Chiang Rai’s Baan Dum Museum, alternately known as the Black House or Black Temple, falls well outside the norm of Thai beauty and art. Though often touted as the counterpoint to the White Temple, typically while citing a heaven-hell motif, the connection between the two is based more on color and the student-teacher relationship of the artists behind the two structures than it is on any intentional artistic correlation.
Baan
Dum is a fairly unique project. Black House creator Thawan Duchanee has painted black numerous
houses of varying sizes and filled them with a hodgepodge of religious
paraphernalia from different Southeast Asian cultures. These adopted images and
architecture -- which come from as Far afield as Sri Lanka and Bali, as well as
from neighboring Burma and Cambodia -- are interspersed with the artist’s own
creations, crafted from animal bones, shells, and skins.
The presence of massive throne-style chairs made from animal
hides and horns, rows of skulls and shells arranged in geometric patterns, the
black-painted roofs and buddhas, the strange and uncomfortable rocks sculptures
and odd buildings, all contribute to the Black House’s ability to give an
eerie, unsettling, or downright disturbing impression.
