스킵네비게이션

Scream from The Sea, 2019, Bamboo, clay, straw, 300ⅹ900ⅹ300cm     

Bounpaul PHOTHYZAN

Scream from The Sea

❑ artist bio

Bounpaul Phothyzan was born in 1979 in Kingdom of Champasak, southernmost place of Laos, lives and works in Vientiane, Laos. He has MA in Visual art from Mahasarakham University, Thai and studied Fine Art at National Institute of Fine Arts in Vientiane. Though he started his artistic career as Realist painter, he has communicated with his audience through experimentation with various mediums such photograph, video, installation as since the 2010s. He is a very active practitioner in various Asian countries including: Thai, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Australia, etc.

❑ introduction

Bounpaul gets his inspiration from whole range of environment. He focuses on ‘action’ of interpreting issues pertinent to environment from the perspective of ecology, sociology and history rather than forms and craftsmanship while making works of art. Till today, his art has been the constant reflections on the impact made by the human advancements on ecosystem. In the example at the top, We Live (2013) was shown at The 4^th Singapore Biennale (2013) and Lie of The Land (2017) at non-profit contemporary art initiative, Elevating Laos.

The new work to be presented for this year’s Sea Art Festival, Scream from The Sea (2019) is also an extension of such perspective. Scream From The Sea is an unrealistically blown up version of human ear. On its skeleton made out of thin bamboo blades, he added dough made of reeds and clay to build long linear ear structure with earlobe, outer, middle and inner ear parts. This work will be placed on the shoreline between Dadaepo Beach and the sea without any supportive or protective devices to fix the sculpture. The waves almost touche the earlobe part of the sculpture at high tide, and they leave bare revealing the bottom part of the work in low tide. The clay that once looked firm gets carved, eroded and finally expose its skeletons as the time goes by in days of the exhibition. Its 3 meter high earlobe functions to collect the complex sounds made of waves that are endlessly and rhythmically rushing in, sporadic winds, birds chirping, various sound that beach visitors make, noises, etc. and deliver them resoundingly to the audience standing the other side of the sculpture.

Bounpaul presuming diverse sounds perpetually generated and scattered on the beach of Dadaepo as scream that sea make as it was destroyed by humans, then he returns the sea’s muted scream back to the audience through Scream From The Sea. He hopes us to aware that the sea is dying by plastic wastes acidification by CO₂, oil spill incident, nuclear waste, etc. that are constantly trashed even at this moment when we don’t notice and he hopes us to respond to such sound.