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Skowmon Hastanan, a Thai artist living in New York City, draws inspiration for her work from her early childhood in Thailand using Himalayan religious images in order to create social statements. Skowmon grew up along the Thai-Laotian border during the Vietnam War where her parents were stationed as medical physicians. At that time Skowmon was exposed to the American life through US servicemen, Playboy magazines, American music and food, as well as fighter jets that would do flyovers above her home. As a daughter of medical physicians, Skowmon would hear horror stories told by her mother about Thai sex workers who had become casualties of the war. Skowmon states that "my mother's daily work included mending uteruses of bar girls injured from having sex with American soldiers" (Hastanan).
After the Vietnam War, Thailand became known for its elaborate sex industry through tourism. In the early 1990s it was declared the epicenter of the AIDS crisis. Thailand is still perceived by many Westerners as the center of the Asian sex industry; Thai women are constantly faced with the stigma that they are prostitutes.
It is these issues along with a language that Skowmon found through her awareness of the western feminist movement that gave her the vision to create works that portray the women from her home country. Furthermore, while becoming a young adult in America, Skowmon came face-to-face with the American male fantasy of Thai women.
During the 1990s and into 2000 the economic growth in Thailand brought on a new commodity that was marketed to the west, i.e., Thai mail-order-brides, escort services and massage therapists. Advertisements placed in the classified sections of newspapers such as the The Village Voice displayed images of Asian women as exotic beauties with pseudo names. In her series of work - Prostitutes and Goddesses & Other Mystiques - Skowmon has taken these "images of Thai sex workers and transformed them into goddesses using horror and humor found in both Himalayan religious paintings and Asian horror cinema" (Hastanan).
In work entitled Dakini-Red Cloud, which means Skydancer, Skowmon has taken a classified advertisement image of a scantily-dressed Thai woman and transformed her into a goddess. The headless woman whose robes have fallen on to the floor seems to be moving...