THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
nationthailand

Thais play dual role

Thais play dual role

The Singapore Biennale's sharpened focus on Southeast Asia this year is a bid to harness the region's energy and build a distinctive identity, and the credit belongs to a bold, collaborative team of curators that includes two Thais.

Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Ark Fongsmut joined 25 other professionals with specific knowledge about Southeast Asian art. The team’s mission was to identify the current global position of regional contemporary art.
Four other Thais have art on view at this year’s biennale. Works by internationally known Nipan Oranniwesna and veteran Prateep Suthathongthai are at the Singapore Art Museum.
Nipan’s site-specific installation with video and sculpture, “Hope Brings Us Here”, is the fruit of several days spent interviewing his countrymen who work at the Golden Mile, a Singapore shopping mall whose compound also hosts an expatriate Thai community.
Nipan examines the facts and fiction in issues related to globalisation, nationality and the politics of identity and migration. In a room with red walls and a floor covered in tiny resin beads, videos depict historical events in both Thailand and Singapore and current scenes at the mall and in an Isaan landscape, home to most of the Thai labourers.
In one corner is a star made of Thai and Singaporean coins melted together, what Nipan calls a sixth star for Singapore’s flag. “It signifies the contribution of the Thai workers here,” he tells The Nation.
Prateep, admired for his conceptual photography, continues a series begun in 2005 about the reality and deceptiveness of camera images. Mere tricks of composition can hide the truth, he demonstrates, and reality might emerge when snapshots are re-framed. In our rapidly changing world of continuously shifting perceptions, concepts are embraced or shunned depending on the distance from which an image is seen, whether the focus is on a lone pixel, a single picture or a tapestry of images.
The Peranakan Museum has new pieces by Nopchai Ungkavatanpong and San Francisco-based Dusadee Huntrakul.
Nopchai’s light installation “I Have Seen a Sweeter Sky” comprises wooden objects, neon light tubes and other electrical accessories with an eye to showing how any item can have multiple meanings. What he calls “a compilation of inter-textuality” robs objects of their known functions and proffers fresh allusions.
Inspired in part by the museum’s history, he has taken furniture apart and reassembled it with his usual neon embellishments to hint at a haunting.
Dusadee’s new collages and graphite drawings respond to the biennale’s theme, “If the World Changed”, with a challenge to the “world” part. Cross-cultural migration suggests it should be “worlds”. He uses excerpts from anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s book “Buddha is Hiding”, about the Cambodian mass flight from the Khmer Rouge. Dusadee’s laborious reproduction of the text helps to highlight the problems of citizenship in a globalised world.
Dr Susie Lingham will conduct a director’s tour of the biennale on Wednesday and many of the artists will conduct workshops on November 23.

 

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