Mazzalovo visited the Kudichin Museum in Thonburi and was perplexed by one poster that showed the evolutionary facial progression of a Portuguese soldier into the gentleness of a Siamese person. “You have this kind of morphing of a serious Portuguese soldier’s portrait into the face of a Siamese man with softer expression,” he said. The museum trip piqued his curiosity, which led him to delve deeper into the comparative analysis of two poster images in Southeast Asian museums respectively in Bangkok and Phnom Penh.

A French-Italian brand expert and Fellow at Sasin School of Management, Dr. Gérald Mazzalovo, discussed a chapter of his forthcoming book on Exoticism, “Exotic Faces: Asian Examples of Ethnic and Ideological Homogenization,” during a research seminar held at Sasin. His methodology involved employing structural semiotics and the notion of exoticism to analyze the contrasting elements depicted in the 2 documents.

Photo Courtesy of Kudichin Museum: Siam Portuguese Origin

Analyzing the documents further, Mazzalovo remarked, “This is obviously an evolutionary process. It’s the genetic evolution of the descendant mixing more and more with the Siamese people, He mentioned that Akihiko Goto, designer of the artwork, after having chosen the first portrait of a Portuguese soldier and the last one of an uncle of the current museum owner, used software to create a visual sequence illustrating the progressive evolution of the Portuguese facial features into the Siamese ones. “The meaning is that you have a minority which is very proud of the Portuguese origin but at the same time is proud to be Thai,” Mazzalovo said. Following his encounter with the poster at the Kudichin Museum, Mazzalovo sought out a contrasting image to the Portuguese-to-Siamese transformation. He found it at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, which documented the Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979. The museum was a former secondary school renamed Security Prison 21, where prisoners were tortured and executed. Mazzalovo explained that the photos depict a haunting reality as the prisoners were executed after the photo shot. The photographer, Nhem Ein, instructed the prisoners not to smile, resulting in images that failed to capture the expressive power of their eyes—the most telling feature of the human face.

Photo of Tuol Sleng prisoners, courtesy of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

“They are not individuals anymore, it’s dehumanizing them all in these big panels where one is equivalent to another one, a bulk of human beings,” he said. Compared to the Kudichin poster that symbolized life, the flow of generation to generation, the Tuol Sleng photo panel depicts death. “They kill them even before they kill them… forcing them to write confessions, denouncing one another and mistreating them physically until their execution: annihilating all traces of humanity: ultimate horror,” he said. The remaining sections of Mazzalovo’s book will explore the semantics of exoticism, its influence on society, and brands with analytical tools for practical implementation. The book concludes with a reflection on the end of traditional exoticism and the rise of Exoverse.