Korakrit Arunanondchai
Palais de Tokyo
Stepping into Korakrit Arunanondchai’s exhibition “Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3,” one had the sensation of entering the set of a music video, an elaborately contrived nightclub, an “imagineered” theme park gone off the rails, a temple decked out in polychrome ritual paraphernalia—or indeed some synthesis of all of these. In other words: a spectacularized Gesamtkunstwerk.
Filling two spaces—one associated with the body and one with the spirit—linked by a darkened corridor, the exhibition, curated by Julien Fronsacq, was billed as the epilogue to a series of videos and installations that Arunanondchai has been making since 2012. These constitute the bildungsroman of a Thai denim painter, an autobiographical surrogate for the artist. The exhibition title plays on a reciprocal experience of otherness for audiences confronting
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