Montien Boonma, gone but never forgotten
Exhibition honouring late artist is part elegy, part celebration
published : 23 Dec 2020 at 04:00
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Montien Boonma's death in 2000, at the age of 47, was perhaps the saddest episode ever felt by the Thai contemporary art circle.
When cancer took his life, his friends mourned the departure of one of the country's most respected pioneers in conceptual art while his students lost their beloved master. Montien, whose work dealt with transitional disquiet, rapid industrialisation, and, late in his life, with the conundrum of Buddhist philosophy, was instrumental in ushering Thai art through the threshold of modernity in the late 1980s and the following decade.