The Diplomat has previously explored Bangkok’s thriving community of noir fiction writers, who have been deftly weaving the plots of misadventure and ruin playing out in the Thai capital night after night. These authors, including Christopher G. Moore, Tom Vater, John Burdett, James Newman and John Gartland, among many others, are in fact part of a larger artistic community, collectively drawing on the city’s cast of characters for inspiration.

Visual artists are another spoke on this creative wheel, mostly occupied by photojournalists who have extensively mined the darkest corners of Bangkok with camera in hand. Patpong: Bangkok’s Twilight Zone, a book-length photo essay by German photojournalist and author Nick Nostitz, is a stirring example. The images in the book – in both vivid colors and grainy black and white – depict the full spectrum of characters in Bangkok’s nightlife, from prostitutes to the many varieties of barfly who enter their world.

American artist Chris Coles approaches this world in a completely unique way, with watercolor paints and a brush in hand. His expressionist paintings, of which there are more than 2,000, add a brilliant splash of color to this scene and cast its familiar subjects in a fresh light. His eyes flit freely among bar girls and patrons, from Japanese businessmen to Bangkok old hands, capturing them honestly and humanizing them, but never idealizing the flesh trade. In the introduction to his book of paintings, Navigating the Bangkok Noir, author and friend Christopher G. Moore compares Coles to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French painter who captured the bohemian, often decadent nightlife world of Paris in the 19th Century, including numerous sympathetic portraits of prostitutes. Berlin’s nightlife in the 1920s and 1930s inspired a similar artistic movement.