VERY THAI: In this periodic column, author Philip Cornwel-Smith explores popular culture and the topics covered in his best-sellers Very Thai and Very Bangkok. As a writer of printed books, he celebrates the subculture of Thais who champion paper and drawing as a sensory remedy for an ever more digital lifestyle.

Paper has got a bad rap. Computers heralded the paperless office, but produced ever more printouts, until apps, social media and digital advances made paper ever more redundant from our lives. 

Yet paper retains a resonance, not just for writers like me, but to an echelon of people who want culture to remain tactile, collectible and personal. It goes beyond the paper and the tools to mark it, from pen or pencil to charcoal or brush. Papyrophiles – paper lovers – prize authentic self-expression. Paper is not about artificial intelligence, but humane intelligence. 

A collation of recent events pinpoints an analogue backlash to digitisation, which cherishes the persistence of paper in Thailand, from loose stationery to bound zines to unbound art.

Stationery that Moves Us

Stationery shops, like hardware stores, attract not just practical shoppers, but obsessives. This is well known about Japan, which makes the world’s best papers. But Thailand has a hidden paper subculture. A Korean expat Hyunkyung Lee even published the book ‘Thai Stationery.’ 

Many of those Thai brands featured in Stationerycore, an exhibition and fair on all things paper, held at TCDC on July 4-5. Leading through the corridor entrance, a giant roll of sticky paper read:

“Follow the tape. Find your people.” 

Following the Paper Trail 

Inside jammed hundreds of my fellow paper appreciators, packed tighter than a perfect-bound diary. Collectors stocked up on retro Khonchanart notebooks and minimalist Moop planners, Moleskine-like Zequenz journals and block-printed Chakram jotters. The brand Phayanchana treats “typography as cultural identity,” and its notebook covers come with each Thai letterform turned into a pop illustration, combining font, art and heritage with such finesse that they might never be written in. 

Aficionados inspected bindings, finishes, gsm (grams per square metre) and nap – the way the paper’s grain is aligned vertically to enable book pages to flop open with the ideal eyelid contour. Beginners bound papers in the workshops, while parents got kids cute colouring books and booklets for stickers. 

Fountains of Knowledge

Hobbyists use paper in myriad ways. The fair showcased rubber stamps and novelty pens, calligraphy nibs and artisanal watercolour paintboxes with organic pigments by Craft Colour or Between Moon and Sun. 

Fans of fountain pens gather at Pips Café in Silom Complex, which lets enthusiasts try out pens and papers.

“We’re trying to build a community,”

says Rye, whose father M founded Pips after overcoming the trauma of learning cursive at school.

“Pips has a wide demographic. The older age range sit for six hours talking and trying everything. But our youngest customer, only 9, comes in knowing exactly what he will buy and just wants to test it out.”

From iPads to my Pads

“Stationary is a big thing now. People are more interested in physical media,”

says Rye, an articulate 18.

“The issue with digital stuff is we don’t own any of it. We only have licenses – and even then, it can just disappear. It’s the same with freedom of speech. Literacy rates are dropping. Children are inundated with digital media that strips away their creativity and individuality. Reverting to ‘analog everything’ brings back the humanity. So I collect a lot of physical stuff. No one can take that away from us.”

Gathering the Zine Scene

That urge to authenticity also drives the fanbase of zines. Bohemians and misfits have always been drawn to self-printed self-expression, from the pamphleteers of the American Revolution to the 1960s Underground to punk presses. Thai zines arose during the 1990s DIY grunge era through the Indie youth movement. Indy Fairs in Phra Arthit Road featured home-recorded music cassettes, outsider art, agitprop theatre and handmade zines that sparked magazines like Bioscope and Footprint. Handmade books became integral to the FAT Festivals of the 2000s and subcultures like Death Metal. 

In the 2010s, zines folded into the annual Bangkok Art Book Fair. Curated by Bangkok CityCity Gallery, it’s now held at BACC every two years. That’s not often enough for designer Wuthipol ‘Tum’ Ujathammarat, who makes pocket albums of his vivid pop culture photography.

“We need more physical space as a community to get together, not just selling the work, but also updating our lives,”

he says about establishing a six-monthly Pubpeab Zine Fair, and annual self-publishing fair printPRINT. 

Art Books vs DIY Zines

Focusing on zines, without the glossy art book publishers, Pubpeab is co-hosted by the hipster complex Galileoasis, in International Zine Month (July) and January. Pubpeab means ‘fully folded,’ and its 3rd edition was fully packed on the same weekend as Stationerycore. Its Zine Factory theme involved talks and workshops, where you could combine special papers in varied bindings, from rivet to spiral bound, or slit, folded and interlocked. One economical technique enables you to make a 64-side mini-zine from a single sheet, with templates that guide the cuts and folds.

Art Book Fairs are a global phenomenon and Thais adopt common styles like street photography or lurid, grainy risographic printing. But Tum notices some local traits, from the collectivity of shared stalls to diary-like topics. Intricate Thai design tradition and the art book influence leads many young zinesters to refined finishes rather than zines’ original aesthetic of photocopied pamphlets, which was the format of the school zine I founded with friends in the 1980s. Great examples can be found at Spacebar Zine shop in Galileoasis and the Independent Print Club at One Bangkok.

Timeless, tactile technology

“The younger generation are coming back to what they can hold in their hands,”

Tum says.

“When you scroll something online, you won’t even remember what you saw. But a book or zine that you can actually open is there forever. It’s timeless.”

“On social media, people are responsive, arguing, fighting each other,”

notes Tum.

“But in printed form, it’s so much softer, without anyone telling you what to think. You take your time to understand the content.” 

Print also brings privacy. Zines are an almost secret bond between you and the creator, Tum adds:

“You get to see who makes it. And then the creator meets their readers.”

When culture stays offline, no algorithm or spyware can find it, no corporate parasite leaching its content without payment or permission. 

Representing the Basement

One collective, The Basement, who met at the 2021 Art Book Fair, produce Fill In The Blank with a murky newsprint vibe.

“We’re trying to reimagine what is missing in Bangkok,”

says Beauty, whose look is more Goth.

“We interview under-represented groups, like rappers, labourers or first-job people,”

adds her colleague, Mind.

The half-dozen articles span Thai feminism, business at a small production house to local spirits.

“The grand narrative tries to erase the history of local female ghosts, like Nang Thani, who have lingered in the city sois and they didn’t have the power to tell their story,”

Beauty asserts.

“So we imagine what they want to tell to us.”

Sketches of a lo-fi flaneur

Depicting the unnoticed is also the sensibility of artist Parinot ’Not’ Kunakornwong, whose solo exhibition, ‘Drawing,’ runs at the prominent 100 Tonson Foundation until 4 October. “Drawing is rarely given centre-stage,” says the gallery, where curator Dusadee Huntrakul gives Not’s monochrome lines a monumental impact. 

Disembodied figures and body parts loom from the dark in huge charcoal versions on canvas of psychologically raw sketches that Not drew around the isolating Covid era. The leap in scale turns those awkward, anti-heroic pencil sketches into heroic statements of intimacy, identity and defiance. 

An inveterate night owl, Not wanders from his family’s old textile factory around Bangkok sois, capturing impromptu vignettes via a low-res camera onto his Instagram reel, or the sketchbook he carries around. Sketchbooks, an artist’s tool for centuries, are giving way to digital devices with a multi-functionality that Parinot avoids. 

Finding Freedom in Limitations

“I really connect with materials. I still like the feeling of marking paper, of writing things down,”

says Not. He resists both the academic conceptual art of his postgrad study at Goldsmiths in London, and the hierarchical decorative art of Thai institutes.

“My work has a lot to do with creating from urgency, like when you see folk art, makeshift things on the street from found materials, or art by prisoners with limited tools.”

Not reckons that limitations open new windows, citing how a Russian astronaut calmed himself by drawing an orbital sunrise with pad and pencils.

“Lines can translate into many ambiguous things.”

The fingers in the show could be read as faces, other body parts or symbols, which might relate to politics, protest or autobiography.

“Sometimes it comes from nothing at all, just to draw it out as a way to release, without the restraint to make it look perfect.”

This echoes zine-making.

“I come from that underground subculture, not fitting into the main narrative. I was in the indie music ’noise’ scene. I like this attitude, without feeling a need for approval or commerce. Honesty is also super-important, a genuine communication with like-minded people.”

Follow the tape. Find your people.

This twice-monthly column, Very Thai, is syndicated by River Books, publisher of Philip Cornwel-Smith’s bestselling books Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture and Very Bangkok: In the City of the Senses.

The views expressed by the author of this column are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Koktail magazine.