Art Attack On Beach Road

Pattaya Focus

Art Attack on Beach Road

It is easy to stroll down Pattaya Beach Road (PBR), glowering at the jet ski scammers, avoiding the cross-eyed gaze of the blowzy harlots, being accosted by dodgy tattooed drug dealers and sneering at some of the flotsam of Pattaya's lowest end tourists of all nationalities, as they shamefully try to haggle down the price of an already cheap bunk-up with some nasty old crone.

Most people think PBR is a horrible place, ugly, dirty and dangerous.

Well, it is.

But it is also something else. It is a walkway full of public art, much of it, surprisingly in this over-scammed town, of decent quality, and most of it certainly deserves to be looked at more by passing tourists, although it is often easy to overlook it with everything else on a human level going on there.

In an attempt to put this right, I thought we should focus on some of the public art on display on the beachside of PBR, flippantly captioned, of course.

PBR contains many traditional Thai sculptures and statues, as well as more modern art, using a whole range of materials, including plastic, metal, ceramics, coral, stone, plaster of paris, and shitty nasty concrete, in the form of that appalling disgrace of a fountain at the PBR/Central Road junction, which we shall certainly be focusing on in a future edition.

The next couple of columns will feature a selection of photos of what I consider to be the best pieces of PBR Art. Not just what I think is good, because each to his own on that, but objects that made me stop and either admire or hate them, wonder who commissioned them, and why, or wonder who made them, how and where.

There is good art on PBR (most of it, relatively speaking) and bad (eg, that concrete fountain). A lot of things caught my attention once I started looking for closely. You will see it on lamp posts, on the grass verges, in fountains, and elsewhere on a walk down the beach side of PBR.

Someone in City Hall deserves applause for conceiving and commissioning a lot of this art. Much of it is easily overlooked but it's well worth looking out for. Well, the bits that haven't been stolen or broken at any rate.

For this edition I have just focused on the traditional Thai images. [more…]

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-- Pattaya One 2011-01-10