A Working Cloth, Not a Picture

Generative art — building thousands of unique pieces out of a set of hand-made parts — was the one genuinely new way to make images to come along in years. Then the NFT frenzy got hold of it and ran it straight into the ground: ten-thousand-piece sets of smirking apes and cartoon birds, scarcity invented for its own sake, flipped and forgotten, the whole thing running on irony. I found it repulsive — a real tool, wasted on garbage.

So I pointed the same method at something that mattered to me. It took four years. I lettered every line of Khom by hand, copied every sigil out of a working ajarn's grimoire, and redrew every figure until it could live in a generative layout and still be right. It was closer to an obsession than a project.

Most Westerners picture Buddhism as a kind of psychology — self-help with the mysticism filed off. In Southeast Asia it's nothing of the sort: centuries of mysticism, magic, scripture and sorcery, tangled up with Hindu devas, ghosts and astrology. The version most people grew up with is a small, sanded-down corner of it, and spirits like Phra Ngang live in the rest.

This collection draws on saiyasart — the “midnight science,” the darker end of Thai folk magic the temple keeps at arm's length. Every diagram was worked through with Ajarn Maha Mettaboon, pulling scripts and sigils straight from his own grimoires. When I first brought him the finished work he told me the sacred lettering was wrong — the sak yant, the Khom, the Sanskrit, all of it — so we tore that layer down and rebuilt it from scratch, sigil by sigil, for each series: wealth, attraction, invulnerability, reversal of black magic, fast luck. It was a working collaboration, not a consultation.

And then there's Phra Ngang. He isn't a black-magic spirit, though that's where most people file him. Instead he's something a little stranger — the “holy fool,” tied to black magic because he's made of the things Buddhism is trying to transcend: lust, risk, hunger, the drive to win. Working with Phra Ngang doesn't mean you have to indulge in your vices (although many do); instead it's about facing your own darkness directly instead of pretending you're above it.

Phra Ngang himself is seldom given the form at all — he is not a temple-merchandise spirit. The pieces that surface are mostly single, hand-drawn cloths on deliberately transgressive ground: a burial shroud, a section of brothel sheet. Sex and death, the two poles of his domain.

Full colour is its own departure. The pha yant is an affordable, popular form, and most are screen-printed in a single ink — gold or red on dark cloth. Full-colour pieces are already unusual; full-colour pieces of him, rarer still. In a decade in this world I've seen maybe two pha yants of Phra Ngang at all, and both were black and white.

There's a logic to keeping him in the dark. He's a worldly spirit — radically immanent, dedicated to appetite and excess, to everything the tradition usually handles with restraint. Rendering him in the full spectrum, in colour that lights up, runs against the grain of how he's always been treated. That's what makes a full-colour series devoted to him a first, to my knowledge: not only that it hasn't been printed, but that the form has never looked at him quite this directly.

Every piece comes with its own written interpretation — what the posture means, what the flanking guardians bring, what the sigils emphasize, and how the diagram is read in the tradition.

See What You Get for the full description of what arrives with each piece, and Working for how the interpretation is used in practice.

You don't play with a spirit like this without giving first. That's how the tradition works, and it's older than anything new about this project. A share of every sale goes to the Childline Thailand Foundation, which feeds, shelters, and protects children living on the streets of Bangkok.