Day 29: Border Chronicles II: White Temple

White Temple

The white temple (or Wat Rong Kuhn) is amazing and completely worth visiting. It’s also a very different experience from any other temple. I’m glad I didn’t know this before going there and so received the full effect of figuring it out while at the place itself.

If you want the same effect — and if you’re going to go to see it, I encourage you to try to have that experience — don’t read further, and don’t read anything about the place.

Just go.

Gaudi

As explained here in wikipedia, Wat Rong Kuhn is not a temple in the sense of the other temples I’ve visited here. It wasn’t constructed in the 1400s and it doesn’t have a colorful history and a host of venerated monks residing there. While it’s technically a real temple with a lineage and monks, that all secondary to its main aspect: It’s an art project.

And what an art project! It’s a fabulous structure, filled to the brim with Buddhist iconography and pop-cultural symbols. It was created as the single vision of the artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, who owns it as private property and charges nothing for admission. As a personal expression it invites the obvious comparison with Gaudi and the Segrada Familia, a single idiosyncratic vision reified in architecture. A building unlike any other.

The place is a feast for the eyes, the detail is extraordinary and the images riveting. From the courtyard with its hanging free filled with the heads of demons from ancient mythology and 70s horror films, to the hellish entrance with hands dragging dragging you down, there’s always something delightful to see. As you move over the bridge, into the heaven of enlightenment and into the temple itself, the statuary becomes less violent and more beautiful. Especially the Buddha images in the Ubosot, the principal building.

It’s a small journey, but it feels like a full day’s fascination for your eyes. Every angle reveals something new, something wonderful.

Even the simplest signage is designed in the same graphic language as the rest of the site.

Masterworks

Entirely unexpected for a temple was the gallery of Kositpipat’s masterworks. Mostly paintings or drawings, with some sculpture and jewelry. These are mostly beautiful (if you’ll allow that the style of graphic novels can be beautiful), often amusing and in many cases feature spectacular color. This is not `high art’, but it’s very approachable and extremely satisfying.

I found the whole place to be wonderful, regardless of the fact I strongly suspect many might find his work, well, gaudy. And also despite the strong likelihood that spiritual underpinnings of the project — an effort acquire merit — might not fit everyones view of piety. Just accept it for what it is, a dazzlingly unique place.