Siam's Guy

Siam's Guy takes its name from a censored Thai erotic magazine of the 1960s–70s, the found material French photographer Tiane Doan na Champassak splices with his own photographs in the book that first joined his personal practice to his art of appropriation.

Published by RVB Books (Paris) in 2016 as a 72-page softcover, 18 × 26 cm, the book layers 68 surviving pages of the original magazine, salvaged from a run of 100 issues, with new black-and-white nude photographs Champassak shot himself. The magazine's original censoring devices, black bars and circular cutouts masking genitalia, are kept rather than removed, so contemporary bodies are viewed through the same apparatus of concealment that shaped the source images decades earlier.

Born in 1973, Champassak is a French artist of Asian heritage whose practice centers on appropriation, décollage, and reiteration: repurposing photographs pulled from flea markets, family albums, and print ephemera. Siam's Guy proved foundational: he later named his own imprint, Siam's Guy Books, after it, and returned to its material for Scraps (RVB Books, 2018), assembled from off-cuts of the original edition. His artist's books have entered major collections and been shown at the Barbican, London, and the ICP Museum, New York.