Mekong Cultural Hub

Bio: Thanom Chapakdee (1958 -- 2022) was a Thai artist, activist, critic, and lecturer who taught at Faculty of Fine Arts, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand. As art critic, Thanom was renoun for forthright views in the critic choice and reviews in the Nation Weekend Magazine and other magazines in Thailand for more than 30 years. He co-founded Bangkok Performance art group, U-Kabat (Bonfire, 1995), also ran the project ‘Let’s visit Artist Home (2002), co-organized performance art festival “ASIATOPIA” in Thailand, organized Community art and participatory art (2005) project at Tha-Long village, Ubon-Rachathani with Bru ethic people and curator of photographs about ethic minority (Bru people) which exhibited at Baan Bar (2009) in Bangkok. He was a member of Southeast Asia cultural committee to Ministry of Culture, Taipei, Taiwan (2015-2016). In 2018 he organised the project Art Manifesto in Northeast of Thailand as the artistic director and organized Khonkaen Manifesto (6-26 October 2018), an alternative art festival in city of Khonkaen, Northeast of Thailand, to carry on the values and aesthetics of resistance through artistic and cultural approaches of a marginalized community which runs every two years. In 2019 he was invited to join JOGJA Biennale in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In 2020, he organized Ubon Agenda in Ubon Ratchathani and Khonkaen Manifesto#2 in Khonkaen.

Thanom joined MCH Network in 2021 and participated in many programs to promote the network of art and cultural and social practitioners in the region.