Of tigers, karma and the cosmos
Three Thai artists showcase their contemporary art at Singapore Biennale
Thai artists Sakarin Krue-On, Araya Rasjarmrearnsook and Pannaphan Yodmanee are participating in Singapore Biennale 2016. Sakrit’s video installation “Kratua Teang Seua: Tiger Hunt” is on show at Singapore Management University’s de Suantio Gallery.
“Kratua Taeng Seua” is a traditional folktale about a tiger hunt, once well known throughout southern Thailand. In recent years, the number of traditional theatre troupes performing the play has diminished. Collaborating with one such group, the Wat Khuha Sawan Folk Play Company, Sakarin, 51, reimagines the folktale as a work of art reflecting life in a megacity.
The artist worked closely with the company to develop all aspects of the artwork, from scripting to costume design, facilitating the production of a community-centric artwork that grapples with the incompatibility between contemporary and traditional ways |of life.
Comprised of three components – a live performance, a silent film, and a behind-the-scenes documentary accompanied by performance relics and documentation – Sakarin’s retelling of the folktale highlights the agency of art in strengthening societal ties, by serving as the crucial link between disparate lifestyles often dichotomised as the “modern” and the “primitive”, and highlighting the fallacy of such divisions.
Araya’s video installation “Jaonua: The Nothingness” (“King of Meat: The Nothingness”) is on show at Singapore Art Museum (SAM).
This installation consolidates Araya’s thematic interests from throughout|her career in an attempt to extract |“the inseparable entanglement of things/lives/subjects”.
Negotiating the expanse of time between life and death, consumption presents itself as a dominant theme within the work –explored through the metaphysics of eating, femininity, the animal gaze, sexuality, and gender stereotypes.
Projected on four fabric screens leading up to a projection upon a bed, the presentation of the video works echoes the transient nature of our existence while also blurring the borders between art and life.
In this installation, Araya, 59, has woven various stories together into a cohesive experience. Almost akin to a surrealistic dream, she invites audiences to ponder with her the karmic consequences of being entrapped within the Sisyphean cycle of |existence.
Pannaphan’s site-specific installation is also at SAM.
In a titanic mural, Pannaphan, 28, presents a mapping of the Buddhist |cosmos that resembles a landscape painting. Using materials both raw and natural as well as the new and mass-produced, her amalgamation of contemporary and traditional Thai art |creates a unified cartography of the heavens and the earth that chronicles Southeast Asian history.
Pannaphan’s ongoing investigation of the intersecting points between Buddhist cosmology and modern science has led her to consider the concepts of change, loss, devastation and inevitable Armageddon.
The artist argues that persistent striving for development and progress ultimately exposes man’s shortcomings and the revelation of a larger universe outside our spheres of comfort and control. She presents the ultimate question: at the end of all ends, will we find comfort in our faith?
