Chris Coles

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bangkok crime fiction writer, Christopher G. Moore, and Chris Coles, the painter, are two of the leading figures in the Thailand based artistic movement known as Bangkok Noir.

Christopher G. Moore's eight Calvino books about an American Private Detective working the atmospheric Bangkok Expat scene are filled with wonderfully cynical and nihilistic insights into Thailand's Expat community as well as the unique and complex Thai Way of looking at life and the world.

Chris Coles series of expressionist style paintings titled, PAINTINGS FROM THE BANGKOK NIGHT, use as their setting the lurid and colorful world of Bangkok, Thailand's notorious nightlife. Heavily distorted lines and strong, clashing colors dominate in these paintings which portray a chaotic, edgy world of colliding intention and misplaced desire, lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation. They echo the German Expressionist paintings from Berlin in the early 1900's as well as the Paris nightlife paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the early Picasso.

There are many other examples of the Bangkok Noir Genre which modern Bangkok seems to inspire, among them, PROVINCE 77, the recent film by the Thai director, Smith Timsawit, starring Pete Tongchua. Set in Bangkok and Los Angeles, the film portrays violent Thai gangsters fighting ruthlessly for territory and status in a nihilistic and cynical world.