The royal masked dance of Siam.
โขน · Kh · on
Cast by hand · Painted by you
โขน · Thailand
Put the mask on and you are not playing the god. You are the god, and everyone in the courtyard agreed to that beforehand.
Khon performs the Ramakien, Thailand's telling of the Ramayana, and it has been court art since Ayutthaya. It was danced for kings, funded by kings, and for long stretches performed only by men attached to the palace.
Demons and monkeys wear the full head. Heroes and heroines do not, so the hierarchy of the entire cast is legible before a single step is danced. That rule has not moved in centuries.
There are more than a hundred demon faces and around thirty varieties of monkey, each one fixed by colour, by crown and by the shape of the mouth. A Bangkok audience could once name every one of them across a dark courtyard by firelight.
Ramakien mural, Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok
The head is built up in layers over a clay mould, then lacquered, gilded and set with mirror glass cut by hand. A single one takes months, and the gold is real leaf, which is why the old ones in the Bangkok collections still throw light a century on.
The dancer sees through two small holes below the eye sockets and cannot speak a word. A narrator and a chorus carry the entire text. Everything left is the body, and the training for it starts in childhood.
Hanuman appears here too, white-faced, as he does in Cambodia. Same character, same epic, two neighbours who carried it differently. Set the Thai and the Khmer versions side by side and the borders of mainland Southeast Asia get a lot easier to read.
Ramakien mural, Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok
Khon survived because kings paid for it, and it nearly did not survive the twentieth century when that money thinned out. It was brought back under royal patronage and went onto the UNESCO Representative List in 2018.
That is the same year Cambodia's lakhon khol went onto the Urgent Safeguarding List, which tells you almost everything about how differently two countries have been able to carry the same story.
Both are in this collection for exactly that reason. One epic, one border, two completely different sets of faces.
You could read the entire cast from the masks alone, before a single step was danced.
Ours is plaster rather than papier-mâché, which means it will take gold paint but not gold leaf, and it will not take cut mirror unless you are considerably more ambitious than we were.
Gold and white gets you most of the way. A little green where the demons live gets you the rest.
Mask Nº 05 · Thailand · 2027
Khon
The royal masked dance of Siam.
Premium plaster, one at a time, in the house on the Siem Reap River.
No colour. The sculpt is the guide: raised edges catch the brush and hold it where it belongs.
Khon is gold leaf and cut glass. White and gold will get you close, and a little green where the demons live.
Mask per box
Pots of colour
One mask, five pots of colour, one real brush, a story card. Nestled in a foam tray inside a coloured box. Every mask in the collection ships the same way.
Cast by hand in premium plaster at the house in Siem Reap. Every carved line of the original is there in relief before a brush touches it.
Water-based colour, non-toxic, off a table with a damp cloth. The five change per mask to match the tradition it comes from.
Real fibre, real spring. The kind you keep in the pencil pot long after the mask is finished and on a shelf.
What the mask is in its own tradition, before we cast a copy in plaster and sent it out white.
Yes. Water-based, non-toxic, and it comes off skin and off a table with a damp cloth. Built for a kitchen table on a Sunday.
A story card with the history and the traditional colours, so you know what you are looking at. No paint-by-numbers. The mask ships white on purpose.
Resin is cheaper to ship and it feels like a phone case. Plaster takes paint properly, keeps a sharp edge on every carved line, and has the weight that puts a thing on a shelf instead of in a drawer.
Khon arrives in 2027. We will not put a month against it until the moulds are cut and the first run is right.
Yes, and we would like that. Minimum order is one case of four, prepaid, and you can collect from the office in Siem Reap if that suits you better than freight. Full pricing and terms sit behind a trade login. Write to us with the name of the shop and we will send a code the same day.
Khon lands in 2027. Leave your email and you will know the day it does.