The Pleasure of Being, Crying, Dying and Eating

This installation by Montien Boonma is made up of hundreds of porcelain bowls carefully stacked to form a tower. Mounted on the wall behind the tower are a row of brass finger-bone chopsticks grasping red napkins printed with human upper jaw and finger bones. Around the tower are four round dining tables, each covered with a red cloth featuring imprints of hand and upper jaw bones. At the first installation of this work at the National Gallery Bangkok in 1993, some of the bowls tumbled and crashed onto the floor. The shards were later kept as integral parts of the installation. This incident illustrates the view that life is fragile and impermanent. The work offers a view of human life influenced by Montien’s Buddhist worldview: a cycle of the pleasure and pain of life from birth, to death and back again in rebirth. In this work Boonma is also expressing his grief over his wife’s early death from breast cancer. Tragically, Montien himself succumbed to lung cancer in 2000 and died at the relatively young age of 47.