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To write about Korakrit Arunanondchai is to be in hot pursuit The first day we were meant to have this interview, he was out of reach, freediving off the reefs of Ko Tao When I travelled to Bangkok in 2018, to see the inaugural Ghost festival of video and performance that he had curated, for a book I was working on, I followed friends to performances around haunted ta-khian trees and drag parties in bank vaults in hopes of tracking him down In London a year later, I found him carrying the chef Angela Dimayuga like a newlywed into the nightclub at the top of the Standard Hotel Whenever I have succeeded in sitting down with him, I leave with an impression familiar from viewing his work: the joy of immersion into his oblique and mysterious logics, grasping the iridescent tail of several interconnected ideas   Contingency is the force that drives Arunanondchai’s sprawling oeuvre of video, performance, painting and installation, which roams through personal relationships, political upheaval and cosmological concerns His videos, often the centrepieces of exhibitions, combine found clips with drone and handheld footage filmed in collaboration with director Alex Gvojic Religious artefacts, veterinary surgeries, news broadcasts and highlights from reality TV are interleaved with slow and sublime cinematic action, sewn together by Arunanondchai’s distinct poetic voice and grounded in a close relationship to location In these major works, titled Painting with History in a Room Filled With People with Funny Names 1-3 (2013-15), With History in a Room Filled With People with Funny Names 4 (2017), and No History in a Room Filled With People with Funny Names 5