When you think about censorship, many different words come to mind: everything but “beautiful”. Then you look at the work of Tiane Doan na Champassak and suddenly here it is: the beauty of censorship. 

Over the course of his travels for the last ten years the French artist with strong Vietnamese origins has been collecting Thai erotic magazines dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. With representations of nudity banned at the time, the magazines’ censorship was applied with great creativity and care: the body is covered by handmade drawings which are literally precious gems.

The obsession for these little details led the artist to collect them in a project that explores the themes of censorship and eroticism. Censored was first presented as a book, published by RVB Books, and now is on display at Fflag, a multidisciplinary space in the center of Turin. The exhibition is open until 23rd October 2020.

We talked with Tiane to know more about the project.

Let’s start from the beginning. How was the project born?
Everything started back around 2010 when I was working in Thailand as a photographer and I had a really bad eye-infection. It was very painful and I couldn't take pictures for the whole time. I started getting very restless and so I went to the flea markets and that's where I basically got addicted to collecting photographs. I started accumulating whatever I found interesting and slowly I came across the most fantastic magazine that ever existed, which is called Siam's Guy: this is a 60s and 70s sort of adult magazine, a kind of a light Playboy published before Playboy and Penthouse reached Thailand. It’s really interesting because it's a pure Thai production and actually the first thing that I got fascinated with was the fonts and the graphic design—very beautiful! I started accumulating and accumulating and then one day my eyes went to the censorship aspect: they were so creative because instead of doing something simple—like to put a black tape to hide parts of the body—I realized the magazine actually hired someone to do all these wonderful drawings on top of the analog photographs. It means a professional photographer took photos to naked models, then made prints, brought those prints to the magazine and then they would draw over the models to dress them up again. It was completely absurd! Every single drawing is handmade and unique... I was so fascinated. It became a real addiction. Looking for these Siam's Guy magazines I started buying also other magazines that were a little bit similar. 

When did the censorship element become so relevant to you?
Looking at this magazines, I thought that we're talking about censorship even today 50 years after Siam’s Guy, for example on Instagram, but not in the right way. We live at a period where everything has to be politically correct and I think it's time to challenge all these ideas that everything should be one way or we shouldn't show this or that. To me it’s kind of an obsession. I don't have taboo when it comes to sexuality and today there's just so much taboo about everything. You can't show it and do anything and it’s pathetic, we’re going backwards, we're in 2020 and we're acting like in the 1940s or 30s. What happened to the revolution in the 60s and 70s? So I came out with this project with thousands and thousands of censored images. I think it’s interesting because with this project I’m showing nudity but you're not seeing nudity because it's censored and in a way it raises the debate about what should be allowed to show or not. However for me most importantly I just wanted to highlight something about the history of adult magazines which is unknown and which was done so well and so beautifully… it's incredible the amount of work they would do just to cover a body.

How manySiam’s Guydo you have? How long did it take to collect the 4.200 images included in the book?
Well, I basically have the world's largest collection of Siam's Guys. Now it's becoming a trend in Thailand and maybe it’s also because of my project. The prices have gone up and it's becoming a fashionable object,  a real discovery for the young creative generation that didn't even know it existed—which is completely crazy when you think that it's part of their history. 
To answer your second question, it took me over two years to scan the 4.200 images included in the book.

How did you translate the project from the book to the exhibition?
When we made the book we wanted to put all the 4.200 images in, so with my publisher we had to come up with a design which I think makes perfect sense: it is a big book, with 6x7 cm scans–the negative photographic format that I prefer and in a way it is the natural cropping to frame the breasts.
When I came up with the exhibition, first for Paris Photos and now at Fflag in Turin, the idea was to keep exactly the same size of prints and to make a constellation of censored genitals. At the end, we made huge prints with over 400 in one print so that the whole book fit in 13 prints. These huge prints became almost something abstract because when you're looking at these hundreds and hundreds it looks like different patterns, as I said before: it is a constellation, printed on a very nice Japanese paper which kind of resembles the Siam's Guy paper. I have to say it was an interesting challenge to adapt the book to the exhibition.

Did you also run an Instagram account for the project, isn’t it?
Yes, what we did—me and my friend Valeria—was posting every day a picture for the many months that led to the release of the book. I regret having stopped it because it was kind of giving the book another life online and it made sense to do it on Instagram, it wasn’t just self-promotion. It was purity for the fun, we thought: let's put on Instagram what will never be censored because it’s already censored! We wanted to provoke a little bit and see the reaction of the people. To my surprise there was no negativity, I was expecting a bit more of a turmoil but everyone loved it.

Most of your projects focus on sexuality. Where does this interest come from?
For many years I did work on this theme of sexual ambiguity which I'm really fascinated with, particularly in Southeast Asia where the gender male and female is not so clear and my sort of angle to the work was mostly trying to tackle why do they play so much with gender on both sides: man looking like woman, woman looking and transgender mixing in that and I find that in Thailand particularly they're very evolved when it comes to these things, they're very open about their sexuality than we are in the West. I started the first projects around the year 2000. Since then, this interest led me to working on sexuality on a more broader aspect, focusing most of my work on showing sexuality and a little bit provoking. I want to make sense why we can show so much violence and we cannot show sex or naked body, even in the art world.

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Censored 
Tiane Doan na Champassak

24th September - 23rd October

Fflag
Via Reggio 13, Torino