Jim Algie Read online

  Working with the Thai government’s Fine Arts Department since the 1960s, Sumet has saved many historic buildings, houses and temples from demolition. Without his conservation efforts, it’s debatable whether or not the ancient city of Ayuthaya would ever have been preserved enough to attain World Heritage Site status. Somehow he has still managed to find the time to be a family man, an avid skier and to pursue humanistic work—he despises the word ‘charity’—such as being the chairman of the Duang Pradeep Foundation. Named after the Thai woman widely known as ‘The Slum Angel’, this grassroots organisation runs a wealth of programmes for the slum-dwellers in Bangkok’s shantytown of Khlong Toei—not the kind of place you would expect to find a direct descendant of King Rama III (1788–1851).

  Sumet was born in Bangkok around the outset of World War II when Thailand was under Japanese occupation. He still has vivid memories of the Americans dropping bombs around the district of Dusit, where the family house was located, near the Japanese military’s headquarters. As a young boy he cheered when the Japanese shot an American bomber out of the sky. But one day he came out of the family’s bomb shelter to find that all the houses around theirs had been flattened by an Allied blitzkrieg—there were many casualties. His first flights of artistic fancy—and his life-long obsession with painting tanks and airplanes—took off around then.

  After living and studying in France and England, returning to his abandoned homeland in 1967 was extremely difficult for him. “I couldn’t speak Thai very well and my written Thai is still quite bad. There were American military bases in Thailand for bombing Vietnam, so I was very angry when I first came back. But I could only write articles in English so I suppose our generals—dictators—must’ve thought, ‘Oh, he’s quite harmless’, because nobody read English here. That was the first big boom period in Thailand and the red-light districts in Patpong and Pattaya got started because of all the American GIs. It was much more negative than positive, but we’ve only adopted the negative side of America here. I know the good side of America more than most Thai people because I’ve been there.” Then Sumet smiled wryly and remarked in that dry, British way of his, “America is a wonderful concept.”

  But he is not a myopic patriot. Ask him about the penchant in art and architecture for ‘Thainess’ and watch his eyes narrow, his lips pucker and his voice drip with vinegar.

  “That form of national identity is archaic. I don’t subscribe to that at all. If you try to force it you get pastiche like the buildings along Ratchadamnoen Avenue with their Thai roofs. They’re really atrocious. You can’t set down a formula for contemporary Thai architecture or art. It’s a process, a progression, you can’t stop it. But what is important is that the younger generation ought to know their own history. History is not learning by heart what happened. Those are chronicles. History is an accumulation of experiences from our forefathers, and you have to build on that, and I think that’s very important in art, architecture, and of course literature.”

  At this point in his career he feels he’s done enough architecture. Most of his waking hours are devoted to painting.

  “I’ve been in semi-retirement from architecture for many years now, because I wanted to get away from the business side of architecture and running the office, which is a hassle. Some new partners are running the show so I could be free of it. But the more I try to retire the more work I seem to be doing. The supreme aim in my life is to do nothing, which is the most difficult thing. When I say nothing, I mean going back to art... pure art.”

  Has working in Paris, where he rents a painting studio, been a big influence on his new artworks? “Paris is free. There are no constraints. It also means going back to my childhood because I went to school in Paris before I went to England. The older I get the more infantile I become and I like to go back to the old places, the school where I used to study, and there’s the desk with my initials carved into it.” These are sentimental journeys for him, not attempts to touch up old memories for the sake of future paintings. But certainly you can see more than a few dabs of child-like whimsy in a lot of Sumet’s semi-abstract, semi-figurative, and very expressionistic, canvases—a whimsy reminiscent of Joan Miro at times in the use of primary colours and the sense of playfulness that is also distinctly Thai.

  These touchstones of his work were made concrete in the architect’s design for the so-called ‘Robot Building’ on Sathorn Road in Bangkok. The original inspiration for the edifice, replete with eyes, antennae and the biggest nuts in the world, came from his son’s toy robot; but the philosophical cornerstone of this twenty-floor android—a desire to humanise instead of demonise technology—is hardly child’s play.

  Would it be fair to say that there’s an element of satire in this building and his paintings of tanks, typewriters and racing cars? The sense that technology can be extremely infantile?

  “Most definitely.”

  After a few more glasses of malt, Sumet (a wee bit tipsily) wove his way into the house he designed to get a photo of a robotic hand picking up an egg. Ever the entertainer, whose boyish enthusiasm forbids him from boring his company, the architect was eager to get my opinion on this technological breakthrough.

  “Wow! This is great, Sumet. Modern technology has now accomplished what cavemen could do 50,000 years ago.” He chuckled and poured us another round.

  His detractors, who have set out to demolish his achievements, claim that his work is a triumph of ‘form over function’, that his buildings are proof ‘there should be mandatory drug testing for architects’, and in a fraudulent feature from the satirical online newspaper Not The Nation in 2010, that he had designed a new structure based on his own penis. That story came after a controversial event at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Thailand. Sumet sat on a panel discussing whether the Western media coverage of the 2010 protests on the streets of Bangkok had been biased or not. Noticeably drunk, the architect lambasted foreign correspondents for not being ‘intellectual enough’ to understand the complexities of Thai politics, claiming they got too much of their information from go-go bars and sleazy strips like Soi Cowboy. It was odd to hear him repeating accusations he had once flung at the American GIs through newspaper columns he wrote back in the 1960s. One foreign journalist at the event said, “Maybe Sumet’s acerbic wit masks his deep-rooted snobbery and nationalism.”

  But that’s not really true either. Sumet has often spoken out against the local trends in art and architecture for ‘Thainess’. On the other hand, Sumet took a former Miss Thailand, Areeya ‘Pop’ Jumsai, to court to prevent her from using his family’s surname, which is exclusively reserved for descendants of King Rama III like him. She caved in and dropped the surname. Yet, his radical stance against apartheid in the 1960s and days as a Beatnik are not consistent with the views of the old guard.

  In interviews, Sumet sometimes refers to himself as ‘schizophrenic’, meaning he’s divided between his Western education and artistic influences and his allegiances to his homeland. This happens to many Asians who study and work abroad for years, only to return home and find they’re not purely Asian anymore, nor are they really Western. It’s a widening rift and a growing identity crisis. In his case, that schism has produced some remarkable artworks and buildings. For all his triumphs, though, Sumet’s dalliances with dipsomania and occasional outbursts suggest that this is a deeply divided Renaissance man.

  To some he may come off as arrogant, but I’ve found him only too willing to satirise his own work. In a career teeming with awards and accolades, his proudest accomplishment is “my proposed design for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bangkok, which was rejected. I’m very proud of that,” he said with a smile. “I wanted to make a colourful public sculpture because the area around the Mah Boonkrong mall is full of all this concrete spaghetti.”

  As he gets older and still keeps creating—Sumet designed the set for the horror-opera Mae Nak, as well as the marvelously surreal ‘Bird Building’ off Sukhumvit Road in 2009, and keeps do
ing solo shows of his paintings like Weapons of Mass Destruction—does he worry about posterity and what future generations will think of his work?

  A scowl flitted across his face. With a drop of tartness in his voice, he said, “I really don’t think that’s important. At this stage in life it’s important to go on creating, and enjoy the process of creation, and family, and good friends. If you don’t enjoy what you do then you’re not contributing anything to the world. But I still take pleasure in creating and that’s my contribution.”

  The Angel And She-Devil of Bang Kwang Central Prison

  An 82-year-old Australian woman was visiting a prisoner at Bang Kwang Central Prison on the outskirts of Bangkok, when he introduced her to Susan Aldous. She told Susan that she’d been writing to different convicts for many years, but had never thought of visiting one until she saw a show on TV about an Australian lady. “She’d been a horrible person… a drug addict and a Playboy bunny, and there she was hugging all these prisoners and AIDS patients. And I thought that if she could do it, so could I.”

  Dubbed the ‘Angel of Bang Kwang’, Susan Aldous is best known for her altruistic endeavours in the country’s biggest maximum-security jail.

  “I told her that was me,” said Susan, her voice chiming with laughter. “And she said, ‘That programme changed my life. You have no idea how much of an inspiration you’ve been to me.’”

  For the last few decades, the nomadic philanthropist has been an inspiration to many: Cambodian refugees and terminally ill prostitutes; Thai cops, drug addicts and mental patients; disabled children in Laos; foreign prisoners in Bangkok; and senior citizens moldering in old folks’ homes in Malaysia. A mighty impressive CV of achievements for a high-school dropout and teenaged troublemaker who rebelled against her suburban upbringing in Melbourne because, “I wanted my life to have meaning. I didn’t want it be just three meals a day, getting married, having kids and dying,” she said at her apartment in Bangkok.

  Driven to the brink of suicide and drug addiction when only 16, Susan found a spiritual calling in social work. “Some people challenged me and that’s what I needed. They said if you’re going to throw your life away you might as well give it away.”

  She conceded that her grandmother, who received a medal from Queen Victoria for charity work, was an early influence. “She told me about Joan of Arc and angels, and she was a very down-to-earth Christian who loved to have a drink and watch the horse races.” In turn, Susan told her classmates at school about Joan of Arc, who teased and bullied her. “That’s when I realised you either believe or you don’t. And if you do you’re going to get burned at the stake. I always thought that was going to be my destiny.” She laughed. “A martyrdom complex.” Susan, however, dropped out of Sunday School when she was only seven because they couldn’t give her any answers. “So if we came from monkeys then Adam and Eve couldn’t be real.”

  Because of her blond hair, blue eyes, svelte physique and extroverted nature, Susan was recruited to work at a high-class Playboy bunny club in Melbourne after the manager saw her handing out religious pamphlets on a street corner. “I just thought, ‘Where do people go when they’re lonely and have problems?’ They don’t go to church. They go to a bar. So I thought this was the perfect place to reach people.” Working the quiet nights, Susan proved herself to be honest and reliable enough for the club to offer her a position as the manageress. “But Asia was already calling me, and when they said they didn’t want me to talk about God with the customers anymore, I thought, you’ve just given me my answer—I’m off to Asia.”

  This was not atypical of an Australian generation who came ‘of rage’ in the 1970s—tripping on rebellion, drugs, booze, anti-conservative politics and music, before fleeing to Asia to escape the life sentence of what the Aussie journalist Jim Pollard called ‘death by suburbia’. Like Susan, Jim and many others travelled through, or relocated to, different parts of Asia. For them, the grit and openness of Thailand is infinitely preferable to the hermetically sealed sterility of the Sydney and Melbourne suburbs. Many of these Aussie expats have become activists in altruism. “It gives their lives meaning and they get a buzz out of it,” said Jim, a former crime reporter and ‘Consumer Watchdog’ columnist in Australia, who has been bastioned in Bangkok for the past decade.

  In a book he is hoping to complete in 2010, Jim is chronicling the lives of a multi-nationality contingent of humanitarians working with refugees along the Thai-Burmese frontier. He wants to turn the project into a three-book series, profiling the expats doing social work in Bangkok, Laos and Cambodia. Susan will be mentioned in one of the books but Jim also wants to underwrite the efforts of more publicity-shy stalwarts like Denise Coghlan, whom he said is “possibly the only female head of a Jesuit relief centre anywhere in the world.” Asked if she was Australian, Jim wisecracked, “Whack a jar of Vegemite in front of her and if she picks it up, she’s Australian.” He laughed. “Yeah, she’s Aussie. She started working at the refugee camp called Site #2 back in the mid-1980sand returned to Cambodia with many of the refugees.”

  Susan also worked at Site #2. With a population of 150,000, the camp was a virtual no man’s land for Khmers who could not return home for fear of political persecution and could not be sent to a third country. Stripped of their political might but not their firepower, the Khmer Rouge launched mortar shells and sneak attacks on a regular basis. “You’d be standing there talking to a family one week, and come back the next week to see that their hut had been shelled and the whole family had been killed,” said Susan.

  Another time, the NGO she worked for had 2,000 pairs of shoes to give out. Once they announced the news on the loudspeaker, refugees gathered for kilometres around while guards with M-16s stood by to keep the peace.

  “It was the most horrendous thing I’ve ever been through... it was bedlam, it was madness. How do you say no to someone? How do you choose? So we had to throw them into the crowd. Finally, after I don’t know how many hours, I stood there with one shoe in my hand, and I was an emotional wreck.” Then she looked down to see a woman who’d lost her leg to a landmine and didn’t have a shoe on her other foot. As it turned out, the shoe in Susan’s hand was a perfect fit. “I just burst out crying. It was too much.”

  By the early 1990s, Susan had founded her own one-woman NGO, One Life at a Time (entirely funded by private donations), and moved to Bangkok. Her work in Thai jails and police stations aroused the suspicions of the authorities, so the secret police kept her under surveillance 24/7 for three months. When an undercover agent finally showed up at her front door, he admitted that, not only had they been unable to dig up any dirt on her, she moved around the capital at such a frenetic pace that they couldn’t even keep up with her. Succumbing to her bubbly charm, the secret police hired the chatterbox to teach them English.

  Some ‘spooks’ from another cloak-and-dagger organisation followed Susan and her daughter into an ice-skating rink in a Bangkok shopping mall. They had walkie-talkies hidden in their shirts. “When cops go undercover they either look like drug addicts or journalists…” Susan laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. We writers are used to the abuse.”

  Susan smiled at me and continued. “But when I have a fear I have to confront it. So they were all sitting there with no skates on in a skating rink, and I went over and said in Thai, ‘Where are you from?’ And then I listed all these different branches of the Thai police and the army. ‘Oh, and they make you work on Sundays, you poor things.’ They couldn’t speak. They were just flabbergasted. I wasn’t sure what I’d done, or if they’d kill me. But one of them spoke into his walkie-talkie and they all just dispersed.”

  True to the spirit of her late grandmother, Susan’s unorthodox views on Christianity have fuelled the ire of fundamentalists who work for other NGOs. “God had a penis because he made us in his exact image and told us to be fruitful and multiply. One theologian told me that there are no sexual desires in heaven. Excuse me, but
I don’t want to go to heaven if there’s no sexual desires. If Jesus came back today he’d wear Levi 501s, have long hair and be very sexy. Jesus never went to church. He was a radical, he was a revolutionary, and they killed him for it.”

  A Christian who does not believe in organised religions, her work is inspired as much by righteous indignation as what she calls ‘touching lives’, “You just have to go by faith all the time because feelings are faith, your moods go up and down, especially if you’re a woman and you’re pre-menstrual. Then you can’t do anything except maybe kill someone. I know I could chew someone’s head off. But sometimes you need to be angry. Anger is not a bad thing.”

  The supernatural ‘visions’ she experienced as a child have continued to provide her with secular wisdom. When a young woman was brutally slain in Bangkok, Susan remembered feeling upset and sitting down on her bed, when the woman’s face appeared before her. “The dead girl told me, ‘Dying is not difficult. Once you cross the threshold, there’s no more pain or fear’. She told me lots of things about herself that only came out in the press later, so I knew they were real. Then she asked me to go and forgive the man who had killed her.”

  “When I went to see him in prison after he’d received a life sentence, I could feel the compassion and forgiveness she had. So I told him she’d sent me and he was blown away. We ended up praying together and he asked her and God to forgive him. The inmate really did well in prison after that, so they used this as an example in the Corrections Department and asked me to talk to the guards about compassion and how to look beyond the crime and examine the motives of the criminals. Like this murderer, who came from a family of ten children; his parents never had time for him, he was uneducated, etc. These things don’t justify the killing, but they do help you to understand it better.”