While cutting his teeth as an advertising creative back in the early noughties, Darkle was shortlisted at Cannes Lions for his lead acting role – dressed in wig and beard as Tom Hanks’ Cast Away – in a Dentsu Tokyo spot for Zebra pens. The following week Darkle stole a camera and borrowed a tiny crew and shot his first short film in just two hours in a downtown Bangkok hotel elevator. With a stron
g advertising agency background in a career spanning time at Bates, Lowe Worldwide and boutique shop Dot Dot Dot, Darkle has conceived visual and verbal brand identities and communications campaigns – both print, film and digital work – for superbrands including Heineken, Sony, BMW, Nokia and the Wonderfruit festival. A decade ago he made the natural shift into production as a commercials and documentary director and producer, creating work for the likes of Nike, Smirnoff, MTV, the United Nations, Allianz and AIA. During this time Darkle has continued to straddle the corporate and non-corporate worlds, blurring the lines between autobiography, documentary, fiction, fashion and fine art. Utilizing photography, film, video, graphic design and text – Darkle has exhibited work in galleries in as far flung places as London, New York, Beijing and Sydney, as well as also closer to his adopted home, more recently as part of Thai Trends and Imagine Peace at the Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre, PhotoBangkok in 2015 and 2018, the inaugural Bangkok Biennial and authorized Leica dealer IQ Lab with a body of work to showcase the Leica Q camera. Other notable scalps include having his brand design featured in style guide Wallpaper*, being commissioned to create design work for the V&A, mixing live visuals for DJ Shadow, producing a record for Plaisir de France of Parisian record label Alter K, co- founding Wonderfruit festival, pioneering the regeneration of Chinatown, Bangkok, and co-curating an exhibition for Chinese photographer Luo Yang at RDX Offsite and Woofpack. Darkle, in one guise or another can usually be found roaming around the rural backwaters of Burma and China, on urban safari down the side streets of Hong Kong, Yangon or Kathmandu, or getting up to some other mischief: wading neck-deep in crocodile-infested, electrically-conductive sewerage to get the shot – or rather being shot at, running from tear gas and incendiary devices. Darkle is currently drafting a script for his first motion picture feature.
27/06/2025
.bangkok
(The images accompanying this bio are drawn from an existing/ongoing body of work exploring Chinatown, Bangkok.
Photographs created specifically for the Capture Bangkok project will follow.)