[ESSAY] “FOUR TWENTY PM: A.T. Apichart at the National Gallery of Thailand” by Daniel Gauss

There is a famous painting by Caravaggio of St Jerome translating the Bible. He is old, gaunt, and frail, and he works with a skull on the table. The skull may be there to invoke a constant awareness of his looming death, providing the pressure Jerome needs to complete his great task. He has waited until the end to undertake this work. Now old, grey, and frail, he is in a race against time to finish something that perhaps only he can truly accomplish.

^{Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio). Saint Jerome Writing. c. 1605–1606. Oil on canvas, 112 × 157 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.}

For Jerome, time is both a limitation and a glorious opportunity to create something remarkable that he believes will benefit the future, a translation of an allegorical text about love, mercy, forgiveness, and humane growth into a language that others can more easily access. The skull reminds him: “Get this done. That is why you were here. Complete it, and then die.”

Awareness of mortality infuses time with meaning and creative potential.

Awareness of mortality infuses time with meaning and creative potential. For Jerome, the nature of time changes and deepens as it allows for the creation of something that may soften or extinguish the sting of death, because of the nature of the work it makes possible. Death both recedes as a fear and returns as a force that cultivates a deep desire to serve others through creation.

At the National Gallery of Thailand in Bangkok, one might read these curious sentences on a wall in Gallery 7: “The more my paintings increase, / The more my time in this world decreases.” The quotation is from A.T. Apichart, a Thai artist whose one man show “Four Twenty PM” was recently exhibited in that gallery. The show was chiefly composed of black and white watercolour paintings of numerous individual wristwatches. In light of Caravaggio’s painting, what might Apichart be suggesting?

These are timepieces that make time appear benign. A watch makes time seem eternal and circular.

I suspect that Apichart is painting a form of time that does not exert transformative pressure, a less sacred and more secular conception of time. These are timepieces that make time appear benign. A watch makes time seem eternal and circular. It separates time from the body and renders it entirely external and ostensibly objective.

This form of time helps one forget mortality in order to focus on schedules, chores, and deadlines. If these watches imply any form of pressure, it is the pressure to survive, to compete, and to meet the most basic obligations and goals of everyday life.

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Unlike Caravaggio’s Jerome, who feels a sense of urgency and finds a way to embrace and use it, Apichart seems to assess his continual diminishment. His output increases, his remaining hours shrink. Ostensibly, though, this is a very dispassionate description. One can imagine him shrugging and saying, jovially, “Yes, that painting cost me x days of my life.”

He describes a situation in which his work is an expenditure of time that leaves him with less time for life and for future work. His output increases, his remaining hours shrink. Does he implicitly yearn for a sense of urgency? Is he implying that his output is as mechanistic as the objects he depicts? Perhaps he is simply stating the obvious reality that each of us encounters in our work, for example: “The more I teach, the less time I have for the rest of my life.” It appears to be a description without judgement, without emotional response. The quotation makes him a kind of Caravaggio and Jerome combined, both the artist and the subject of the art.

Is he suggesting that art is futile, that art is sacrifice, that art is expenditure? Or is art always the visible evidence of disappearing time? If so, in this exchange is art of equal value to the time expended? Is it of greater value? Is the task for each of us to use time to create something of greater value than time itself? Is Apichart working with time while Jerome uses it to fuel desire?

What could be of greater value than time? Family love, a search for justice, meaningful labour, acts of kindness, humane development, creative output. Perhaps the use of time is redeemed through art, just as Jerome believed that translating the Bible redeemed his final years. It may be that Apichart is suggesting that the real core of human life lies in our striving to find actions more valuable than our time, actions that should form a seamless part of life rather than a frantic gallop towards the finish line.

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Literally, Apichart is painting wristwatches, human made mechanisms that provide our illusory sense of time, a mechanised metaphor for the ephemeral. They give the ephemeral a practical impact, a more concrete assessment of transience that makes it appear rational and orderly. Like Jerome, he is also taking the ephemeral and using it to produce something real and enduring. Art becomes a kind of quid pro quo: one gives life some time, some portion of one’s mortality, and receives in return something permanent and meaningful to share with others.

Of course, Apichart is also a Thai artist, and so one might be tempted to wonder whether a subtle political message is present as well. All of these watches are frozen at a moment, each at a different moment. Democracy, too, has been frozen for a long time in Thailand. He might be suggesting that political life in Thailand resembles these beautiful and finely crafted watches, which have stopped.

Yet inherent in his remark is a quiet irony. His paintings are overwhelmingly of wristwatches, and the act of painting the measurement of time brings him closer to death. Why, then, would a person paint one watch after another, knowing that each painting moves him closer to death?

Perhaps it is a demonstration of inner development expressed through technical and creative skill. Watercolour is among the most accessible and least elitist of painting materials, and thus it seems a fitting medium for the subject, as nearly everyone can possess some form of watch. Still, to master this most egalitarian of media requires well developed inner qualities of patience, focus, and resolve in order to produce the remarkable visual results that Apichart achieves.

Watercolour is unforgiving. A single misplaced stroke can dissolve an entire form. One is essentially guiding coloured water across paper with a horsehair brush, allowing it to be absorbed and to dry. To render the gleam of metal, the distortion of glass, or the crisp edge of a dial hand requires an extraordinary degree of control. Watercolour demands patience, steadiness, and restraint that approaches a trance like concentration. A perfectly clean line in watercolour is not merely a technical achievement, it is evidence of a demanding inner composure.

Apichart may therefore be asserting that intense self development allows for breathtaking artistic technique, and that this constitutes his own redemption of time. Such an insight resonates with certain traditions in Asian art, where technique is inseparable from the discipline of the self. In literati painting, the brushstroke is not merely representation but revelation. It reveals the moral and spiritual condition of the painter.

One cannot feign equanimity. It appears in the line. The image allows the viewer to recognise the inner state that made the work possible in the first place. It is not merely that the artist possesses a high degree of self possession, but that he exercises self command combined with a capacity for engagement.

In this sense, a heightened state of being may be demonstrated in this series of paintings, and this possibility allows us to reinterpret Apichart’s two lines. He is filling his time with a higher level of attention and focus, and perhaps this is the remarkable way in which he chooses to use his time, through such heightened concentration and awareness. His remark, after all, does not convey horror. It is a dispassionate assessment.

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^{Nessun Dorma (None Shall Sleep); Image: artist’s IG}

By painting watches, the artist may be staging a confrontation with measurable time itself. The discipline required to render the watches becomes a form of self mastery, an existential choice. The “price” of the work is time, offered up deliberately. The watch, a device that measures duration but cannot measure meaning, becomes ironic. In perfecting its image, the artist converts mechanical time into something that gestures beyond time. What cannot account for creation or transcendence becomes the very instrument through which creation or transcendence is attempted.

Apichart’s watches, then, may be less about horology than about his own self control. Each painting demonstrates mastery over light, reflection, surface, and time bound material. A watch is a difficult subject precisely because it is reflective. It validates the existence of the world while measuring its passing. To paint a watch is to paint reflected reality, a reality already mediated by glass and glare.

The artist is not painting a watch so much as he is painting the limits of what can be seen: how light reveals, how it penetrates, how it fractures on polished surfaces. Apichart is painting light again and again, and the wristwatch becomes a kind of surface upon which light plays across the watercolour paper.

The repetition of a single object inevitably recalls the conceptual practice of Peter Dreher, who painted an empty glass each day for decades, or On Kawara, who painted the date each day for decades. Kawara’s works were not about the date as information. They were about survival. The painting testified: “I was alive on this day.”

Is this artist thus similar to On Kawara? Each watch records not only time in the abstract but the artist’s continued existence. The viewer, confronted with dozens of nearly identical timepieces, begins to sense what is not being represented: inner turmoil, spiritual growth, and the daily demands of life. The watches simply indicate continuation. They are merely watches, not intended to express an inner state, yet they are imbued with the artist’s interior life and self mastery. We recognise our desire to see that in works of art. We do not want merely paintings of watches.

These watercolours also reveal something about their wearers. The different types of watches clearly reveal the existence of a social and economic order. When we see a Rolex that may lie far beyond our economic capacity ever to purchase, what do we see? Injustice? Opportunity? The wonders of consumerism? The waste of luxury goods? The empty desire to wear prestige on one’s wrist?

Watches are not neutral objects. They are chosen and worn. They signal taste, aspiration, and wealth. A luxury watch can announce economic power. A cartoon watch can signal nostalgia or irony. The wrist becomes a small stage for self presentation.

By painting a range of watches, from elite brands to playful and inexpensive ones, Apichart also quietly maps a social hierarchy. The exhibition becomes a gallery not only of timepieces but of economic identities. Each watch implies a wearer. Each wearer implies a position within a stratified world. To what extent can we predict what a person is like simply by looking at their watch?

In painting the same type of object repeatedly, the artist also creates a confrontation with the economic reality of the world and with the way it fragments human experience and unevenly allocates resources. The works therefore operate on several levels: as secular memento mori, as exercises in self discipline, and as documents of social order.

Jerome and the man wearing the Rolex experience time differently. In Caravaggio, the skull demands that one embrace death and create. In Apichart, the watches suggest that one continues without thinking about death. One continues working. Yet Apichart continues exchanging hours for form. He continues documenting both his own self possession and a world in which time is universal but lived unequally. Apichart, like all artists, converts disappearance into presence.

Finally, “420” was originally a code word for marijuana, used so that American users could refer to drugs without attracting police attention. By calling the exhibition “Four Twenty PM”, Apichart introduces a subtle subversive layer. The watches themselves are hyper disciplined and meticulously rendered objects, symbols of mechanised time and mortality governed by a denial of death. The title, by contrast, evokes secrecy, indulgence, and subjective experience, a dilation of time, a counter cultural temporality in which ordinary time loosens its grip.

The exhibition thus becomes a meditation on competing temporalities: the strict and visible time by which we live, and the hidden or coded time of perception, play, ritual, and creative action. Like Jerome confronting the skull, Apichart confronts time itself. Yet in his studio discipline and subversion coexist. Each painting measures life while simultaneously acknowledging the freedom that lies beyond the clock and, perhaps, even the possibility of change within the social structure that reveals itself on a person’s wrist.

^{A.T. Apichart}

^{How to cite: Gauss, Daniel. “FOUR TWENTY PM: A.T. Apichart at the National Gallery of Thailand.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 6 Mar. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/03/06/four-twenty-pm.}

Daniel Gauss was born in Chicago and studied at UW–Madison and Columbia University. He has worked in the field of education for over twenty years and has published non-fiction in 3 Quarks Daily, The Good Men Project, Daily Philosophy and E: The Environmental Magazine, among other platforms. He has also published fiction and poetry. Daniel currently lives and teaches in China. See his writing portfolio for more information. [All contributions by Daniel Gauss.]