Artist: Yuree Kensaku
Technique: Acrylic, glitter, collage on canvas
Year: 2020
Dimensions: 140 x 540cm
Yuree Kensaku is a young female Thai painter whose work ranges from paintings to many other mediums. One of her latest art piece is a multi-media painting called “Bleu Blanc Rouge”, created during her artist residency programme at the Centre Intermondes in La Rochelle, France. This piece was then brought back to Thailand to be featured in 2020’s Bangkok Art Biennale, exhibiting at The PARQ in Bangkok.
True to Yuree’s concept and way of working, the painting features cutesy and colourful cartoon characters whose bright and playful aesthetics act as a cloak for their story and history. In “Bleu Blanc Rouge”, Yuree took inspiration from French artists and thinkers as well as characters from popular culture and cartoons who all have been wronged or persecuted and have had to fight for their freedom.
The first central character is the Goddess of War; Nike who Eugène Delacroix painted in his “Liberty Leading the People” painting as a symbol of the French revolution in 1830, also known as the July Revolution. In Delacroix’s painting, Nike is holding a French flag and Yuree has chosen to illustrate Nike with a head of a coq, with the coq being France’s symbol. It also features a portrait of Delacroix where in the original he is holding a gun, but in this painting he is holding a palette and brush instead.
The raven, considered to be the most intelligent bird in the world, represents writer and thinker Jean-Paul Marat, a key figure in the French revolution, who was assassinated whilst in the bath tub as historically documented in Jacques-Louis David‘s painting “The Death of Marat”. The artist was also a revolutionist since the beginning of the movement in 1789.
On the other side of the painting, there lies a short story about Queen Marie Antoinette who is known for the phrase “Let them eat cake” of which was rumoured to have been uttered by her during the revolution when the poor were heard saying they had no more bread to eat. This was an untruthful event, where she was in fact slandered unfairly, leading to anti-monarchy sentiments and the dissolution of the French monarchy as we know today. Yuree then painted her holding a cake and also wearing the Hope diamond where she was also rumoured to have desperately wanted but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Yuree was influenced by many factors for this character, from films, books to a cross-cultural experience with the world-famous Japanese cartoon called “The Rose of Versailles”, a cartoon with a political message hidden behind bright-eyed characters.
“Les Trois Mousquetaires”, a novel based on historical events by Alexandre Dumas, was translated and published in Thai in 2017 where Yuree was actually the designer artist for the cover. The story of D’Artagnan and the three musketeers is based on a holy civil war that had La Rochelle surrounded as a Protestant town in Catholic country, in order to persecute them. “Bleu Blanc Rouge” thus features this story as an ode to the town that Yuree did her artist residency and created this large scale tableau.
The last character in this painting is from the French cartoon Barbapapa, that was once shown on Thai TV network on channel 5 and channel 11 at the beginning of 1987. This character acts as the link of Yuree the Thai artist with French pop culture, as well as the French flag in the painting that is being flown upside down, resembling to the Thai flag where they both share the same colour way but each colour embodying different meanings.
With each inspirations, Yuree has taken it and made it her own by adjusting and composing the painting with a colourful mask hiding stories about escape, avoidance, violence, fear and confusion as well as disguising personal stories and social commentaries within the work. Everything lies under a blanket of adorable and charming haze, continuing the artist’s narrative as she has done through out her career.