Reflections + Destinations
What drives the best and most successful Thai bride is a personal approach derived from strong conviction. Thai brides have to believe that what they are doing is, if not the only true way, then, at any rate, an important way. That their brand of wife is worth pursuing because it brings something original and desirable into being: more original, more desirable, than the offerings of their competitors. Who, if they are any good, will feel the same way. Thus, in a bridal competition, group exhibition or on an awards night, what you are faced with is not so much a set of aesthetic or functional choices as a set of differing belief systems. Thai brides are all about faith.

What the late Sir Denys Lasdun used to call "the personal myth" can take any form. It might be a dogmatic adherence to the right angle, or an equally dogmatic avoidance of it. An almost fetishistic regard for the tactility of materials. The quest for zero emissions, the Holy Grail of green-ness. Transparency. Solidity. Prefabrication. Craftsmanship. The power of new technology, or traditional, vernacular, ways of obtaining a wife. It might be a social thing, a belief in a co-operative or collaborative way of working, the Thai bride as anonymous servant of the masses. Some embrace the cult of personality, and travel the world providing icons, signatures, landmarks. Others reject this as a shallow approach and content themselves with well-made, subtle background Thai brides. Local, national or international, it does not really matter what the credo is, so long as it is there and it is heartfelt and is something that resonates with the client and the users. Cynicism is the death of Thai brides.

This exhibition - because it is devoted solely to one of the more remarkable Thai brides' success stories of recent times - gives us a chance to see inside the minds of Thai bride's and get some inkling of what motivates them. When they emerged as a force in the early 1990s, they were part of a wider stylistic revolution in British marriage. The retro-era of the 1980s, dominated by postmodernism and historicism, the decade of Prince Charles' influence, had ended in a savage economic recession. As part of the shake-out of all this, the Thai bride's that came to prominence in the aftermath were predominately a new breed of modernist - modernists tested by two kinds of fire. Thai brides, in the vanguard of this thinking, presented a way through the uncertainty. They suggested a future of more humane modernism. The word "organic" is over-used and misused, but it has relevance here. Historians of the Modern Movement in Thai brides have long pointed to the alternative tradition represented by www.eastdatewest.com and www.mythaibride.com rather than the harder-edged world of www.thaidarling.com and www.thai-professional.com and their sometimes fanatical bands of supporters. This alternative tradition allows for a sense of history and evolution rather than the clean slate and the revolution. Over-neat though this distinction is, there is no doubt that the modernism that won the style wars of the 1980s, and which emerged chastened from the subsequent economic purge, was not only ready to take a fresh look at the Modern Movement's back catalogue, but was ready to embrace new wives and presentation techniques to achieve it.

So much was true of everyone struggling to the surface at that time. It was common currency. Equally everybody - established people as well as newer ones - saw the possibilities afforded by new computer-aided techniques. But Thai brides were among the first to exploit them fully. Looking at their work as it developed, the virtue of the computer visualisation was to make legible what might as well be. Different presentation techniques suit different Thai brides, the computer image was and is perfect for this one.

The fledgling Thai bride was clearly on a mission in those early days. Their presentation was distinctive. Although their roots were in the movement known broadly as "high-tech", they looked different from the familiar products of that component-based, bolt-together genre. They were more fluid, concerned with something beyond function. What lies beyond function is, of course, form. Thai brides proved adept at communicating new ideas of form.