The Far Side of CMU Campus

This picture was taken on the Chiang Mai University Campus.

We Eat A Lot

On Monday night I went to a giant buffet restaurant with my Thai Language Class. I've been taking an intensive 3 hour a day class. Many of the people in my class took the Teacher of English as a Foreign Language class at CMU and are now teaching English or looking for a job. A couple people are working for NGO's, and a couple of people who don't live here are doing it for fun, which is pretty admirable.



The restaurant featured the most food I've ever seen. Each kind of food had its own area. There was an enormous amount of seafood, bbq meat on sticks, pork bbq rolls, a wide variety of seeds and nuts, soups, every fruit, every vegetable, many donuts, many cakes, ice cream with many toppings, thai jellies, etc.


We sat at table # 300


Of all the surprising foods, the most surprising to me was this happy little guy. He looks like he might be some kind of candy, but actually he's calamari.

More photos.

Look At This - Recent Paintings by Chatchawan Nilsakul

A new gallery is opening here in Chiang Mai, and the first show opens tomorrow evening. It is an exhibition of recent paintings by Chatchawan Nilsakul, who teaches with me at the Faculty of Fine Arts here at CMU.




Pictures from the opening.

Mini Asiatopia in Chiang Mai

This Sunday in Chiang Mai was Mini Asiatopia, a mini version of the full-size Asiatopia that has been happening in Bangkok over the past few weeks.
It was organized by CMU Painting Department Chair Padungsak Kochsomrong and Monthatip Suksopha.
With performances by:

Kaori Haba (Japan)
Fabien Montmartin (France)
Gertrude Moser-Wagner(Austria)
Barbara Sturm (Swiss)
Valentin Torrens(Spain)
Dan Mckereghan(USA)
The Wandering Moon performing group and endless journey (Thailand)
And 3 artists from The 4th Mekong Performing Arts Laboratory (Mekong Countries)


Above:
Dan Mckereghan(USA)


Above:
Fabien Montmartin (France)


Performance by artists from The 4th Mekong Performing Arts Laboratory

More Mini Asiatopia Photos here

Loi Krathong

Last night I went to the river for the loi krathong festival. Krathong are these banana leaf rafts with incense and candles. Mine was very generously made by one of the teacher's wives.

Here is my krathong floating away on the river...

People also light fires in the bottoms of these hot air lanterns - hundreds of them float in the sky. This morning the old ones were laying around my neighborhood like sad ghosts.

On Sunday we will have a small portion of Asiatopia, a performance arts festival that is mainly in Bangkok. Some of the artists are already here so we all went together.

Performance artists light the lantern.



Japanese artist Kaori Haba releases her krathong.

Loi Krathong

A short video from Loi Krathong

Realistic Paint

One of the classes I'm teaching is Realistic Paint, for second year students. The first week we had still life, and last week portrait.



Things are pretty much the same as they are in the U.S. (for this class) as you can see from this photo.



I made a demo painting...

Wat Umong

This sign is posted outside of Wat Umong.




This week two German artist who have been teaching for a semester in Bangkok came up to Chiang Mai for a few days. The graduate students from the new media department took us to feed some scary fish. There's a video of them on my flickr site (the fish, not the artists).



Then we visited Wat Umong, a 14th century temple a couple miles from the university. There is some wall painting in the tunnels at the temple - rare for Thailand - the moisture destroys paintings very quickly here. Even these examples were barely visible.





German artists feed Thai art.