
Ariana Chaivaranon Thailand, b. 1996
Looks Good Under Your Couch , 2023
Oil on canvas
107 x 190 cm
This life-size oil painting of a Thai sex worker reclining on a couch recalls Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s famed orientalist painting, Odalisque, Slave, and Eunuch (1839-1840). Unlike Ingres’s prone, fair-skinned concubine, this...
This life-size oil painting of a Thai sex worker reclining on a couch recalls Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s famed orientalist painting, Odalisque, Slave, and Eunuch (1839-1840). Unlike Ingres’s prone, fair-skinned concubine, this sex worker confronts our gaze with a knowing confidence, challenging the reductive objectification and criminalization of her profession. The title reverses the familiar phrase that a painting would “look good over your couch,” a playful critique of decorative contemporary art that offers itself to the commodity market. Cockroaches hide in plain sight on the peripheries of the painting, alluding to the dehumanization and marginalization of sex workers forced into the “shadow market” sustaining Thailand’s international tourism industry. One roach has left the shadows, only to die.
1
of
35