picks January 15, 2019

Pratchaya Phinthong

The title of Pratchaya Phinthong’s latest exhibition, “This page is intentionally left blank,” describes a practice of meticulously removing elements that could detract from the artist’s conceptual exactitude. Here, seven archival cardboard boxes containing daily logbooks from the 1990s, on loan from the National Gallery of Thailand, are stacked in one corner; eight discarded cement barriers from the gallery’s parking lot are methodically organized across the expansive space; and the same shade of white has been applied to the interior walls of both the National Gallery and this gallery.

Phinthong’s

picks September 01, 2018

Dusadee Huntrakul

Art’s potential to turn banishment into belonging—cultural and personal—haunts “There Are More Monsoon Songs Elsewhere,” Dusadee Huntrakul’s exhibition of intricate drawings, ceramic sculptures, and found photographs. The show shares its title with a set of hyperrealist drawings that depict, against a white background, prehistoric Ban Chiang bracelets chanced upon by an American student in Thailand in 1966. The jewelry’s accidental discovery, its US-led excavation, and its present home in LACMA’s collection help sketch out themes of displaced civilizations, US cultural imperialism, and migrated

print Summer 2018

Nipan Oranniwesna

“Neither Body nor Soul” was Nipan Oranniwesna’s first solo exhibition in his home country in six years. One of the most prominent Thai artists of his generation, Oranniwesna is appreciated for his minimal, ephemeral, and contemplative installations, which evoke the concepts of home, belonging, and displacement. His oeuvre is remarkably consistent and unmistakably distilled, but the quietness and subtlety of his work occasionally (and perhaps deliberately) obscure and undermine its political dimension. Since the mid-2000s, the artist has been working with city maps, traditional songs, and historical

picks September 13, 2017

Latthapon Korkiatarkul

(Un)Composition” is the highly anticipated first solo exhibition from Latthapon Korkiatarkul, a young Thai artist whom many have considered a kind of a maverick since he burst onto the scene in 2010. His process-based works, riddled with serious, deadpan humor, succeed in projecting a healthy skepticism for the formulaic definitions and trite readings applied to art. By transforming familiar objects into eerily surreal entities—laboriously polishing an egg until it shines like marble, or scrubbing banknotes until they lose all individual markings—he has not only changed their appearances but

picks July 07, 2017

Paphonsak La-or

At first glance, Paphonsak La-or’s solo exhibition “Klai Ban” (“Far from Home”) seems to consist of a few dozen innocuous paintings of mountains in various foreign locales, but upon closer inspection, it yields a much more subversive and multilayered interpretation of the current political turmoil in Thailand. Paphonsak is among a handful of young Thai artists whose works have consistently addressed issues of censorship and freedom of expression, which has been severely restricted by the military regime and by regal intervention in recent years.

The colorful, picture-perfect landscape paintings

picks September 03, 2016

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Moving through the dark labyrinthine space of “The Serenity of Madness,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first survey of video installations and short films in his home country of Thailand, which later travels to Para Site in Hong Kong, is like making a nocturnal journey into a primitive cave of delirious unknowns. In other words, it is an experience not dissimilar to indulging in any one of his films.

The selected works span from 1994, when he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to 2014. His earliest experimental films are the most revealing. In Like the Relentless Fury of

Narawan Pathomvat