Zoe: How did you end up in Thailand?
Kane: We were initially living in Vietnam. I was finishing up filming a video there when we got the boot from our house. We spent a few weeks living in different hotels around Saigon before I did a ‘Martin Sheen’ and lost my mind. Vietnam will do that to you. I then applied for an art residency in Bangkok. We knew someone who lived in Pattaya – which is the haven for greasy old men in Thailand – and we stayed on a mattress there for a while before upgrading to a bed in Bangkok. Sadly, the art residency fell through, so we just worked on growing GlueBag and trying to better ourselves. It was a weird period at first as we were both sort of going through a reality check and dealing with a lot of issues. To be honest I didn’t know much about Thailand other than what I learnt from a skate trip I had been on the previous year. I’m happy things went a bit tits up in Vietnam; I find the Thai smile more seductive.

Zoe: What is the skate scene like there and how does it differ from other countries?
Kane: The skate scene here is tight. There are a lot of different crews and pockets of skaters and a good mix of different styles. I’ve found that Thai skaters are very welcoming and there’s less of an ego amongst the skaters than in a lot of other countries.

Zoe: What is youth culture like there as a whole?
Kane: It varies so much. You see a lot of teens completely lost on their phones, more so than anywhere else I’ve visited. There’s a big identity crisis with some of the youth who just seem to imitate whatever is popular at that moment. On the flip side, you get a lot of boys that get into racing customised motorbikes. It’s sort of like the boy-racer thing from the UK but the Thai style is no helmets, super skinny wheels and motorbikes that sound like hedge-trimmers on speed. Lean is quite big here. Pharmacies are really relaxed and the police can’t piss test you. I’d say the skateboarders here are pretty relaxed and do their own thing like in most countries. It’s a big country and I’m just going by what I see in the city so as far as youth culture as a whole, its pretty much like any other major city, ‘same same’, just a bit more chaotic.

Zoe: What is it that fascinates you about the people and personalities in the skating scene?
Kane: It’s a community for eccentric, characteristic outsiders. A lot of the time it feels like kids who want to belong to a community that isn’t as socially accepted as football or basketball. Skateboarding attracts the weirdest of people and Thailand is no different. Thai culture is all about keeping the harmony so it’s interesting to be around locals who question certain values and have personalities similar to friends who come from a completely different culture.

“It’s sort of like the boy-racer thing from the U.K but the Thai style is no helmets, super skinny wheels and motorbikes that sound like hedge-trimmers on speed.”

Zoe: You’ve mentioned that some of your photos could be considered quite taboo in Thailand, how would you say this has impacted your art?
Kane: I wouldn’t say its impacted my art or photography at all. Older Thai people can be quite conservative and social media is so huge here it has limited me to how much I can display online without the worry that someone’s great grandmother will see them bonging in an alleyway. My personal art addresses a lot of sexuality and anxiety subject matters, which differs a lot from Thai contemporary art, but the Thai skaters seem to find woodcuts of my naked ass amusing. However, I was once talked out of producing a run of decks because the graphic was too pornographic. I bought a bunch of old black and white nude photos from a guy at a market but Thai law forbids pornography so I had to adapt a different graphic.

Paul Smith Jeans £235

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