The haunting realism that Sunti Pichetchaiyakul achieves in his sculpture overwhelms even his own reality. That he's transplanted from Nakhon Ratchasima to Bigfork, Montana. That his work is on view at more than 50 temples throughout Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. That he may be the world's fastest sculptor, able to make a life-size clay bust in just 17 minutes.
And that he's still only 39.
In Korat, Sunti fashioned startling renditions of revered monks. In Bigfork he extracts divinity from bronze and resin to depict Native American chiefs like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Last month Sunti ended up fourth overall among 1,600 competitors from 39 countries in the annual ArtPrize contest - the world's largest art competition, with $500,000 in rewards just for the 10 finalists.
The judges in Grand Rapids, Michigan, obviously loved his dual-likeness of the late President Gerald Ford, a Grand Rapids native. Sunti was the only non-American in the top 10.
Betty Ford, the former first lady, gave Sunti permission to undertake the project five months prior to the competition, just before she died.
There is much to like besides parochial pride and exacting resemblance. While evoking the subject's true spirit, Sunti's realism extends as far as implanted hair follicles and pores in the skin, moulded in tough resin, as he explains in an interview.
Why did you choose President Ford this time rather than, say, a Thai personality?
I did portray the revered monk Luangbu Luan in hyper-realistic fibreglass resin last year, as my first-ever entry in the ArtPrize competition. I ended up in the top 25 among 1,713 artists from around the world.
A lot of people just assumed it was cast from life. They were amazed that I actually sculpted it by hand.
But this competition was based in Grand Rapids, and I wanted to enter a piece that the community could connect to, so I went with a "son of Grand Rapids", former President Ford. I've been honouring local heroes for almost two decades.
Sculpting Ford was quite a challenge because if I didn't get his exact likeness, the city of Grand Rapids would be the first to point it out. I set out to create a recognisable individual with two different expressions in two different media. I don't believe this has ever been done before.
The concept was that President Ford appeared to be attending the competition preview and seeing a bronze bust of him. In the resin version he seems to be laughing inwardly, in reaction, while the bust has a more "presidential look".
Tell us how you created the two images.
I made a full-body resin figure on a plaster mould of a clay sculpture. The plaster was then cast in wax, which accepts very fine detail. I worked from black-and-white photographs, but the greatest challenge was getting a neutral facial expression that didn't appear in his photos. He always either looked very stern or completely overjoyed.
So I invented my own "relaxed" or "satisfied" expression by meticulously examining how his facial muscles changed with his mood and estimating what they'd look like when expressing a mood I'd never seen.
Next I fashioned a silicone mould to cast my final fibreglass resin piece. I used the same mould to create a hollow wax sculpture for the bronze bust and re-sculpted Ford's expression using the "stern" look.
I covered the resin sculpture with many layers of acrylic paint, added the clothes, and inserted the hairs one by one. To finish off the bronze sculpture, I applied my own patina. And I only had four months to single-handedly create both sculptures!
The Nation
