Toby Barnes didn’t hear your average bedtime stories. As a child, his mother would tell him, in Thai, the Ramayana Epic, a Hindu and South Asian mythology that taught the ideal virtues a person should possess. The tales carry adventure, fantastic characters and a fight between two protagonists.
“
The dynamics of the archetypes such as Rama and his rival Ravanah indicated the struggles between two opposing forces,” Barnes said. “These experiences, of my mother telling me stories, reflect my artistic intentions.”
This was Barnes’ first encounter with contesting sides. Now, much of Barnes’ life is about duality. His name reflects only part of his heritage as a Thai-American. He is called an Asian artist, but doesn’t identify completely with that either.
“For me, it is important to explore and challenge what it means to be an Asian artist and do Asian art,” Barnes said. “Does it attach itself to a specific nationality (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc)? Or to an experience? How does the label include and exclude?”
His art seeks to explore other dualities that the public may not be sensitive to, through the use of Asian and pan-Asian iconography.
​
The puja or personal shrine is a Hindu and Buddhist concept of a personal, sacred space of worship. It offers the individual a visual encounter and a darsan, or dialogue, with a deity. Barnes takes this spiritual heritage and asks questions about the spaces that social media and online communication have created. Are these spaces shared or personal? Sacred or banal?
He applies his own cultural explorations to concepts of dualism he sees in our technologically savvy world. He uses bright colors and influences from Asian manga and superheroes to modernize his examinations, without forgetting the past.
“By creating a new interpretations, I will enforce the value of the traditional,” Barnes said. “Unlike the radical contemporary avant-garde who wanted to do away with the traditional, I have a relationship with both the old and the new.