Page 37 of ‘I Saw A Blue Wing’ appears like a perfect illustration of the famous explanation of maya: in thick jungle at night, an empty road leads to a glowing blank movie screen, proclaiming that the dreams that play across the screen are projections of insubstantial shadows and only the screen itself is really there. At the same time the screen itself is a box in the vast mystery of the forest.

Manit Sriwanichpoom: “The snapshots in this book are my brief notes from many trips I made to join various exhibitions, art festivals and international art fairs in the years before Covid. It’s a record of things that had struck me as a visiting observer from another culture.”

The cumulative effect of these snapshots is hypnotic and transcendental. Freedom and Beauty are calling out to us. We fantasise; we put on costumes and fancy dress, to express our need to lash out of the box and be free to be our true connected self. We would be winged but we are lame; we limp along bent over, careful not to hit the ceiling and the sides of our little box, eyes rivetted to the phone, life is boundless but we confine ourselves; like the meditator on a sacred rock on Dragon’s Back in Hong Kong, over whose lotus yogic posture looms a large boom microphone.

21 x 16.5 x 1.5 cm, 214 pages, text in Thai and English, Softcover, 2023.