~.~

Carolyn • 🇦🇷 • She/her • 20's. Animation • kpop • art • shows. Art blog-> @cianhia • Art instagram

[my-wholeheartedly]

Soo i created an instagram art account and an art sideblog, in case anyone here wants to follow >.< ~

[zeravmeta]

holy shonen trinity ranked on their relationships with the government

[hurlumerlu]

While this scene makes it extremely clear that the people in power don't feel threatened by Dan's art, I don't think this is a statement of his murals' failings. For me, it is to be interpreted more broadly as being about the limits of art as a tool for protest.

For one thing, UNAR is known enough that Namo can give a little exposé about his work off the top of her head, but also when Yok tries to track him down via his latest mural, there's already a small group of people admiring it (and keep in mind that Yok rushed to the scene).

Now, it is possible that those people only connect with this piece on an aesthetic level, and not at all politically. But we do know someone who connects with it on a political level! I'm talking about Yok, of course.

In fact, he connects with it in such a brutal and intimate way that he disregard every warning signs, convinced that he knows the real, true Dan emprisoned behind the uniform - when the reality isn't nearly as simple. (yes, Yok is dickmatized, but he saw Dan's mural before he saw anything else of the man. It's the political art that makes him throw all caution to the wind first, and I simply don't think he would have fallen that hard and that fast if he had met Dan in another context. He calls Dan's art honest!)

This is at the heart of many of their conversations: how come you can make this art, and still be a cop? How is the contradiction not eating you from the inside?, wether explicitely:

or implicitely:

Yok is constantly engaging Dan in maieutic dialogues (let the cop give birth to the artist? hm. not sure I like that image) to get him to solve that contradition by quitting the force. It is very naive (Officer Dan Danai is just as much the "real" Dan as UNAR is - in many ways the two cannot be separated) but - mostly because Yok is one of the narrative's special little guys* - not entirely unfounded: the contradiction is eating at Dan. He does end up quitting.

(Important to me also that Yok always gets the last word in their arguments: no wonder he's so sure he can fix him!)

All this to say: I think we lose a huge chunk of their dynamic if we interpret UNAR's art as entirely ineffective in a political sense. Which brings me back to that one scene:

I think it loses its impact if we interpret it as Dan, specifically, being a bad political artist. For its whole run time, the show grapples with the question of just how much art can do politically, and in this scene it lays out the most resigned side of the debate. Not only protest art can't change anything, but engaging in it gives people the illusion of having pushed for meaningful political change, when they've done absolutely nothing. It's the show at its most hopeless and self-deprecating! But it is also the story's darkest hour, and I'm not sure how uncritically we should receive what the man in white is saying.

After all, if political art could never be a threat to power, what would be the use of censorship? For example, I find significant that this scene visually alludes to Buddhism, when this religion (the only one pushed forward by the Thai Constitution, afaik) is conspicuously absent from the rest of the show

and when, while I can't speak for Thailand, the corruption of some buddhist monks and their ties to oppressive governments is a hot button topic in some South-East Asian countries. Visually, I also find this accumulation of traditional-looking riches (compared to the more modern look of Tod's fancy penthouse), very interesting. It brings to my mind Thai nobility and royalty, and is again the closest the show gets to mentioning them, unless we extrapolate from the lecture on impunity that serves to introduce Sean's backstory.

Maybe Not Me has nothing to say on those subjects, maybe it had to be very mindful of what it said: I don't know. Maybe the show would have been exactly the same without lèse-majesté laws! And maybe the man in white is right to feel entirely unthreatened by political art.

But is being a direct threat to power the only value political art can have? In the end, and to borrow heavily from a discussion with @peanutbutterangelic, I think Not Me's stance on art comes down to this: art connects us. It might even (slowly, in small ways) be able to change us, or comfort us while we go through the painful but necesary process of change. But it cannot act for us. If we want a different world, we have to act.

[riotbrrrd]

So on the subject "if political art was never a threat, what would be the use of censorship?" I obviously don't have a perfect answer but what I do have is a 2020 "public dialogue" from the university of Chicago on the subject of "censorship and information control during information revolutions". which obviously tends to have more examples of the imperial core but involves several historians especially during the first sessions, and I think you would find the second session, censorship's historical consequences, particularly interesting in regards to "well, what is the goal of government censorship anyway", as it moves away from the mere question of art and recontextualizes what censorship does to the flow of information in general.

It might be a little of a moot point to make because obviously in this scene Dan isn't being punished for his art but precisely for not sticking to it, and censorship was never in question here, but like. To me this scene is a sort of didactic course into le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, in which modern societies have the ability to absorb their own criticism because they have a hand on the flow of information and as long as art flows through those channels, it does not have a disruptive capacity no matter the message or the effectiveness of its execution.

I'm bringing this up because I think one overlooked aspect of Dan's art is that technically it is using an illegal channel of information. Some of his stuff is easily available in town but we have at least one example of a breaking-and-entering going on, that it would have been very interesting to examine for how unsafe it is capable of making someone feel, had it not immediately been one-upped by, you know, a much more radical version of the same crime. "This art piece comes to you whether you want it or not" holds political power no matter how radical the piece in question is. But. At the same time. It is very marginal in the first sense of the word. It isn't disrupting the mainstream. And so, we circle back on that consequences of censorship and whether censorship is here to erase any sort of dissident message, or to simply create an atmosphere where the only way for Dan to make his art is to break the law, and his only way to "safely" break the law is to also be an enforcer of the state. Absorbed into, etc.

[fadelgender]

Pulling more at the threads of art as political action vs. connection (vs. more?) that I've been thinking on since I finished:

I want to preface this by saying that I do read the show as essentially saying political art is toothless in terms of direct action, though not useless overall. For me the two scenes that cement these ideas about its toothlessness are the one you presented with Dan and the elitist in the white shirt, and Yok asking Namo if art can truly awaken people after, well, everything with Dan. The constant tension between Dan's place in the political system and his activist art comes to a head for me here - even though Dan does change his heart by the end, the show answers Yok's inquiry more in the personal, with Namo responding that it helped her through heartbreak. In fact Not Me shows Namo, Sean, and (to an extent) Yok using art to get over personal heartbreak in a successful manner more so than as a political act.

For all the art we see in the show (Eugene's dancing, Namo's graffiti, Dan's murals, Yok's portraits), the show never shows art itself as a consciousness-raising effort (even though that's what I believe art can be a useful tool for); all of our artists are already political minded, even UNAR/Dan. The only person we see on screen undergo consciousness raising is White, and he does this through a combination of direct action and his discussions with Gram; even Dan, I would argue, changes at the end not because of any of his art but because of the (many) things he'd done. Now, the show does believe in the power of social media as a tool for political power, and Dan (to complete his mirror of White) is a known political artist via his social media, and it seems his reputation comes from a combination of the art and the art's social media presence than just what the art says, even if Yok - who is already a politically minded artist - gets excited by it. I won't harp on the BLM mention in Not Me for too long, but one of the big failures of that movement that black activists talk about even now is that the lesson many white Americans took away was to read the right books or watch more diverse shows, rather than get involved directly in anti-racist, anti-police, anti-carceral, etc. work. Art can be useful for knowledge, but eventually the actual work needs to happen.

I agree with everything riotbrrrd said about capitalism absorbing dissent and I think it's relevant to the university aspect of the show. Somewhat of a sidebar, but the most direct art we see (to my memory) is the spoken word poem/rap that accompanies Eugene's first art performance (I believe it's when we first see her in the show). Yet it's not lost on me that a lot of the art (Eugene & Yok's specifically) is tied to the university system, which itself is another system that once upon a time could directly challenge political power and has since been completely absorbed into a toothless branch of dissent (caveat that I am speaking from a history w Western colleges). Student protest at universities is a common way for students to get politically minded, but to an extent - something like Eugene's dance or Yok's portraits can be accepted, but we see that direct protest against the head of the school by Black & Sean is much more harshly treated. The fact that Tawi gets invited to the university as an honored alumni guest speaker is one of the ways that universities buy into these capitalist systems and, as said above, controls the flow of information for its students.

The last thing I want to bring up is Dan's art still having a sense of illegality to it by breaking and entering, because in regards to muralism and graffiti, which Namo and Dan do, I can't argue that it has no direct political purpose. Going to dox myself here, but Los Angeles is a mural- and graffiti-heavy city, and there is a strong connection between graffiti and the disruption of public vs. private land. Why should empty private buildings stay empty due to ownership? Why does private enterprise get to force certain building & artistic designs in our neighborhoods, but these can't be reclaimed? (I think often of LA's graffiti towers; most people view the graffiti as an embarrassment to the city, while I think of it as a public reminder and reclamation of space from a business that imposed these unfinished skyscrapers on the skyline. To each their own.) When Namo shows Sean the empty building, she also has an appreciation for the style and durability of the building in a way that a capitalist would not. But on the note of trespassing, Dan sneaking into Tawi's forest house would only have had an impact once Dan posted the mural online, going back to the usefulness of social media; if the house hadn't been burned, Tawi could and would have easily ignored the mural. It's not wasted effort, but it does feel marginal to me in the end. Even when Namo informs Yok at the end of the series that she's going to transition to activist art, I'm still not sure how to take that after the show had us follow Dan's attempt at political art being so defanged by the elite. A lot of Eugene & Namo's art is seen at the protests, but by that point, the political action has already begun - it feels like the show agrees that art and political action go hand in hand, but that art as political action is fruitless.

[hazmatilda]

Okay so, to start with, I love love love this commentary. Not Me is one of my favourite shows, and political art, specifically graffiti, is something I'm quite passionate about. I agree with a lot of what everyone has said about what the show is saying about political art as an arm of political action, specifically in the community and awareness building side of things, and I want to jump onto and continue the conversation of censorship not just as it is portrayed in the show, but as the literal contextual background of a TV show being aired in Thailand, and the political history of censorship in the country.

I went chasing through some of the conversations that @hurlumerlu mentioned with @peanutbutterangelic but don't know if this aspect has been brought up yet explicitly (although please direct me to any conversations that have!). In their initial post, hurlumerlu mentions the spector of the lèse majesté laws and the obvious lack of monarchy call outs in the show. For those who are not up on Thai censorship laws, the lèse majesté laws or Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, prohibit an act that defames, insults or threatens the Thai royalty. It is the section that has been used to imprison a man in 2024 for 50 years for social media posts, sentenced a retired service woman to 43 years in 2021 (who has since been released), and in 2026 sentenced free speech activists to 32 months for statements made at a democracy rally- and what a man in 2024 was arrested for referencing, charged under vandalism laws (Cleanlines Act etc). But that is not the only force of censorship in Thailand.

Censorship pervades the show, in what it can and cannot say. The nature of a GMMTV show means that it is reliant on sponsorships (see the distinct lack of product placement in the show (edit: I have been reminded there was product placement, I'm thinking more of the lack of company title cards for the time), the network guidelines, the use of BL as soft power for Thailand (with the implicit censorship that follows), the lack of reference to the military lottery despite the references to the military (A Dog and A Plane is perhaps the first and only reference I have seen to this - 2026! 5 years after this show!) I'm sure someone who is more in the know about network regulations could speak on this (I think @clairedaring had a lot to say about politics re Mandate?) but I think it's an important backdrop to what Nuchy could say in the first place, and what she is trying to say about political art, in a piece of political art, embroiled in censorship.

Because while @riotbrrd asks whether censorship is here to erase any sort of dissident message, I think that is a simplification of the relationship between political art and censorship in the Thai context.

Censorship is not the thing that stifles the bite of political art, but is something that feeds the creation of political art in the first place, and it's the threat of censorship that pushes political artists to creation and propagation of their art and beliefs.

Which is where I want to bring in the thread of the university. @fadelgender brings up the seemingly toothless reality of student protest in universities, but with the important caveat of Western university context, and I want to push back on that here.

University graffiti is something that I am very interested in, as a tool of communication and protest within an institution, one of my favourite papers that explores this is Sirach Lapyai's paper, 'Scratching protest: A study of graffiti as communication in universities in Thailand' (2003). Even if it's over 20 years old now, I think it provides some important considerations in the difference between western university protest and Thai universities, which speak to the role of political art in Thailand. (A lot of below is drawing from this paper, including the quotations).

In the 1920's, the Thai government began funding universities as as a cultural educational institution where education was a tool to re-make the country as comparable with the Western world, but on Thai terms. Students were to be shaped and moulded by the university, to be the future leaders and bearers of Thai cultural identity, with a strict hierarchy between administration and the students. Made explicit is the fact that "students should not intervene with what adults and the government are doing, staying silent is the good character of a respectable Thai student". In the same way, the nature of Buddhism-Brahminism as a political tool by the ruling class, functioning as the national ideology, is embedded in the institution, where even "democracy's emphasis on equality is unacceptable to Thais who have been acculturated into this hierarchical system." (There is an entire other rabbit hole to go down here, with the effect of the Law of Karma and the unequal social hierarchy that builds Thai national ideology legitimating the authoritarian power of the ruling class... something something The Edge of Horizon).

The Thai university system then seeks to encourage the Thai major attitudes that hold political passivity, submission without resistance or challenge, and view opposition as destructive and negative; shaping the Thai youth with an obligation to the state and the traditional Thai view of life.

But just as in the universities in the West have been a hotbed of political activism, the very place of citizen making was a site of consciousness raising; but as a reaction of a stifled student group. Fearing student interest in politics, from the 60s-80s, student political involvement was banned, which, among other actions, resulted in 'underground' student publications because students viewed official student media as censored (first fruits in raising and spreading political ideas, through a self published media, in the face of censorship). In the face of increasing military presence on campus, who would arrest and murder student under the change of being 'communists', students began to oppose the educational system and its hierarchy, and the government, growing until the 1970s student uprisings.

I assume the reader has a passing knowledge of the 1970s student uprisings, but the interesting factor of these is the lack of official documentation and obscuring of these uprisings after the fact. Suppression of the information of these protests is a reflection of the societal censors, sealing off 'undesirable' social phenomenon, with this suppression leading to Thai students becoming politically inactive at a later date. (Here is an interesting paper that further investigates the relative lack of later student protests in comparison to the 1970s uprisings.) Contemporary student activism is suppressed quickly and violently (Lipyai's paper references a student demonstration that resulted in police action and expulsions, which I can't find reference to elsewhere), as well as the 2020/21 student protests that were suppressed on multiple levels by authorities, with arrests under charges of sedition and intimidation of protest sympathisers; where restriction of free speech (including online) was an arm of this.

In the face of suppression of protests and physical activism, and the censorship of said political action, graffiti in universities functions as an alternative means of communication under pressure. Students use graffiti to "express their overt feelings of anger towards... those they perceive to be oppressive and tyrannical." The Thai university system (at least as it stood 20 years ago) was structured such that students are kept silent and obedient, without the rights to make complaints and evaluate teachers. Student graffiti was then a major mechanism of resistance and reaction to the control imposed by authorities and absence of freedom of speech. It resists the mainstream culture by disrupting and contesting authoritarian power in a subtle manner, and arises out of the suppression of the right to communicate.

Graffiti can be interpreted as the reaction of the powerless to the powerful through attempts to discuss or show things the society deems forbidden, physically resisting the authorities through disrupting the well-managed social order and social aesthetic of universities. Graffiti breaks Thai social taboos by expressing forbidden topics and neglecting ideal behaviours and discourses. I believe that political art more broadly uses the same tools and ethos. To this point - the artist Baphoboy, whose art is used for UNAR in Not Me, talks about the social limitations or boundaries as a thrust for his own political art, as someone who started as a student activist himself - “In reality, if we look at it from the perspective of boundaries in Thai society, there are always limitations. For example, the terms ‘sensitive’ or ‘superior’ indicate limitations."

I know I went on about student graffiti a lot there, but the main thrust is that the Thai university, where the majority of the characters are politically active within, has from its foundation been not just a space where student learn, but are indoctrinated into statehood; an institution where questioning authority is disavowed, with the suppression on and restrictions of political expression ranging from expulsion to death by military. Graffiti is often see as the response to physical suppression and censorship, erupting in waves after incidents as the anonymous expression of dissent.

I spent so long talking about the landscape of the university, because just as it situates the students in the show within their political context, it also provides a framework for Dan as a cop and Dan as UNAR, and his art as political action. Dan as a cop can't express his views or frustrations within the system, with the threat of overt action being brutally suppressed, and thus turns to the anonymous outlet to vent that political frustration. He is at risk for his views in the show, but also in the contemporary political climate of Thailand, he was at the risk of prosecution if discovered (both for vandalism and the themes, which could be deemed 'politically nationally destabilising', 'disrespectful towards leaders', 'defamation and libel', 'immoral' and 'religiously prohibited' as recorded by the Artistic Freedom Report Thailand). This is not to vindicate Dan, but to offer an understanding of his political expression through art, which I do think is a valid response to suppression and censorship, even as he is himself an arm of that suppression.

Because, to bring us back to what @hurlumerlu asks in their first post, if political art could never be a threat to power, what would the use of censorship be? If it has no bite, why would, according to the artistic freedom report Thailand, there be 64 cases of banned or censored art between 2010 and 2022? Or arrests of artists under Section 112 and vandalism laws, or police surveilled exhibitions by 'Unmuted Project' (of which Baphoboy is a part), and the thread of political art that suffused and encouraged the 2020/21 protests?

Not Me itself exists within a censored media landscape, by both cultural and political structures, and yet it is a piece of political art. It exists within a continuum of political art that seeks to critique the political and cultural institutions, and portrays how that very art is a voice of a suppressed and censored people. Whether it is a legitimate form of political activism by itself, I would say that it claims a role in the political ecosystem, and reveals the threat of the populous to a vulnerable government; if the Thai majority were filled with a political consciousness as opposed to its current apathy, if opposition to authority is not seen as distasteful, then how would they defend their authority, their right to rule, and to maintain the status quo?

In a cultural climate where going against the power structure and hierarchies is not just censored by the government, but by the Thai majority, political art, in whatever way it is able to be expressed, is a political action and a call to action. It is a consciousness raiser, especially within a disenfranchised youth. By actively pointing out the censorship, the political art questions whether 'sensitive' topics and social taboos are not just possible but important and worthy of being talked about, not just hidden and ignored. Political art motivates already politically minded people, but dares to tell the un- or a-political person, you should know about this, and you are allowed to care about it. And that's what I love about Not Me. Because even within a censored medium itself, it shows not just the Thai people what revolution can look like, but opens Thailand's protest history and current struggles to a wider audience (thanks to Nuchy taking that BL money).

[hurlumerlu]

THANK YOU for this bounty of links and context! I have not yet read the theses linked, but I have read everything else (+ some stuff that was linked on articles that you linked - I'm going to have to read everything on sanamratsadon.org). Among it all, one detail jumped out to me in the article on Baphoboy. It's in the the quote that you yourself cited, and the explanation that follows:

Terms such as ‘superior’ are commonly used as euphemisms to refer to the monarchy, a taboo subject under Thailand’s strict lèse-majesté law.

And what does the man in the white shirt tells Dan? Well.

Interesting, isn't it?

[khaoala]

Did you intentionally hit my car?

BONNIE PATTRAPHUS as KEY episode 1 of MOONSHADOW

[gustavorinaldi]

Brazilian Folklore Illustrations part 2

[namtan]

YOU MANIAC | OFFICIAL TRAILER

[khaoala]

Film Rachanun - Jub Meow at JuniorMark's SunnyMoon Concert Day 3

[ @/khunnunakim ]

[papawolfchris]

STRAY KIDS - This & That MV

[look-peach]

How many continents did these flowers come from? Ever since I met you, I've learned something. No matter how hard you search for the very best, nothing compares to what's already in front of you. It's only one kind of flower. The Peach Blossom. For my special one.

PEACH AND ME (2026) EPISODE 04

[pointlesscandies]

A Dog and A Plane // Finale

A perfectly fitting proposal for these two

[bobnichollsart]

NEW PAINTING TIME!

Here is "Consuming the Fallen," commissioned by The Etches Collection. It features over 50 different species of marine reptiles; lobe-fin, ray-fin, cartilaginous, and agnathid fishes; echinoderms, crustaceans, isopods, ammonites, belemnites, teuthoids, nautiloids, gastropods, brachiopods, bivalves, annelids, bryozoans, cnidaria, and microbial mats. There are also coprolites and burrows.

[cinematicjourney]

Arrietty (2010) | dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi

[mangonetics]

"why was the ending so rushed it was so good up until the ending" the answer is the same every time no matter the media you're talking about: the author is a bee and had to go back to the hive to defend the queen

[blackgwenstacy]

:’)

[koiagain]

im going to fix my entire life

[fruitcakebro]

When?

[koiagain]

Like Um. later

[purpleguitar]

Print's Payday, Pay Up Babies 🦩

[thesuperyapper]

Mutual I wanna talk to you but I don't know what to say. I really like you and I enjoy our interactions I think you'd be an awesome person to be friends with in real life. Please do not attack me with a sledgehammer.