Research & Article

This article explores the often-overlooked images of ordinariness one finds in Thai temple mural painting. Through redirecting the scholarly gaze away from more traditional concerns with narrative, style and function, I show how seemingly banal scenes of the everyday are sites through which to locate subjective understandings of cultural and political identities. I do this by critically reflecting on my own work as a Thai mural painter in Singapore and showing how my situation within a diasporic Thai ritual universe transforms visual representations of Buddhist texts into fascinating engagements with the extraordinary, thereby inserting agency into a genre where artistic presence and viewership is largely silent.