NURTURE GAIA Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB)
Various venues, Bangkok, 2024 - In Greek mythology, Gaia is a goddess who offers life and nourishment. She has evolved in many forms and is revered as a mother, nurturer and giver of life. References to her have been found in temples, shrines, statues and paintings. In prehistoric times, she was worshiped as the feminine earth mother related to fertility and agriculture; in Hinduism, she is the earth as a living organism symbolized as mother earth Prithvi; in Southeast Asia, she takes on the form of Phra Mae Thorani found frequently in Buddhist scriptures and temples.
Gaia hypothesis, which proposed that the earth is a living being that sustains life, has received much attention. With climate change, pandemics, war and the destruction of the environment caused by Homo sapiens, there is critical awareness that humanity as an integral part of Earth, can no longer survive. When nature is defiled, people and animals ultimately suffer.
Scientists, environmentalists, sages and artists, including Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, James Lovestock, Bruno Latour, Jayasaro Bhikkhu, and Sulak Sivalaksa, have discussed Gaia in the context of the earth as a living organism. Due to the lack of respect humans have for Gaia, the damage done to rainforests and the reduction of planetary biodiversity resulted in global catastrophe.
The World Meteorological Organization announced the hottest summer months measured in Europe. In September 2023, United Nations chief Antonio Guterres put the blame squarely on humans. “Scientists have long warned what our fossil addiction will unleash,” he said. “Our planet is imploding faster than we can cope with extreme weather events hitting every corner of our planet.” He added, “Surging temperatures demand a surge in action. Leaders must turn up the heat now for climate solutions.”
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TRAVELLING SOUTH, IN THEORY
Circa Art Magazine, 2022 - Travelling South, In Theory is a project that commissions two art critics/writers based in Southeast Asia to engage with the online archive of Circa, Ireland’s main art magazine, in print, from 1981-2009. The project aims to address questions of the historicizing of theories of contemporary art and/or pursue South-South relations in terms of the framing of cultural practice (whether the making or writing of art, or both) from a non-hegemonic, or “alternative,” vantage. The objective of the commission is to contribute to knowledge or insights about the negotiations and shaping of autonomous cultural practice[s] with or without regard to the metropole, and as a possible condition of demarcating historical-theoretical understandings of ‘contemporary art.’ Further, it is envisaged that the project could contribute to accounts of the relatively recent art and art criticism of Ireland within postcolonial and decolonial discourses of the ‘global south.’
As well as using the metaphor of ‘the South’ for the non-hegemonic, the title refers to an idea of travelling ‘downwards’ to the past to examine historical genealogies, or lineages, of critical theories of art.
The project is facilitated and editorially supported by Brian Curtin, an Irish-born art writer and lecturer based in Bangkok, who is supported by Circa’s ‘Archive Project Editor’ award.
Please click here for the original brief, introductions to the commissioned projects are here, and the writings are archived here.
DESIRE LINES Tania Rutland
Hicks Gallery, 2019 - A desire line is a path or track created as the consequence of erosion, caused by either human or animal footfall.
Desire lines abound in Tania Rutland’s paintings and prints, ones slowly carved by the movements of bodies through the natural (rather than urban) landscape, alternately captured with a sense of the intimate and the epic. The framing of her views can point to the very beginning of a pathway or great distances. We remain curiously on the edge.
Rutland’s works also hint at the detritus left by human endeavour; isolated architecture, and abandoned objects. Misty, drenched and apparently subject to continuous change, these landscapes slow us down in thinking where to move and turn, giving time to wonder about what has gone before us. And the natural landscape, perhaps definitively, unlike manmade ones, carries irreconcilable extremes of care and danger.
As the artist is acutely aware, the image of the British landscape has been held as a deeply lyrical and also battle-scarred and weary. Two of her favourite writers on the landscape are Robert MacFarlane and Edward Thomas, in particular, the latter’s One Green Field. Both authors recognise landscapes as a space of the unruly, not only shaped by the play of light and ever-shifting atmospheres but also the impact of the past – including remembrance – on the present, and the possibilities and limits of imagining a personal relationship.
BEAUTIFUL FUTURES Paintings and Installation by Mit Jai Inn
H Gallery Bangkok, 2018 - Beautiful Futures is Mit Jai Inn’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and also further to the international group exhibition Somewhere in the Distance at H Gallery Bangkok in 2011. The exhibition takes over both the main gallery and upstairs project room in an ambitious installation that continues to evolve the artist’s interests in the spatial possibilities of painting, from bulbous surfaces to canvases that hang or scroll free of support. Here an experimental use of lighting allows for the exploration of newer physical and perceptual relationships to the artworks.
Mit plays with his audience, as he allows his audience to play. Earlier exhibitions encouraged visitors to move and re-shape freestanding painted canvases. His angular and color-field compositions suggest flags or other ceremonial forms but the often intensely bright colors also claim a saccharine parody of the objects of reverential use. And heavily textured surfaces usurp aesthetic contemplation for tactile disorientation. Indeed, a strangely beautified sense of glut, if not grotesqueness, sometimes emerges and can dizzyingly impact the process of interpretation. This is the heart of Mit’s practice: subversively playing with and against surety of understanding.
Beautiful Futures most immediately introduces a darker, somber tone to his oeuvre. A number of contemporary Thai artists are currently grappling with the profound impact of a continuing military government since the coup d’etat of 2014 and the passing of the revered Rama IX King Bhumibol in 2016. Mit allows for an acute acknowledgment of the public role of the artist in reflecting conflicts and ambiguities about how such experiences are to be assimilated. Facing unpredictable futures, recognition of the problems of the present and the forces of the past becomes paramount. Beautiful Futures immerses visitors in metaphoric questions of direction and guidance amidst spot-lit artworks; and also explores the seductions and illusions of the surface as we pursue significance and insight. But, ultimately, surfaces can belie any depth and we turn back and forth for other guiding lights. The title of this exhibition should be read as deeply ironic.
TIME LESS HELD: ARTISTS REVISITING THE OVERLOOKED
Tadu Contemporary Art, 2018 - Time Less Held: Artists Revisiting the Overlooked is Tadu’s second major exhibition since reopening in a new location this year. It continues Tadu’s commitment to staging exhibitions that firmly contribute to Thailand’s evolving history of contemporary art.
This exhibition features early career artists of diverse interests and media. A curatorial aim is to create relations between different perceptions and experiences in order to address the provocation of the theme: the very pervasiveness of the states and beliefs that the artists explore. These are states and beliefs that typically suggest or claim no insights. They include boredom, indifference and pointlessness.
Such can be acknowledged and mapped. The artists in Time Less Held revisit the long-standing art-historical claim that what we typically overlook in our daily lives carries strange beauty and underestimated significance. But this interest is far less explored here than questions of how and why the seemingly non-insightful, banal or tedious acts on us. Time Less Held examines the spaces, objects and experiences that we often try to ignore or sometimes aim to redeem. But the artists prompt recognition of greater understanding, activating our relationship to the details of routine lives rather than allowing for continuing pacification.
Dhanainun Dhanarachwattana is a graduate in geography and photographs new urban developments while also casting an eye at rural hinterlands. Nearly poetic or not quite melancholic, the images can suggest the rhetoric of corporate catalogues. This tension of the lyrical and banal reveals the very struggle of our contemporary built environment to manufacture meaningfulness. Moreover, Dhanainun sometimes captures the results when this aim has been abandoned, by, for example, developers because of the forces of a fluctuating economy. Saksit Khunkitti realizes some of the implications of these considerations of our immediate, daily, spaces but in abstracted physical and spatial terms. His choice of materials and emphasis on surfaces and contrasts in sculptural assemblages can be subtly repellent, and the difficulty of actually categorizing these abstract object[s] as of or existing in relation to the world is disorientating. The brute facticity of material culture is foregrounded. Prae Pupityastaporn partly anchors the exhibition with gentle paintings of casual views of landscapes and domestic contexts, faintly naive in the rendering. These are oblique or happenstance views and highly ambiguous in claiming significance or insignificance. Esther Alis and Tulapop Saenjaroen directly thematize personal states of mind. Their works highlight typically unexamined or overly familiar aspects of our existence in order to probe the limits of our creativity in thinking beyond.
Finally, Time Less Held includes a curatorial notation on the theme in regard to ‘contemporary art’ itself. The paintings of self-taught artist Watcharas Leelawath are rooted in the fine tradition of sublime landscapes, and possess qualities of powerful beauty but also danger and conflict. The paintings are included in this exhibition in order to inquire into questions of the language of contemporary art: what do we more readily accept as such, or not, and why?
THE NERVE THAT EATS ITSELF ประสาทแดก Sculptures and Installation by Be Takerng Pattanopas
Gallery VER, 2018 - This is Be Takerng’s fifth solo exhibition since 1998 and he has been included in many exhibitions internationally.
We are all under the threat of wars and natural catastrophes. The Nerve That Eats Itself is a series of sculptures that attempt to offer consolation in touching the core of viewers’ bodies and minds. However chaotic the compositions may seem, viewers can sense various forms of energy from the subatomic to cosmic. By taking time to slowly contemplate these artworks, viewers may discover a rare experience of inner peace.
The sculptures are wall-bound, expansive, and meld surface and depth. And they disorient our sense of scale, challenging our perception to oscillate between a sense of microscopic views rendered large or strangely detailed landscapes that render us small. Visceral, web-like, skeletal and bristling, these intricately shaped forms suggest networks: human cells, neurons, and also perhaps the minutiae of underwater worlds. But their denseness is also relieved by the play of light and the works can appear weightless. This shifting perception is the core of Be Takerng’s practice: between recognition and the unknown and the material and immaterial. Energy made visible.
The title refers to ideas of gradual disappearance or the profound insight of our existence: all ends as nothing. The Nerve that Eats Itself represents a maturity in the artist’s pursuit of an artistic language acute to this interest. All moves and shifts towards an ethereal infinitude.
BULLET SCHOOL Sawangwongse Yawnghwe
H Gallery Bangkok, 2018 - The Bullet School Canvases are an extensive series of large-scale paintings created especially for H Gallery Bangkok. The scale of the installation and the multiple perspectives of individual works heighten the drama of Yawnghwe’s subject-matter.
Yawnghwe’s biography is marked by violent episodes in recent histories of Southeast Asia. His surname comes from the name of the Shan state-now officially part of Myanmar- where his grandfather once ruled as Saopha, a hereditary royal title meaning ‘Lord of the Sky.’ The grandfather, Sao Shwe Thaike, was the first President of Burma following independence from the British Empire in 1948 but was then arrested during the infamous military takeover by General Ne Win in 1962, and subsequently died in prison. Yawnghwe was born in a camp of the Shan State Army (SSA). However, he was initially raised in Thailand before his family fled as exiles to Canada after a spate of assassinations of people connected to the SSA.
Further to these losses and forced movement across borders, an urgent theme of the artist’s practice is the fraught assembling of individual and collective identity as the result of new living contexts for survival. This is suggested by the layering and contrasts in his works.
Many of the paintings are based on a flag-like structure of color-field grounds, and a preponderance of green is symbolic of both Shan State and Burma/Myanmar, signifying agricultural abundance and peace. Across these grounds, media images, personal memorabilia, graffito and abstracted signs seemingly float or hang haphazardly. Acronyms for rogue armies abut images of military hardware and there are glamourized depictions of politicians and other figures wearing modern and traditional garb. Most recently Yawnghwe has produced lush paintings of landscapes that are less suggestive of the passing of time on conflicted geographies, or prelapsarian romanticism, than how political histories can become erased.
The rough and jumbled surfaces in Bullet School are a collaging of different forms of remembrance, a skewing of how official narratives and myths come to represent history and others don’t. Graffiti and the graffito can serve the voices of those written out of official histories. The fragile lines and barely legible sentiments are a testament to disenfranchisement. The flag-like forms of Yawnghwe’s paintings are not just a proud conduit for vested and national interests but also a means of counter-expression.
A few years ago Myanmar was officially listed as only one of two longstanding military regimes “left” in the world. This statistic is now all but universally irrelevant as we witness the persistent rise of authoritarian rule and values across many regions. Myanmar is currently led by the National League for Democracy-elected in 2015-as well as the military, whose powers remain enshrined in the constitution they drafted in 2008. Regular news of violence serves as a reminder that seven decades of civil war have yet to come to an end and the possibility of such now seems ever-more remote.
Yawnghwe has said that modernity will only be achieved for his “country” when there is a collective reckoning with deep-rooted problems and an indictment of those who perpetuate them. The Bullet School Canvases is a call for such.
ECLIPSE Jedsada Tangtrakulwong
H Gallery Bangkok, 2017 - Eclipse is Jedsada Tangtrakulwong’s third project with the gallery, further to site-specific installations at H Project Space in 2011 and H Gallery Chiang Mai in 2014. Eclipse continues to evolve Jedsada’s ambitious approach to installation while introducing a recent interest in the production of objects, often laboriously, and also photography.
Eclipse transforms the main space of H Gallery into an immersive experience through sharp contrasts of light and dark. Exploring a central concern with wayfinding, where experience segues into metaphor and vice-versa, visitors move through the darkened interior and encounter spot-lit icons and images of disappearance and loss.
Movement through darkness towards light carries metaphysical implications but the installation allows for a subtle politics of materialist interest. The central part of Eclipse consists of an arrangement of nearly one hundred blackened books that the artist created as a result of flood damage in his storage space during October of last year. That month was a momentous one for Thailand as it saw the passing of beloved Rama IX King Bhumibol Adulvadej. Creating an analogy between personal and national experience due to the forces of time and nature, Jedsada’s coating of the books with black ink symbolizes a sense of numbness and speechlessness that can ensue from unexpected loss. The blackened books preserve this sense and possess an ambivalence about the future; and the colour black carries manifold significance.
Last year also saw the artist relocate to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. An accompanying series of photographs depict the rough-hewn hinterlands of that city, pathways into unknown territories and the suggestion of a loss of the familiar. The photographs frame the strange and unknown as Jedsada continues to refract personal experience through anxious realities that now face his country. Eclipse includes a desk with his works-in-progress and offers speculations on new futures.
Thailand’s highly regulated order of public symbolism has just completed a particularly strenuous year due to widespread mourning for Rama IX. Wayfinding amidst a darkened present carries an ambiguity of the exhilarating and ominous. Eclipse acutely captures this ambiguity and, urgently, insists on the importance of the artist for critical reflection on relations between experience, understanding and the local politics of aesthetics.
MERIDIANS Recent Paintings by Lesley Dumbrell
H Gallery Bangkok, 2017 - A leading member of the women’s art movement in Australia during the 1970s, Lesley Dumbrell’s longstanding practice of meticulously rendered patterns explore an expansive approach to abstraction. While suggesting mechanical or digital reproduction, the artist’s sharp lines and clean forms hint at multiple significance and resonances. We are invited to become lost within the entangled pictorial spaces and a wide and often dazzling palette.
Meridians also introduces new sculptural works that extend the artist’s concern with relationships between the perceptual and the experiential.
Dumbrell’s paintings are primarily based in exploring diversity in the affective impact of color, with which her compositional structures move and meld. Originally inspired by extensive travels where the artist recognized infinite variations of hue and tone, the variable cultural significance of color is also an important source of inquiry. The compositions are primarily based on the pattern of a grid and from which she painstakingly creates lines in complementary and counter directions. Radical uses of color then play with our perception of weight and space, shaping a layered dynamism across the deceptively flat surfaces.
Meridians embraces a waywardness from the ‘pure’ forms of mathematical precision and implied objectiveness to generously allow for cultural references and emotional impact: from the implications of textile design and decorative arts to the aesthetics of spirituality. Canonical appraisals of twentieth century modernist painting, which were vibrant when Dumbrell emerged from art school in the early 1960s, have been debated in terms of how artists use edge, surface and illusion in painting. Modernist abstraction, in theory, resisted a reproduction of the visible world and pursued an autonomous language and logic. Subsequent generations of artists have grappled with how to imagine differently within and beyond the frame as a key means of negotiating this history and our contemporaneity.
Soliciting manifold affects, Dumbrell allows viewers to contemplate the question of how art can be separated from the world. Or how this might be an impossible conceit. Looking on, through and beyond her paintings we can begin to wonder how one ends and the other begins. The artist’s new use of sculpture further shapes insights into the conscious and unconscious impact of color, prompting a spectrum of associations and relations.
DISQUIET William Klose
H Gallery Bangkok, 2015 - William Klose’s third solo exhibition with H Gallery, Disquiet is a new series of the British artist’s most conceptually sophisticated paintings to date. Klose settled with his family in Bangkok in recent years and his previous works explored the strange anonymity of the city’s infrastructure, a subtle sense of alienation and also the quiet dramas of domestic life in a foreign place. This new series is a stylistic departure while continuing to examine his relationship to personal history.
Disquiet are a set of deceptively realist narratives unfolding on suburban London streets, of the type where Klose grew up. They suggest studies of the very idea of memory, its metaphors and also the segueing of personal experience with collective understanding. Scenarios include men in protective uniforms who closely examine the details of a footpath; an incongruous group gather in a cordoned area, curiously conferring in view of a row of bland semi-detached homes; a figure falls dramatically; intimate exchanges between couples can be discerned; and subtle and extreme disturbances occur, birds swoop and black smoke billows into a clear afternoon sky. Disquiet is a compelling and enigmatic exhibition.
The facades of British suburbia as a trope of mystery, private dramas and fear is a recurring theme in British literary and popular cultures. Though a symbol of contentment and the satiations of material privilege, the facades can come to signify the opposite: fragile signs of dullness and repressive conformities. In this respect Klose's works have a distant corollary in Eric Fischl's painterly explorations of the anxieties of affluence in white America. And both artists share a cinematic approach to image-making. But, unlike Fischl, Klose eschews the visceral or expressive for the cool and considered. His method of appropriating and assembling disparate images from Internet searches, personal archives and drawings reveals a self-consciousness about how images mediate experience- seemingly reflecting our selves and our lives but remaining beyond strict definition to instead appear metaphoric.
RADIATION Art and Queer Ideas from Bangkok and Manila, Un-Compared
Manila and Bangkok, 2013 & 2014 - A group exhibition in two parts, RADIATION explores ideas, and possibilities, of ‘queer’ as they can echo and translate across national boundaries, be it in derogatory or affirmative ways. Acknowledging specific histories, contextual restraints and potential futures, the title denotes an outward movement from a source and also infection; in this exhibition, mutual infection[s]. The artworks play with formations of masculinity and femininity – rhetorical, provocative, subversive – across themes that include gay domesticity and corporeal excess; metaphors of belonging, concealment and disruption; and methods of appropriation or pillaging and the performative.
Un-comparing artists from Bangkok and Manila most immediately rebuffs rational engagement. Instead, the arbitrary, haphazard and possibly dangerous is valued. To discover differences is at the core of the very idea of queer itself, regardless of the ideologies of particular representations. However, routes of connection between un-like and often marginalized entities such as these two Asian cities can suggest alternative or parallel understandings to ‘official’, dominant or western narratives. RADIATION positions itself centrally at this insight, all the more queer because of an insistence on subjectivity for deciding such routes; subjectivities that will remain perpetually in question, or challenged.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
H Gallery Bangkok, 2012 - Conflicts of Interest is a two-part group exhibition that provokes tensions and antagonisms for considerations of what contemporary painting is and does. Essentially aiming to map diversity and differences, this ambitious account skews conservative understandings of painterly method to explore radical forms and fresh perceptions of this allegedly tradition-bound medium.
The artists in Conflicts of Interest disrupt painterly craft. Their works oscillate between the intimate and the vulgar, the observed and the cerebral, and art historical preoccupations and thoroughly contemporary experiments. Refusing to settle on any particular proposal about ‘painting,’ the exhibition also inquires into the equivalence of authentic expression, irony and the slapdash. Further, painting's dynamic relationships to visual and material culture at large are acknowledged; between text and image; the streamlined and the visceral; the appropriated and the invented; the assimilated and subverted; and form and formlessness.
MORE OR LESS QUEER
Nospace, 2011 - Nospace is very pleased to announce the first queer-themed exhibition of visual art for Bangkok. More or Less Queer revisits the radical ambitions of the initial emergence of theorized notions of queer-ness in terms of the contemporary significance of such radicalism. The title points to tensions between earlier ambitions and current issues such as the politics of assimilation, on-going demands of divisive categories of gender and sexuality, and new global contexts.
Queer Theory emerged as an academic discipline in North America in the 1990s further to the impact of feminism, gay and lesbian studies and critical theory, amongst other disciplines and factors. This emergence was premised on the claim that normative categories of identity are inherently unstable and therefore an insufficient foundation for questions of who or what we are. Further, Queer Theory distinguished itself with a central focus on language and/or representation.
Queer Theory is now established as an academic discipline and is burgeoning in Asia. Contexts that use the mantle ‘queer’ are widespread.
However, the initial context and background for the emergence of Queer Theory has all but disappeared. Major socio-cultural shifts include the groundswell of support for gay marriage and, in tandem, a shift in the terms by which gay men and lesbians might view themselves. Further, ideas of ‘gay culture’ and ‘queer communities’ have become extensively commodified and commercialized; and brutality, oppression and intolerance continue to characterize the lives of those who are perceived as not expressing a normative model of identity. Finally, international flows of information and knowledge continually re-figure the understanding and use of Queer theories.
More or Less Queer aims to re-examine how a critical engagement with representation can provoke and resist fixed understandings of identity and subjectivity, as a universal principle.
The artists included cross generations and nationalities. A humorous but disconcerting short film by Ohm Phanphiroj places the viewer in the position of gay man attempting to seduce a beautiful, young white straight man. Filmed at night in a bedroom, the naked young man responds to provocative questions by a disembodied voice with a conflicted sense of interest, desire, resistance and agitation; a perfect description of how any of us negotiate the given rules of sexual identity. Rene Smith’s collages employ pin-ups from the early years of Playgirl magazine and play with ideas of gendered spectatorship for the contemporary context. Who gets to enjoy them now and why? Mark Robbins probes the social contexts of subjectivity by raising questions about how identities exist in relation to space and architecture. And Panpan Narkprasert directly engages the manipulative rhetoric of representation with a seemingly pornographic short film that demands a reconsideration of the sureties of looking and interpretation.
THE ETHICS OF ENCOUNTER
Gallery Soulflower, 2008 – Gallery Soulflower is delighted to announce an ambitious and provocative showcase of some of the best contemporary art from India and Thailand. A book detailing the works of the artists and the critical issues raised by their juxtaposition will be launched simultaneously.
India and Thailand have a long history of exchange and integration, yet both countries retain a strong sense of autonomy. This dichotomy between mutual influence and issues of authentic individuality is highlighted in our global age. On the one hand, we are told that transnational circuits are more pervasive than ever but, on the other, we are regularly made aware of often violent expressions of cultural integrity and national identity.
The Ethics of Encounter stages a relationship between Thailand and India in terms of a seemingly simple but nevertheless complex claim: one should not expect an ‘other’ to perform the way one expects. The question “Who am I?” in terms of cultural and national identity becomes heightened when one is faced with who we think we are not. However, rather than addressing definitions of ‘Thai-ness’ and ‘Indian-ness,’ curator Pandit Chanrochanakit with art critic Brian Curtin seek to present this particular encounter as a means of challenging and subverting broader expectations of cultural and national differences. Questions of translation, transference and transformation may be extrapolated to the levelling contemporary contexts of globalism and internationalism. How do we define what is different from ‘us’ in the current era?
The Ethics of Encounter showcases a variety of media and methods, from video and painting to performance and relational practices. In keeping with Gallery Soulflower’s concern to engage the best of contemporary art in the region, the artists included range from the internationally celebrated to the locally lauded and emergent.