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Living in History, 2010

1. The research base project from June - December 2010

Art on Farm, 2010

Jim Thompson’s artists-in-residence program, Korat
Curator: Gridtiya Gaweewong, Somsuda Piamsumrit and Yuwadee Srihuayyod

2. Itineraries, 3Young Contemporaries, 2011

Valentine Willes Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur

Curator: David Teh

3. Territories of the Real and Unreal: photographic practices in contemporary Southeast Asian art, 2012

Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta

Curator: Adeline Ooi and Beverly Yong

4. Mondi (World), 2012

Dryphoto arte contemporanea, Prato

Curator: Pier Luigi Tazzi

1. The research base project from June - December 2010

Art on Farm, 2010

Jim Thompson’s artists-in-residence program, Korat
Curator: Gridtiya Gaweewong, Somsuda Piamsumrit and Yuwadee Srihuayyod

List of works

 

Living in History

Site specific Installation at Thai Traditional Northeast house

Photographs, print texts and found objects, dimension variable

A site specific installation in Thai classic northeast twin house situate close to Praya Prab mountain a landmark of the farm’s location. The selected images, print texts and found objects re-arrange in 4 sections: the documents, the mountain, the portraits and the nature. At the balcony is reading area of interview book “Tales of Praya Prab Mountain”. The space under the house install the hammocks found from military camp area close to the farm.

 

Tales of Praya Prab Mountain

Interview book,

Interview book, Thai text version

Black-and-White offset print

183 pages, 12.5 x 19 x 1.5 cm., 1,000 copies

The interview book of people who lived around Praya Prab mountain. The story telling is like an evidence of the past, a secret to be told, showing the way of life, it is also used as a hidden teaching of past beliefs. By an oral history process, recording and transcription with documentary photographs.


Jim Thomson farm, located at Pakthongchai district of Nakorn Ratchasima province a city in the northeast (Isan) of Thailand and gateway to Isan. Nakorn Ratchasima city is also commonly known as Korat (RTGS Khorat, โคราช), It is located at the western edge of the Khorat Plateau and historically marked the boundary between the Lao and Siamese territory, however now is considered a gateway to the Northeast.

 

Jim Thompson was an American businessman who helped revitalize the Thai silk industry in the 1950s and 1960s. after Thompson’s disappearance that the Thai Silk Company relocated its weaving operations to Korat, a city which serves as a base of operations for the Royal Thai Army. Although it abandoned home-based weaving in favor of factories in the early 1970s, the Thai Silk Company’s Korat facility looks more like a landscaped campus than a factory.

 

The Art on Farm projects at the Jim Thompson Farm began with the collaboration of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok and the Jim Thompson Farm in Korat. By inviting and open call for artists to produce works in the context of Eco Agriculture and North Eastern style architecture, giving the artists the opportunity to interrelate between art and the environment. The artists were encouraged to work with nature, local artifacts and recycled materials, they were inspired by being on the farm also by the communities around them such as their history, myths and legends, the landscape and customs, even the food and meals. How the way of life has changed from the past to present also resulted in all the artworks reflecting and transmitting this culture.

Installation view
Installation view
Installation view

Tales of Praya Prab Mountain
Interview book, Thai text version
Black-and-White offset print
183 pages, 12.5 x 19 x 1.5 cm.
1,000 editions

Tales of Praya Prab Moutain
PDF Download  (click on icon)

Installation details of Living in History
Site specific Installation at Thai Traditional Northeast house
Photographs, print texts and found objects, dimension variable

2. Itineraries, 3Young Contemporaries

Valentine Willes Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur

Curator: David Teh

8 April - 28 April 2011

 

3 Young Contemporaries: Itineraries, an exhibition of new and recent works by three of Thailand’s most exciting artists: Arin Rungjang, Kornkrit Jianpinidnan and Pratchaya Phinthong. All three artists address the contemporary experience of place, travel and migration. Itineraries will explore their refreshing takes on an enduring theme in Thai cultural history: the poetics of distance, its physical and imaginary imprints, the crossing of intangible borders and their sometimes very tangible effects.

Though they were all academically trained in fine art, these three artists work across a range of traditional and non-traditional media. In stark contrast with previous generations of Thai contemporary art, their work is marked by a sustained engagement with the legacies of conceptualism, minimalism and process-oriented practice.

Living in History
Living in History
Living in History

3. Territories of the Real and Unreal: photographic practices in contemporary Southeast Asian art

Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta

Curator: Adeline Ooi and Beverly Yong

27 November 2011 – 6 January 2012

 

The recognition of photography as a medium for art practice has come comparatively late in the context of the regional scene, despite its critical place in some of the most challenging work of the past two decades.

 

In many ways, photography can still be considered a new and empowering medium for Southeast Asian artists working with the image. Its immediacy, and its ambiguity, as a visual language of the real, allows for open and malleable readings of the complex and sometimes confounding realities which shape our peculiar experiences. Conversely, those realities invite fresh investigations into the meanings and potential of the photographic image and process.   

 

This exhibition gathers selected bodies of work by artists who employ photography as a primary medium or as a key factor within more multi-disciplinary practices, suggesting something of the breadth of approaches and concerns that can be found in photographic works in the region today.

Living in History
Living in History

4. Mondi (World)

Dryphoto arte contemporanea, Prato

Curator: Pier Luigi Tazzi

20 October – 6 December 2012

 

The project consists in presenting the works of ten artists, the most of which coming from Asia and in their thirties and early forties, in the form of an illustrated conference run by the curator and with the participation of some of the selected artists, and of four exhibitions in galleries and other exhibition spaces in the city.   MONDI wants to show, discuss, and dig into that territory where photography, instead of a way to document the World, is an aperture the Worlds, where the reflection gives up to openness and revealing. Photography in its history and tradition has always entailed the assumption of an operational polarity: on one side the operating subject, the Roland Barthes’ “operator”, on the other side the visible reality of the world, a world conceived in its monolithic and sole unity. When the artists, starting from the 1970s and during the 1980s, free photography from its specificity and its history of a medium different from the others – painting, sculpture, drawing – and adopt it as an art tool of the same dignity of the others, old, or new such as performance, installation, film, video, and later on when digital photography is introduced and developed, photography becomes available to many and different expressive intents, and together they free it from the dichotomy that has marked it since its beginning: Subject vs World. When the model of western art spreads on a planetary scale and at the same time comes into crisis, the new planetary artist finds available a rich set of tools that technology and culture have been tuning following that model: photography is among these tools. So the minorities away from the centre of the – political, economic, social and cultural – empire, use this “friendly” medium, liberated from its history and traditional aesthetics, operator vs world, to open to those worlds, plural, from whom each of these artists comes from and looks at. It is about “worlds”. Worlds on the edges, peripheral, different but not in antagonism toward the sole and centralized World that artists from the centre go on looking at and working in by means of traditional methods.

Living in History
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