Exhibitions
JWD Art Space
May 02 - Jul 14, 2024
All images courtesy of the Artist and JWD Art Space
JWD ART SPACE is pleased to present Country Home Sheriff, a solo exhibition by Oat Montien. The exhibition presents an exploration of the cowboy archetype as an epitome of masculinity, Inherited from his late father’s wardrobe. Montien uses cowboy aesthetics as a device to challenge and queer the prevailing notion of masculinity while coalescing the relationship between him and his cowboy-loving father.
The exhibition features a three-channel video installation titled ‘The Exquisite Fall (2024)’, a newly commissioned piece, along with a series of objects, poems, VHS home videos, and drawings gathered as a biographical site of the artist and his late father.
Oat Montien (b. 1989) is an artist and writer working across various media ranging from drawings, poetry, moving images, and performance. Montien is a leading figure in the queer community in Thailand, where he actively promotes sexual diversity, queer history, and erotica as a protest against the status quo.
Montien was born in Bangkok near Don Mueang Airport, where his mother ran a successful brothel. Growing up around sex workers, he managed the lighting for their erotic shows. This experience is manifested in his drawings, where he works to reposition and address the stigmatization and discrimination within the sex work industry and beyond.
In 2020 Montien founded the Boddhisattava Gallery, an art gallery in Bangkok exclusively dedicated to South East Asian queer artists, and in 2022, he was selected as an artist in residence at Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, where he presented ‘Yellow Fever’ a series of drawings depicting nude Asian male bodies in the kinks and leather community amidst the rise of xenophobia in the post-covid America.
Oat Montien
