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 deceptively simple formula of juxtaposing displaced objects from two distinct realms poses a subtle critique of existing systems. Loaning objects from the established National Gallery to a fledgling commercial gallery subverts the hierarchy of art spaces by connecting their histories physically, while painting them in the same color binds them permanently. Each object also represents various laborers—from the security guards who tend to the logbooks and parking lots to the art handlers who paint the gallery walls. The figure of the security guard has been present in the artist’s work since 2009, used to indicate not only issues of displacement and precarious labor but also Thailand’s military junta and surveillance society (as in his 2015 exhibition, “Who will guard the guards themselves?”) and Zambia’s colonial past and collective memory (per his 2013 exhibition, “Broken Hill”). The blankness of Phinthong’s installation here is not a void; it is a carefully sculpted site of vacancy in which often overlooked nodes of agency and power, both within and outside of the art world, are reflected back to the viewer.