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Before the
Yellow Robes Came
Before the yellow robes came
Before the Yellow Robes Came' is a photo series inspired by the monstrous female trope explored through Thai superstitions and an ecofeminist lens.
In Thailand, I grew up being told that my female body can rob a monk of their holiness with a touch. It had always felt strange and mystical to me but also instilled me with a sense of weariness of my own body as a dangerous and sinful thing.
While Buddhism is Thailand's institutionalize religion, what we call 'Ghost Religions/ศาสนาผี' are more pervasive especially in local villages where natural and ancestral spirits are worshipped.
In these practices, women are respected as mediums, our bodies an in between space to commune with spirits.
This photo series explore the relationship a Thai female body has with spirituality, capturing the mysticism and beautiful monstrosity within the female nude while conversing indirectly with Thai Buddhism, its oppressive aspects as well as superstitions within Thailand.
I was interested in the contrast of the femininity within Thai folk religion and in our institutionalize religion. How in the depiction within folk religion, the female body was mystical and scarily powerful - she is monstrous - but it is not seen as a bad and dirtying thing.
The photo series is a way for me to address a larger conversation of the self-colonization that happens within Thailand, where 'central Thai' is heralded as the main practice and the status quo, creating an erasure of local practices and in this particular case also creating an erasure of women personal sanctity and power.
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