The Art of Clinch With Diesel
Kru Diesel is one of Thailand's elite krus of the Muay Khao, forward pressing knee style, an attack that often culminates in the skills of the clinch, a full art & system of grappling found with great diversity, uniquely in Thailand and its heritage of fighting. This photo essay looks to cut across that art and reveal some of its hidden Nature. These photos were taken during filming as part of the Preserve The Legacy Documentary project. Best viewed on desktop.
The art of Thailand's clinch begins with the hands...but not that you use them. It's a wonderful anathema that you can see the skill of a Muay Khao clinch fighter in the regular degree of relaxation in their hands. The hands express our instrumentality toward the world, they are our ultimate tools. In clinch it is our weight, our position, our relationship that determines our outcomes. Not our tools. If we think in terms of instruments, we lose.
The Other is an instrument that we play. We find the balance within them. The ironies of clinch is that it takes enormous strength and endurance in training to learn, to walk that staircase of skills, but strength and endurance we regularly do not use.
All of that falls away, as feeling grows.
There are moments of strength, but they are notes.
Position wins.
The Body is a vector of desires and intentions.
Think about that. Sinews create trajectories of an intensity, sometimes knotted, sometimes set free, but it is the frame of them, their matrix, that determines their outcomes, unto our feeling for the Other.
Pressures create potentialities, stalling Time, in order to be released.
There is a psychology to those pressures, not just a geometry.
And there is a waiting.
Our hands are no longer instruments, but sensing devices.
Posture impregnates moments and seals. It is our architecture.
The Time knows the frame.
And then we explode.
This shoot features Kru Diesel a legend of clinch, the Thai stadium fighter Sirichai Klong Suan Plu Resort Gym and historic female fighter Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu
You can find Kru Diesel on Instagram here, and Sirichai on Instagram here and Sylvie here.
The sale of prints of these photos is 100% non-profit to us, you can order gallery quality prints here. Any profit from prints goes to Kru Diesel/Sirichai. Many are extremely high resolution files so very large gallery quality prints can be produced for commercial spaces. If you are a gym and would like a high quality very large print I can work out a very good price.
