edged sword. It’s great as a place to showcase your work, but it’s been overrun by idiots trying to sell fake likes. Also, it has fostered the trend of online one-upsmanship, especially with these ‘travel’ blogs where modern-day solipsists traipse the globe taking selfies in soft focus, often with bonus duckface. 

Chunderwood in Annondale. ©Jason Gagliardi.(Painting and appstract)

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The greatest ignominy would be to join the growing ranks of the dead and injured who were too busy gazing at their screen to know what was happening around them, or who came to grief while doing something silly, dangerous or both to get the perfect selfie. I’m guilty of it myself, catch myself walking down flights of stairs while editing or painting. It’s dangerous, especially in Bangkok. I’m trying to give it up.

ends

A portrait of the artist as madman

This piece originally ran in a recent edition of Fah Thai, the Bangkok Airways magazine and one of the spiffy publications of the INK group.


Chalermchai Kositpipat is crazy like a fox. What does the fox say? “I am simply a painter … a small unit in human society, hoping to contribute by a small measure to the planet earth.”

     That is Chalermchai in Thai National Artist humblebrag mode. But the creator of Wat Rong Khun, the White Temple in Thailand’s northernmost province of Chiang Rai, is prone to more bombastic and bizarre soundbites.

ALL WHITE: BUDDHISM GOES POP AT THE WHITE TEMPLE, CHIANG RAI
insta-art © Jason Gagliardi

  “A living treasure”, “world masterpiece” and “a must see for every human being” is how the self-styled “creator of food for the soul of all humanity” describes his work, begun in 1997 and so far costing a reported THB 40 million, all funded by the artist. It is his meisterwerk and magnificent obsession, a visual epic poem and a hubristic shrine to his own talent, draped in ancient allegories and limned with pop culture references.

    Lanna Rococo meets Buddhist Disneyland on Ritalin might best sum up the style, all white plaster and shards of glass and curlicues upon flourishes, like a wedding cake dreamed by Dali and left to melt in the Siamese sun. Visitors run a gamut of gods and monsters, cross a bridge over hell, depicted by 500 outstretched arms, and enter the red and gold ubosoth, an inner sanctum where the struggle between good and evil gets a Warholian makeover:

George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden glitter in a demon’s eyes as Doraemon watches the Twin Towers burn. Spiderman, Superman, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, The Terminator, Kung Fu Panda, Ronald McDonald and Hello Kitty are there, dodging space ships and ancient ogres.

       Chalermchai uses western pop culture to highlight the delusion of desire and to poke the glazed eye of rigid tradition. Thailand’s most successful living artist has seen his paintings fetch over THB 500,000 at auction, and counts among his collectors HM King Bhumibol Adulydej.

      A serial talk show guest, the artist made a recent appearance on left-field lifestyle program The Toilet Show, little knowing he would soon be starring in a toilet show all of his own. It began with his ban on Chinese tourists at the White Temple, announced to journalists along with a rap sheet of Chinese potty atrocities.  The headlines plopped into the public domain and splashed around the world. WeChat whizzed the straight poop to every last Chinese with a smartphone. It was a gut-punch to national pride, a strain on bilateral relations and threatened to put the skids on the torrent of free-spending Chinese tourists – the one thing propping up Thailand’s moribund economy.

Mr Dojo Rising ... Meet MMA's hardest Nutt

My latest piece in the South China Morning Post, on the full mental racket that is Full Metal Dojo, a potent cocktail of brutal cagefights, hot girls, hard rock, full beards and cold beer. Jon Nutt is the Dojo's high priest of hucksterism and hype. I meet him in 'the coolest city in the world' - Bangkok, says Nutt - to get the lowdown on throwdowns, takedowns, staredowns, and shakedowns, not to mention System of a Down.  Link to the SCMP story is here: http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-entertainment/article/1857244/mixed-martial-arts-and-rocknroll-hit-thailand

SWASH & TURNBUCKLES: JON NUTT, MODERN DAY
SAMURAI AND PIRATE OF PIZZAZ MEETS PT BARNUM AT THE NEW
 CIRCUS FOR MODERN GLADIATORS, FULL METAL DOJO

Jon Nutt has a reddish beard and a piratical air, although he professes no family connection to the 17th-century English pirate who cut a swathe through Newfoundland and Labrador before his capture in 1623.

The latter-day Nutt is content with cutting a swathe through the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) with his Full Metal Dojo show, which he somewhat breathlessly extols as the ‘fastest growing show on the planet, in the fastest growing sport on the planet, in the coolest city on the planet’ – his adopted home of Bangkok.

The most recent incarnation of Full Metal Dojo, two weeks ago, was held in the Sukhumvit Soi 12 club Insanity, formerly known as Insomnia, packing in a capacity crowd in excess of 600 people.
The first, although probably not the second, of the two conditions is almost certainly a boon in the world of MMA, a fighting style which sees two men or women of more or less equal weight (although often from wildly different fighting backgrounds) enter an octagonal cage and, with few rules and no holds barred, ‘get it on’ over three to five five-minute rounds.

The fighting discipline reached its global apotheosis with the show Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), in which the leading exponents must bring to the ring a mix of striking and grappling skills to have any chance of success.

Full Metal Dojo follows a similar model, although Nutt has made it his mission to spice up the showbiz pizzazz; his shows are a full metal racket that combines the bareknuckle fighting with hucksterism, live bands, DJs and copious quantities of food and booze. The Insanity show, Full Metal Dojo VI – For Those About to Rock, was the sixth outing in just over a year for the Full Metal Dojo machine – justification, in Nutt’s world, for his seemingly rather ambitious and exaggerated claim.

WAI A SWORD?  JON NUTT PERFORMS AN ARCANE RITUAL
 IN THE DOJO INVOKING THE WARRIOR SPIRIT OF THE SAMURAI,
BEFORE PERFORMING A SEK LOSO SONG, HIP HOP STYLE

Six weeks earlier, Full Metal Dojo V took place on Bangkok’s outskirts, at a venue called Live House, tucked away in a warren of local bars with bands, art-and-craft shops and independent fashion boutiques known as JJ Green, near the popular Chatuchak Weekend Markets.

I walked into Live House, after 60 minutes wandering in fruitless if entertaining circles trying to find the place, to see a fight start and end, with a brutal uppercut and a knee to the head, inside four seconds.

Branding Bungles of the Piggy Banks

This piece first appeared as one of my Palm Oil columns for Coconuts. The column became a casualty of my day job workload but I've been missing the chance to sound off in print and illustration on various topics that annoy or intrigue me lately, and I've been toying with the idea of resurrecting the column, perhaps just as an occasional feature on the blog. This was the final column for Coconuts, and one of my better 'Insta-art' pieces, illustrating the porcine aviation properties of banks and their promises.

LoadsaBank: Bish Bosh, look at all our dosh.
This little piggy goes to market! Insta-Art by Jason Gagliardi 

After the subprime-fueled global economic meltdown, when HSBC high-tailed it out of Thailand in 2012 and left behind only its corporate banking operation, I was amazed the press didn't make more of “The World's Local Bank” becoming rather less local. (It also flogged off its Japanese private banking business, a chunk of its Russian consumer banking business and about half of its US branches, along with great swaths of its Central American operations.)

There was a predictable flurry of perfunctory business stories, but what about the body blow this represented to the brand and its much-vaunted, oh-so-clever tagline? I was tempted to write something snide then, but figured that as I had taken local bank Krungsri's baht to pen about 20 letters to various classes of cardholders about the sale (Krungsri paid about US$115 million to acquire HSBC's Thailand retail banking business, including an array of credit card products) I was a bit close to the proceedings at the time.

Palette pimp: Riding in the hood with red

This is my essay on the colour red, which was a lot of fun to research and write. Thanks to the splendid 'eight' magazine and Ink Publishing for asking me to contribute it. These kind of 'think pieces' off the top of your head are always a bit daunting, but the most rewarding, often, when they are done. 

The colour red is crazy. Insane in the membrane. A few crayons short of a set, and not the sharpest pencil in the box. Call the men in white jackets, tell the asylum to get its padded cell ready. Poor old red – ready or not, here it comes, the loony tune of hues, the crime of passion, the time of your life, a twisted melon: lover, fighter, sinner, saint.

The pimp of the palette, the paint box pantomime clown and the visible spectrum's biggest show-off, red clamours for attention, the hue that cries. Red is the most visible and arresting colour for humans in daylight hours, capable of causing discernable shifts in mood and arousal and stirring appetites, passions and emotions. Sporting teams that sport red tend to win more, as do boxers and martial artists. Women wearing red are judged more beautiful and desirable than those in other colours. Men with redder faces get more mates.

Yet red clings precariously to the edge of the visible spectrum, the first or last shade on the rainbow, bleeding into its mysterious and invisible cousin, infrared. Just a few scant nanometres of wave length are the difference between celebrity and anonymity.

Simply red? It's complicated. Red is the colour of confusion and contradiction, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Red is a conundrum, pigment as palimpsest. Red runs thought the fabric of our lives, splashed across literature, staining the vernacular. In a world where red can mean almost anything, does its sound and fury in fact signify nothing?

I was caught red-handed and left red-faced painting the town red when my red letter day saw me walk the red carpet, only to find a red herring. That was a red rag to a bull, the red mist descended and I saw red. That got me red-carded so I hopped on the redeye, drank a red bull and got into a fight with some rednecks.  

Red is life and death, love and hate, sickness and health, hurting and healing, headache and heartache, oppression and revolt, bureaucracy and anarchy. Red is the capitalist, the communist and the fascist, the sailor's dawn warning and afternoon delight. The Red Army marches in Red Square. The crimson gape of the Grand Canyon. Uluru, the big red rock in Australia's parched red centre. 

Writer Saul Bellow - now there's a fellow who knew a thing or two about red's starring role in the grand opera and farce of life. In The Adventures of Augie March, his protagonist sears this image into the consciousness with colour: "The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheelchair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see the sinews, square of chest and shoulder from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the red ... She and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other, the figures of a war."

Red means danger and evil in the Middle East, macho men in Greece, female reproduction in Japan, Christmas in the West, but in China the East is Red. Red means sackcloth and ashes and mourning in South Africa, and sex for sale in Amsterdam. 

Chinese democracy is cool for cats

This was to be the illustration to go with a column on Hong Kong's protests. However, with many good mates there on the frontlines, I realised there was nothing much I, who hasn't even lived in Hong Kong for 13 years, could add to the collective wisdom on the topic. So in the spirit of a picture being worth a thousand words, here's my skewed view of the protests, through the prism of Deng Xiaoping's famous saying about cats