Jan Jath’s second home is Bangkok. whenever he travels from Suvarnabhumi airport along the highway to the city center or heads north toward Khon Kaen to visit one of his workshops, he is fascinated by the huge billboards by the wayside.
Most of these billboards have oversize advertising stuck on them. Yet they are thoroughly cleaned whenever the campaign changes. “That is the moment that appeals to me,” says Jan Kath. “The normally so brightly colored billboards which foist their consumerist messages on the passing public are suddenly completely naked. You can see that they are welded together from simple metal plates and can often still discern faint glints of color and some old advertising slogans in squiggly Thai writing, which the sun has burned into the background. The associations with a rag rug were obvious to me. ”Jan Kath commissioned a photographer and gave him the task of photographing blank billboards throughout the country. These pictures served as the design template for the BILLBOARD collection. The pixel data from the photos was rendered knot by knot in a high-precision process so that even the finest color nuances in gentle pastel tones were brought out. To do this, the carpet makers in the workshops in Nepal use Tibetan highland wool combed and spun by hand, fine Chinese silk and Himalayan nettles.
