vieng joom on,…the pink tea house

Posted on | February 14, 2008 | No Comments

today we visited the warorot market…a typical bustling thai market with about fifty million vendors on four or five huge floors housed in and all around an enormous concrete building.
underwear! shoes! bags! cosmetics! strange dried things! luridly coloured sweets!
below all this, on the basement level….the wet market, with all the fresh food and lots of cooking and eating going on continuously.

after wandering through the gold shops there, we went to the treehouse on charoenrat rd, and looked at an eclectic mix of art and antiques from burma, laos, cambodia etc….then onto la luna art gallery where i fell madly in love with the work of an artist called morrakot naksin.
the gallery owner invited us to the opening of naksin’s solo exhibition, “the beauty of simple things”.
the work is pure poetry: large clean canvases of details such as hair, ears, feet, all rendered very graphically, with large flat spaces.
my favourite paintings had plenty of white….flowers and robes…..and the old-fashioned thai ear piercings….and complex traditional hairdos.
faces are not shown….the the expression is captured in the hands, the feet, the necks.
if the artist releases prints, i will be first in line.

at la luna, there was heaps of other wonderful stuff, including some cubist watercolours of the chinatown in kuala lumpur, that were very evocative of the chaotic, colourful atmosphere there.
we were quite tempted by them, but honestly, we have nowhere to hang the art we already own!

finally we arrived at vieng joom on.
this is a 3 story pink mansion, on the banks of the river ping.
they have a wonderful tea selection….we had a large pot of rooibos massala chai, with a club sandwich to share.
we sat in the tea garden, surrounded by french style iron furniture, pink cushions, pink menus, pink ribbons hanging from the trees, pink bougainvillea.
fans with misters and romantic french music washed over us.
then we had a pot of tender orchid green tea, with a selection of nine tiny cakes.
each was more delicious than the one before it….and the tea was great.
i had just bought dragon pearls tea at warorot, so i didn’t buy tea at VJO, but they did have a wonderfully ambient retail area, with many beautiful things for sale, all tea-related.
it was a gorgeous and refreshing interlude.

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