Isabelle Zhao, Mongkol23 Images
At first glance, the photos in Mongkol – a series of portraits by Isabelle Zhao of the boys who frequent Rawai, a family-run Muay Thai gym in Thailand – don’t look like they’re documenting a combat sport at all. There’s an ease and casual intimacy with which Zhao’s subjects linger near one another. In one photo, two young men squat together on the grass, one holding onto another’s shoulders in a clinch; in another, a group are captured in the mid-run, their bodies blurred with motion, frozen in time. The fragments of combat exist elsewhere: in the picture of a punching bag, or a camera zoomed in on the sweat and strain of someone’s back.
For Zhao, Muay Thai can’t exist without the quiet moments captured in these images. “When you watch a fight, the focus is obviously on the violence taking place in the ring. But everything surrounding it – the before and after, the in-between – is just awash in care.” In one of her photos, two young men stand with their backs to the camera, arms interlinked, each with a hand on the other’s head, as if this contact grounds them. Even the clinches that Zhao captured are more nuanced than just moments of combat; it’s impossible to ignore the closeness of the fighters, their unbroken eye contact. “From a photographic standpoint, I was interested in the visual fine line between violence and care, particularly during clinches. In some of the photos I took of the boys’ training, it’s indistinguishable whether they’re embracing or fighting.”
It’s in these moments where fighting seems to lead so naturally to tenderness, through which the photos in Mongkol challenge not only the conceptions surrounding Muay Thai as a sport, but masculinity more broadly. In telling me about her subjects, Zhao stresses the fact that, “at the end of the day, they’re just boys”. Whether captured in repose in a fighting stance, or wearing a ceremonial headband (Mongkol, through which Zhao names these photos), there’s no real sense of posturing towards a specific ideal of masculinity. “I just don’t think masculinity has to be as one-dimensional as we’ve made it out to be,” Zhao says. “These boys are so unabashed about their full display of human emotion. They’re gritty, tough fighters in the ring, and shy, playful boys outside of it.” For Zhao, this revelation came about through the time that she spent in the gym herself; she had been training in Muay Thai herself from a month before her first visit to Rawai, looking for not just a gym but “a second home, […] a place where I could carve out a little life, relish in a slow and steady routine.”
The gym, Zhao says, offers a place that transcends language barriers, which Muay Thai itself also does. “The sport is a wordless form of communication that parallels the care and affection between the boys who practice it.” This affection comes from the community fostered in the gym as well as the sport itself, something that Zhao says is a requirement for Muay Thai – “you wouldn’t last going it alone” – and that she puts an emphasis on in seeing how the boys train. “They’re pushing each other at the end of their daily three-hour-long training sessions, offering a supportive shoulder after a loss, just relishing in each other’s presence every step of the way.” This feels almost directly visualised in one of Zhao’s photos: two boys together, one lifting another up on his shoulders, each looking directly at the camera.
The last action before a fight in Muay Thai is a trainer removing the mongkol headband from each of the fighters; this act has a meaning steeped in ritual. It acts as a way of taking the fighters from the spiritual realm to the physical one, a kind of preparation for combat. More than that, its removal is often punctuated by a prayer or blessing from the trainer who removes it. This final moment of protection exemplifies how Muay Thai as a sport is rooted in ideas of care and community. It also speaks to Zhao’s photographs of the training done by the boys at Rawai, moments where “the line between violence and care blurs completely”, allowing both the sport and its practitioners to occupy both of those spaces simultaneously. As Zhao puts it, when describing the boys at the gym: “their soft underbellies don’t discount their strength.”
Visit the gallery above for a closer look.
