ABSTRACT
This essay examines controversies that attended artist Ohm Phanphiroj’s project titled Underage, a photographic series and film that depicts teenage male prostitutes in Bangkok at night. First exhibited in a Bangkok gallery in 2010, the exhibition was previously rejected by two other galleries and provoked criticism from the local art community as well as the interest of a child protection agency. The film was removed from a large LGBT-themed exhibit in the Thai capital in 2019 further to public complaints. However, a coffee-table book of the photographs was published in Europe, between these events, and has not received criticism. Arguing that the local critiques and other discursive contexts of Underage rely on theories usually applied to documentary or reportage photography and produce irreconcilable polarities (e.g. exploitation or insight), the essay instead situates the series in relation to a literary tradition that depicts the Bangkok night as a place or time of permissiveness. Exploring how this tradition can be analogized to the actual social conditions that “allow” underage male prostitution in the Thai capital, the essay draws on a number of theories about the contradictory realities of Bangkok as a city and the unstable regulatory impulses of the Thai state. One example is anthropologist Edoardo Siani’s theorization of night-time Bangkok as a relatively sanctioned zone of morally ambivalent freedom, due to local belief-systems, and how this temporality is precariously governed. Ultimately arguing for a structural understanding of Underage in its staging of rhetorical and social contradictions and ambivalences about “queer” sexuality, the essay aims to arrive at a complex understanding of Underage that maps the limits of local criticism while providing a context that can shape the very provocation of Phanphiroj’s particular approach to photographing a disenfranchised Other.
