Thawan Duchanee is one of Thailand’s foremost artists and whose vivid and visceral interpretations of Buddhist teachings and visual motifs have won him international acclaim. Despite being an avowed Buddhist, Thawan has invoked the importance Hinduism has within Thai folk culture with his depiction of Hanuman, a central figure of the Ramayanan or Ramakien (in Thai). Popularly known as the Monkey God, Hanuman is in Hindu accounts, the incarnation or avatar of Shiva and represents divine strength, power and agility. Here in this painting, Thawan captures a chapter in the chronicles of Hanuman in which the monkey deity is ravenous with hunger and mistakes the sun for a ripened mango. As he chases the sun, the god Indra intervenes by striking Hanuman in the jaw, triggering a saga of retaliation from Hanuman’s father.Hanuman was part of a renowned series of 14 paintings shown at his solo exhibition at the British Council in Bangkok in 1973. This work comes from a period just after Thawan’s paintings were slashed by students in 1971 for supposedly desecrating Buddhism as he had juxtaposed erotic, monstrous forms with the Buddha, and he was at the time residing at the Student Christian Centre which led to a misconception that Thawan was a sacrilegious Christian railing against Buddhist beliefs. The Ramayana series however did not cause the same controversy of his earlier works because the depicted subjects were monkeys and demons rather than Buddhism.
