CHAMPASSAK, Tiane Doan na. Censored.

(Paris): RVB Books, 2015. First edition. Softcover. 33.2cm by 23cm. Extraordinary appropriation-based artist’s book. Drawing on his extensive collection of Thai erotic magazines from the 1960s and 1970s — a period during which representations of nudity were prohibited — Tiane Doan na Champassak assembles a vast archive of images shaped by highly inventive forms of censorship. Breasts and genitals were obscured beneath hand-drawn jewels, flowers, geometric motifs, clouds, flames, and other carefully painted graphic interventions devised by publishers to evade censorship laws. Focusing entirely on these acts of concealment, Champassak transforms the improvised censor marks into unexpectedly beautiful autonomous forms hovering between collage, drawing, found abstraction, and conceptual gesture. The volume reproduces hundreds of censored body fragments — predominantly breasts — shifting attention away from the erotic image itself toward the strange visual language created through prohibition and erasure. This is a near fine copy signed by the artist. Housed in a perspex case with an archival pigment print on Japanese Awagami paper mounted on non acid coloured cardboard. Print measures 29.5cm by 20cm. Signed and numbered (9/50) by the artist.