Mindful living: on view in traveling retrospective organized by New York's Asia Society, the sculptures and installations of the late Thai artist Montien Boonma use Buddhist forms and medicinal herbs to create peaceful reflective environments

Montien Boonma's art is inseparable from certain facts of his life. The herbs that make his retrospective exhibition "Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind," so remarkably multisensory are medicinal, and that's a major part of their significance. The forms he uses--prayer beads, bells alms bowls and iconic busts--are even more specific in their reference to Buddhism. But they are simultaneously abstract and timeless. They speak less of Boonma's identity as a Thai than of a reflective person seeking serenity.

Boonma (1953-2000) was the first Thai artist to become a regular on the international exhibition circuit. Ills work was previously shown at the Asia Society in New York as part of its "Tensions and Traditions" show in 1996 and in the most recent Asia Pacific Triennale [see A/A., July '03] in Brisbane, as well as in France, Korea, Japan, Germany, Norway and elsewhere. But this retrospective organized by the Asia Society is the first opportunity to see his work hl quantity in the U.S. In this well-selected exhibition, perfectly sized for its New York venue, curated by Apinan Poshyananda, the Thai curator and critic who also organized "Tensions and Traditions," there was enough space for individual contemplation, and yet the works played off each other with an almost bell-like reverberation. Forms and textures repeat in this show, and Poshyananda includes drawings of installations not shown as well as those physically realized in the galleries, which seems to erase the temporal and physical limits of the exhibition.

Boonma was apparently always a spiritual person; his early works usually had an environmental or social consciousness consistent with Buddhist "mindful living." I But the trials of his life turned him more deeply in that direction. In 1991, two years after the birth of their first child, Boonma's wife was found to have breast cancer. She survived until 1994. Boonma himself developed a brain tumor and then lung cancer, which killed him at the age of 47. Nearly all the work in the show was made in the fertile but painful last decade of his life.

The earliest, however, was Self-Portrait: A Man Who Admires Thai Art. (1982), a photograph of his own face that he decorated with the complex patterning of Thai dance masks, including the stereotypical "Siamese Smile" of a people known for their grace and graciousness. This work suggests his search for a personal subject matter and is more successful--that is, more readable--than a Buddha drawing of the same year motivated by his dismay at the pillaging of artifacts and the debasing of Buddha images through reproduction. One must be told of these implications. With Bowls, Candles and Matches (1990), he was clearly moving into the abstracted symbolism that became his mature expression. In the three drawings that bear this title, he melted candle wax onto paper, texturing and burning through the surfaces.

Among the pieces stylistically related to this work are Benediction (1991), in which candle wax and gold foil are melted onto photos of television screens in a collision of two worlds, meditation and entertainment. Boonma also made several works between '89 and '98 that he called "stupas" or "pagodas." These are glazed and framed panels containing tactile surfaces. They include such materials as soil, sand, rice flour, ash, white cement, charcoal or pigment, rubbed onto paper or canvas. The panels are stacked in graduated piles to suggest the architectural referent, both hung and leaning against the wall, raised off the floor on bricks. The panel arrangement of alternating rows of horizontal and vertical rectangles alludes to the bricklaying method used in pagodas, and the frame and glass of the panels themselves to skyscrapers (which Boonma, quoted in a wall label, calls "the modern pagodas of Newly Industrializing Countries").

His Charcoal Pagoda and Pots (1994) was the largest of this type, and the first work viewers saw at the Asia Society as they climbed the stairs to the second floor galleries. It rose 16 1/2 feet on the stairwell wall. It's a stack of framed charcoal drawings of alms bowls used by Buddhist monks to receive food offerings from the lay community every morning. The ellipses emerging from the darkness on the pages evoke mouths or eyes as well, especially because the images are stacked in pairs (which are increasingly smaller above the "base" of four large drawings). The work refers, a wall label explains, to the Buddhist ritual of placing vessels with cremated human remains inside the walls when stupas are constructed.

As evocative as these works are, Boonma goes further in his three-dimensional installations. These were introduced to viewers with House of Hope (1996-97), an installation surrounded by painted walls meant to evoke smoke-stained temple walls. Red-painted stairs---in a casual-looking assembly of sections reminiscent of children's step stools--lead to a rectangular platform almost concealed by hundreds of dangling ropes of prayer beads (recalling Felix Gonzalez-Torres's bead curtains). The entire installation is fragrant because the beads are made of herbal medicine balls. (2) Red, tan and gray-tinged, they hang in various lengths. Outside the installation room was a drawing for this project dated 1996, labeled with Boonma's explanation that for him the medicinal herbs symbolize hope, and the work is "about possibilities and acceptance." Boonma's words, used on many of the exhibition labels to point out and explain, seem never to constrain the viewer's response to the works.