A screenshot from Nut’s video work Sound Of Nothing.
As stated in the text, “Oscillation”, an exhibition at Chulalongkorn University’s Art Center which opened earlier this month, “considers a state of actively moving back and forth between multiple reference points and ideas, during which meanings are produced and reproduced”.
Then it goes on telling us that the show curated by Vuth Lyno “proposes a state of non-fixity as a generative mode, through which our understandings are continuously challenged and reshaped. It embraces a journey of becoming and unbecoming, and resists stability and conformity in order to allow for contingencies and possibilities”.
I honestly don’t understand what all that means. What I do know, however, is it’s a group show by Arnont Nongyao, Takerng Pattanopas, Stephanie Powell and Eiji Sumi with Hiroshi Miyata, and a totally enjoyable one.
Greeting visitors first, next to the space’s entrance is Takerng’s red tunnel installation which is a continuation of his “Merz Maze” series. Investigating “the inaccessibility of the inner”, the work is an illusion, optically and then bodily. Viewed from afar, the tunnel looks promising, as if it’s a door to a long journey, with endless possibilities. Stepping inside, however, visitors climb up short and narrowing holes to find complete dead ends. With shreds of red coarse cloth — reminiscent of the tradition of colourful cloths tied around old trees in Thailand — covering all the interior, the work is unavoidably an image of Thai society in stagnation, plagued by old, biased ideologies and beliefs.
In the same vein as Takerng, Arnont’s interactive sound and video installation inside attempts to show society in its climate of fear, a society under tight censorship. With the vague sound of the radio on, the real time video shows us visitors as we walk around inside the exhibition space. Once you step too close to the hanging camera, however, the sensor triggers both the radio sound and video to vibrate until the video and sound are blurred and unintelligible, as if to say that there’s some area we can never walk into and some subject we are not to talk about.
With this past Sunday being the second anniversary of the 2014 coup, whether it’s intentional or not, quite a few exhibitions which are heavily political abound in the capital.
Over at RMA Institute, artist Liam Morgan created a dark and oppressed atmosphere in an exhibition “98.5% Of This Light Has Been Blocked” that is incredibly similar to the reality outside right now. Though we are uncertain what he refers to by “98.5%”, it has brought to mind the result of a poll earlier this year by the National Statistical Office that says 99.3% of Thais were satisfied with the government’s overall performance.
With a high-power spotlight projecting the words “98.5% of this light has been blocked” onto the wall, Morgan takes things literally; inserted inside the spotlight shaft is a round filter on which the exhibition title sentence was die-cut, consequently blocking the rest of the light away. With no air-con on, the atmosphere inside the space is stifling, and visitors (or some people under tight control of the military government) could feel like the light, which is stifled and perhaps ready to burst.
At Silpakorn University’s Art Centre, there was quite a buzz at the opening of “Two Men Look Through The Same Bars: One Sees The Mud, And One The Stars”, both for the artist line-up and the free-flowing beer. Though the exhibition, curated by Kritsada Duchsadeevanich, is comprised mostly of old works by Dusadee Huntrakul, Latthapon Korkiatarkul, Miti Ruangkritya, Nuttapon Sawasdee, Phornphop Sittirak and Viriya Chotpanyavisut, the current political atmosphere has given these works a renewed significance.
Miti’s part is a photographic series of vandalised election posters of both the Pheu Thai Party and the Democrat Party collected by Miti from the election in 2011. Now, five years later, the vandalised images of Yingluck Shinawatra and Abhisit Vejjajiva still feel incredibly relevant, representing a prolonged clash between two completely opposite values, the clash which is currently starred in by different characters.
On the ground floor, in video work Sound Of Nothing we see Nut Sawasdee go about recording notable structures like monuments around the country as if he could detect unheard voices other than the surrounding environments. On the floor are music scores he had a composer come up with from those recordings, and this was played live by musicians on the opening day.
Like Arnont’s work in “Oscillation” at Chulalongkorn University’s Art Center, Nut is an example of many contemporary Thai artists whose choice of medium results from the need to address a sensitive issue indirectly. The music he created in this show corresponds directly with the exhibition title “Two Men Look Through The Same Bars: One Sees The Mud, And One The Stars”; Nut either tries to say that nothingness is immeasurably valuable or that people should cease to be blinded by something that is intangible.
Video and sound installation by Arnont Nongyao.
Work by Liam Morgan in exhibition ‘98.5% Of This Light Has Been Blocked’.
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.