Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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CHIANGMAI’S MYSTERY METAL MONSTERS
They’re all around you, but where did they come from?

by John Cadet

I don’t know where they’ve come from, but there’s no doubt where they’re going to - pretty well everywhere, if Eric Jupp’s to be credited: and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be.

I’ve been in Chiang Mai some years now, so nothing much surprises me, particularly where the tourism business is concerned. I must admit though that the gleaming metal monsters knocked me sideways.

What on earth…? What in the name of….? Did you ever see anything like it…?” I found myself asking. And I still haven’t entirely got to the bottom of the matter. There’s still a bit of a mystery involved.

Let me explain. This is a couple of weeks back, nice evening, strolling along the Moonmuang Road, just before the cafe called Kafe and on the way to the Montri Hotel, a couple of minutes from the Thapae Gate. I had an appointment but was early, time to spare - part of the reason for strolling, when normally I shoot around on my trusty Honda, and you don’t rubberneck when you’re motor-cycling in Chiang Mai, not if you want to stay healthy. Which is another explanation for having failed to see the monsters before.

Well, there I was, as I say, the moat to my left, various establishments to my right - noodle shop, a temple, a car hire outfit, tour guide office… and a little hole in the wall shop-house with the name ‘Noi’ above it.

And standing just outside…

I’m at a bit of a loss to know how to describe it but let me try. A most gi-normous, intricately fashioned, infinitely menacing, hundred percent metal humanoid monster, glittering in the light of evening, splinters of evening light glancing off a myriad polished surfaces - seven feet tall if an inch, weighing a ton, and with a laser weapon of some description in its iron grip. Next to it was a creature of a similar size and disposition - and looking further I saw the interior of the shop was full of companion pieces… a knight-like warrior mounted on a metal charger, sword raised furiously: an extraordinarily delicately-fashioned sinuous dragon, four-feet long and marvellously life-like: and still in the business of blood and slaughter, an assortment of smaller but no less convincingly-designed helicopters, tanks, submarines, robots… And at the back of the shop - what could be more incongruous? - a set of Buddha heads in what appeared to be traditional materials, looking down with the customary pacific smile and hooded eyes on this array of metallic mayhem.

If it was the size and unconstrained menace of the figures at the front of the shop that first took my attention, it was the extraordinary workmanship of some of their companion pieces inside that won my admiration. Everything on display - Space-wars monsters, dragons, humanoids, helicopters - was a composite, with plates, bolts, pistons, screws, chains, circuit boards, wires, and a myriad other manufactured what-have-yous, welded together making up the whole. But so beautifully-fashioned and engineered, these miscellaneous bits of metal, that the final figure was a work of art in itself. And I mean just that. Some of the bigger pieces were remarkable arts forms.

Well, wanting to know who was responsible, determined to get to the bottom of it if I could, I got a card from one of the shop-assistants. “Eric and Noi Jupp,” it said. “Retail and Wholesale Thai Exporters, Manufacturers of carved bamboo heads, powder wood dragons, lizards and birds: and” - there we were - “scrap metal robots”…among other things. Their showroom was off the Hangdong Road, down a turnoff, in that very busy handicrafts centre of Ban Tawai, some fifteen kilometres south of Chiang Mai. I phoned, made an appointment, and a couple of days later drove out to see them.

Now I think I can claim to be no slouch when it comes to dishing out the spoken word - and I don’t need a glass in my hand, either. But Eric Jupp is in a class of his own. Tallish, mild-mannered, born in Bournemouth some fifty years ago and with the slightest trace of a south-western English accent to testify to it, he started in telling me about his odyssey at around ten in the morning, and at midday, when his wife Noi reminded him they had an appointment, he was still going strong…something of a force of nature, evidently, as his story - fascinating in itself - indicates.

Much of his working life had been spent in Sweden, he told me. He’d set up a business there that was successful enough, but life-threatening in the hours he put into it, day in, day out.

Gardening, gardening accessories, a massive catalogue of plants and seeds, from all over the world. And I did everything, buying, researching, selling, photography. You see, you can’t run a business in Sweden and make real money. The taxation makes it impossible. Did you hear about the author of the Pippi Longstreet books? At one point she found she was paying 101% tax on what she was earning. 101%! They had to make a law change, specially. But that’s how it is there. You don’t dare employ anyone, either - welfare, pension rights and so on: they’re prohibitive. So I did it all myself, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. With, of course, the inevitable breakdown. The doctor told me, ‘Look, you’re an idiot. You’re killing yourself, and all for what? Go on like this, and the next time I see you you’ll be in a body bag.’

Obviously, he’d had to change, and about this time he’d read the book, ‘Awaken the Giant Within’ and that galvanised him. He sold up in Sweden, came out to Thailand.

More or less penniless…I was teaching the children of well-to-do people English. I’d been here before, on and off.. Photography - working on my catalogues… Picking seeds as well. I could get enough off one tree in a morning to pay my air fare. That’s how I met Noi. She was my translator…”

About five years ago, married by this time, they set up their first shop in Ban Tawai - four square meters of working and display space. You could hardly start smaller. Their speciality had been dragons. They’d seen the villages in the North where they turn out wooden dragons, one after another, an unvarying sequence, they way they’ve always been made. What Jupp and his staff did differently was to offer the customers not what they - the makers - came up with, but precisely what their customers (who now come to them from all over the world) ask for.

We tell them ‘You let us know what you want, and if we can we’ll make it for you.’”

So they’ve grown by leaps and bounds, thanks mainly to the dragons, but also by creating novelties of an extraordinary variety: water wheels, fountains and other garden accessories, Swedish traditional Christmas candle-holders, Buddha heads, innumerable items from bamboo, for which they’ve concocted their own preservative treatment. All this with craftsmen more or less straight off the street: Jupp’s driver, members of the extended family, someone who’d heard there might be a job going. A Ruam Katanu drop-out, even - you know, one of those corpse-collector people.

They’re amazing. I tell them what we want and leave them to it. They work by themselves, getting better and better all the time. They’ve got patience and such exceptional skills, all you have to do is give them the chance to develop them, and they do.

That’s how it was too, evidently, with their monster-maker.

Now I have to confess that I’m strongly tempted here to refer to this even more exceptionally talented but elusive employee as Bunbury - but let’s call him Somporn, or Pu for short, because that’s how he’s known to his employers.

This is the person I’d come to interview, to get some pictures of - if possible in the act of creation. Because I’m convinced the fellow’s a genius. You have only to see the scrap metal monsters - particularly the mounted knight and the fantastic dragon of the Moonmuang shop-house - to know that whoever fashioned them is a master-craftsman. Not surprisingly, though, Jupp and his wife are only guardedly informative as to who this prodigy is, and where he works. After all, as they explained, the handicraft industry in the North may be conservative, but no-one’s slow when it comes to ‘borrowing’ a successful innovation - or poaching a craftsman.

What I learned was that Pu is a cousin of Noi’s, working (before ‘discovery’), as a Lampang car mechanic. He’d had a side-line cum hobby, fashioning cartoon characters, mainly Japanese, out of scrap metal. It didn’t earn him significant money, but they’d encouraged him, suggested small items they might be able to sell, and he produced for them. And went on producing - and what he came up with grew in size and artistry as his confidence (and no doubt his financial return) increased proportionately. Until he’s reached the stage where he’s got himself an international clientele and someone recently suggested he should come to Los Angeles - they’d put him on as an installation artist, and he’d probably be an immediate (and very well-rewarded) sensation

Nothing came of that, apparently. Pu may be exceptionally gifted, but he’s a small-town boy and translating to America might not all be good news. So he’s still in Lampang - apparently - producing the Darth Varders, the R2D2s, the knights and dragons and all the rest of it to order: not the starving artist in the garret, obviously (one of his medium-range metal monsters sets you back B.75,000 or thereabouts, and the bigger pieces are probably in the six-figure range)…as I say, not the starving artist in his garret but, paradoxically, the successful and rapidly improving creative master, known personally only to his nearest and dearest.

Just how long he’s going to remain that way is anyone’s guess. Mine is that sooner or later someone’s going to stumble on him in - or more likely, trace him to - his Lampang hide-away, and the game will be up.

Name in lights and all that goes with that.

For the moment, though, the mystery remains. The master-craftsman stays hidden, only his scrap-metal masterpieces speaking to us on his behalf - particularly those massive and menacing monsters of the shop on the Moonmuang Road.

If you see them I think you’ll agree that for all their iron-bound silence, they’re remarkably eloquent.

Text and images © J.M. Cadet 2003

(The author has written extensively about Thailand and Southeast Asia over the last three decades, and a new book - The Mountains of Sacrifice: Chiang Mai’s Ceremonies of Death and Regeneration - is due out at the end of the year).