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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— There’s a saying in Buddhism about how change is inevitable, and the only thing that’s certain is change. That seems pretty true. I’ve been making these videos for the past 11 years. When I started, one of the reasons I got a video camera was to shoot my grandfather as he was his losing short-term memory and ageing. A part of my practice is about anticipating the death of my grandfather. The experience of that relationship, pulled into the frame of my art practice, then makes and expands relationships between other things. On a personal level, the work is about the fact that he raised me and is a significant figure in my life. But on a material level, it’s a loaded space: the ancestral space, the space of personal relationships. 

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— My first video work was the trilogy 2012-2555 (2012). When I set out to make it, I wanted time to work as it does in a movie; that is, with nonlinear cuts between past, present and future, all compressed into 120 minutes. At the time, I was obsessed with death and the end: we were experiencing intense flooding in Thailand, and 2012 was meant to be an apocalyptic year. I was also thinking about the future. In the Thai calendar, 2555 is the equivalent of the Gregorian calendar year 2012, but seeing those dates together sparked some thoughts about science fiction. 

 

But instead of developing a fully-formed speculative future, I was mainly filming and gathering material from my own life. The project took on a diaristic bent as a result. I became more interested in looking for the future elsewhere, in the present, rather than creating or imagining an entirely different temporality. In other words, I wanted to find an alternative sense of futurity in regions or locations where modernity has played out differently. So I went the other way: rather than using material from my life to create narrative structure, I used narrative or cinematic forms — such as the trilogy, the documentary, the trailer — to structure my own experience of time, my psychology and my artistic practice moving forward. I consciously approached making these films as a form of actualisation and development. I was still thinking about time, but not in a sequential sense: more like how the passage of time is perceived through life-changing relationships, in the progression of ideas and how time’s effects are marked on the body. 

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— In History In a Room Filled With People With Funny Names 4 (2017), I was thinking about my grandmother’s dementia in terms of entropy in thermodynamics, where everything in the universe goes through the entropic stage, where all things start to become more of the same as they lose energy. You can apply that to real, living things and to human systems as well. In Songs for Dying, one of the central ideas is decomposition. I talk about ghosts themselves as decomposers: how they digest ancestral memories, trauma, things that seem like they can’t be processed in one person’s lifetime.

 

My obsession with video, or moving image, or time-based media is with time itself. My medium is time, and change – change seen through all these bodies and places that are depicted in the work. In 2017, I curated and helped found the inaugural Ghost festival of performance and moving image in Bangkok. That edition really expanded upon the idea of seeing invisible networks — from animism to capitalism — as ghostly, like how you can think of ‘possession’ in terms of both hauntings and ownership or private property. It was conceptually grounded in various ways of relating to time: locating yourself in a specific moment in time, spending time, allowing your body to be possessed by time. Songs for Dying felt very special because the main body being depicted in the video is that of my grandfather, who was the beginning thread of this entire project, which stretches from 2012-2555 to the work I’m producing today. Following tradition, his funeral happened really quickly and it was really formal. For me, the process of making this video was about personally processing his life, too.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— A video always feels like a meditation. I guess different videos have different ways of meditating. History In a Room Filled With People With Funny Names 4 was actually structured around an ayahuasca circle, and the qualities of an ayahuasca meditation. In Songs for Dying, we begin with footage of my grandfather at the funeral overlaid with a Maraṇasati meditation, which roughly translates as death-consciousness, a recreation of dying, or learning how to die better.

 

Before I started editing, I went to a meditation-retreat-slash-workshop, at this place called the Paccaya Foundation in Chiang Mai, Thailand]. Some of the monks there were once student activists who had been jailed while protesting. All the attendees got invited to an advisor of the foundation’s ninetieth birthday, which doubled-up as a mediation trip. The whole thing was like a movie, where I was the extra and this woman was the main character. For political reasons, she had to escape Thailand in the 1970s, when the military overthrew the monarchy. She left for England, where she became a student activist. In reality, I was participating in a meditation workshop that went back and forth between a Buddhist mindset and revolutionary politics. The monks explained that there are always these two spaces that are connected. Even the Buddhist space, where you’re trying to be zero, is connected to what’s happening in Thailand right now, with the student protests.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— There’s power not just in vulnerability, but allowing for instability, and trying to write a sequence that allows you, and the audience, to feel many things within an artwork: to feel transformed, and to open up many more conversations with people about their experiences. Early on in my artistic development], I wondered: could I make work about not just my life, but life in general? And could it still be interesting to me? A lot of movies about life end with a bottom line, a lesson learned — but could I make something where life can still be a lucid, moving, undefined thing? Could it still be art laughs] — but could it still be life?

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— It came at a really specific time. Grad school is basically therapy, and I went to do my MFA at Columbia at a relatively young age. I didn’t have so much of a life or a self outside my art practice, so what I was processing as a person in the world, and within my art, became one and the same. Back then, I was interested in the virtual space and the real space, and the ambiguity of the former. Everyone was obsessed with conceptualising what the virtual space was, which was interesting because it was unclear. I would go on for hours talking about the ideas travelling between these two spaces. It was Daniel Bozhkov, my professor at the time, who said: Forget about the real and the virtual. Think about those two spaces, and the invisible membrane between them. Your practice is about throwing an object that makes that membrane appear. A membrane is interesting because it’s not a wall, it allows things through, but it’s still there.

 

Since then, I’ve been working with the idea of the membrane over and again. And I don’t only mean what divides and lies between real and unreal space, the West and the East, Thailand and my personal life. At the Ghost festival, we called the membrane ‘air’: the air around things, the air around the event. It’s subjective but it’s not neutral. In Songs for Dying, the membrane becomes the ghost: an embodiment of the space between disparate locations or events where ideas or emotions get translated. In Painting with History 3, the membrane becomes a character called Chantri: a drone, ghost and spirit. The membrane between the audience and the work gets given a name. The membrane is what weaves between rooms, different times, different spaces. It’s also storytelling.

 

I remember the moment when Bozhkov conceptualised the membrane for me – he picked up something and threw it at a wall to illustrate it – and that’s when I re-conceptualised my practice.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— I moved to America at the age of 18 in 2005. I think of this as the time when I learned how to be an artist, but I was also preoccupied with my grandfather and the life I left in Thailand. I began this series in order to build a bridge between the academic discourse] in the United States and the rest of my life at a time when I really saw and felt the separation between these two worlds. I created the central character of the Denim Painter to address the questions I had about Western art history and art practice, and where my own perspective came in. I was thinking: How do I connect these disparate spaces to become a more full person? At the time, there was almost a stigma around being from Thailand, doing video and trying to make something that connected personal experience from a non-American context to the traditions and context of Western art. In Western white spaces, the work often sits in a neutral ground where ‘a life lived’ doesn’t really enter — its’s like life contaminates the space of art. And when life is allowed to enter, it suddenly dominates the conversation and how the work can be read. As the work grew, I felt like I wanted to find a type of storytelling where all my interests could come together, without these limitations.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— The Denim Painter is based on a fictional, more representational version of myself as an artist. In 2012-2555, I was thinking through a few themes. First, I was really interested in Duangjai Jansauoni winning Thailand’s Got Talent in 2012. Because she made paintings using her half-naked body, she created a huge controversy — and a public conversation around ‘real’ versus amateur art. One of the more prominent figures condemning her work was a neo-traditional Thai painter. His power and authority also got me thinking about the role of Buddhism in Thai culture, especially in terms of how the nation-state was structured and modernised after World War II. Lastly, conversation about Janasuoni’s art was closely tied to sex entertainment and its association with moralised, unconscious desire. I started to see how the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self was projected onto the identity of the nation-state: between the Buddhist religion and sex entertainment, for example. In short, the Denim Painter became this character who was always trying to find a place where he could actually connect the conscious with the unconscious, and the work that he makes addresses that. He’s called the Denim Painter because he wears denim, and uses it as a material in his paintings.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— Yeah – the paintings are more like metaphor-making or symbolic actions to serve the character of the Denim Painter. At the same time, there’s a symbiosis between making paintings and making videos. Sometimes, as in this case, paintings will arise from the video work. Other times, the painting will present a way to push the narrative forward, or shift something about the characters’ relationships.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— At first, my idea was: if the trilogy 2012-2555 was about the life of the artist, then the Painting with history… series would be the work of the artist, and these two series would function separately. How that ended up playing out was more like a full cinematic universe: with spinoffs, sequels and prequels, along with trailers and live performances, that feature a consistent cast of characters. Sometimes, I think of my entire practice as a sculpture: how each individual part – video, performance, installation, painting and research – comprises a whole, three-dimensional body.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— In naming these works, I’m referring to spaces or ‘rooms’ built from discourse or compartmentalisation. The Room of Western Art History. All these rooms! In the beginning, my work was very much about how to find or claim a space of ‘painting’ for myself, but it was never about making paintings on my own terms against a Western context and Western audience.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— Chantri is a void. She is also a filter for the audience: a storytelling tool that allows me to alter the audience’s point of view. Initially, I used Chantri to address a Western audience with a Thai name. Part of those early works involved telling a story about Western male painters, and what it feels like to be othered in the ‘room’ of Western art history. Through this form of address, whoever comes to the exhibition and watches the video essentially becomes Chantri. They become one of the people with funny names.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— I gave Chantri a voice. She became an embodiment of this space ‘in between’; the space where meaning arises. For example, the space in between the moment when light enters your retina, and the moment when you interpret what you see as an image.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— The year I was making Painting with history 3 was the year the first prosumer drone, the DJI Inspire, came out. I remember thinking to myself, this is going to change how we see the world. At first, it was just a filmmaking tool, but then the drone just had such a big presence on set. It was this new technological object that no-one had seen before. At some point, I realised the drone was a main character, and that the entire shoot should be based on it. Turning the spirit of Chantri into a drone let me give form to the connection between animism and technology. She links the animistic, anachronistic network of spirituality with the physical-yet-immaterial digital network. Both these networks function very similarly, and by the time we get to Painting with history 4, Chantri takes on a more dystopian personality. It was 2016, Trump had gotten elected, and any tech optimism had faded; instead, we were facing a deep anxiety about the digital network.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— If we think of Basco or my grandparents, these are characters that are, in essence, relationships with real people that I’ve made. Even though there are metaphors and names and ways they perform, the way they enter the work is actually through a non-constructed space. My video With history 4 (2016) was centred around this idea. Tristan Garcia’s book, Form and Object (2014), was hugely influential. I was thinking about how the definition of the human species is relational: from the names we choose to give to everything, to the network of relationships between these contexts. The human species is defined by how it names, connects and remembers itself. I was considering this in relation to my grandmother’s dementia — how that meant that she was starting to physically lose these networks of meaning. She became the main character for this video.

 

Actually, in With history 4, a new structure was formed. I started to see myself as a medium: channelling and telling stories from the world and people around me, rather than my own. Equally, I was playing the role of documentary filmmaker. I spoke to archeologists who worked in carbon dating, I spoke to brain surgeons and psychologists who specialised in animal consciousness, I joined an ayahuasca ceremony, all to understand how the network of the mind, and the network of the world, were connected.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— The more gaps between the bodies of knowledge I’m drawing from or investigating, the better — then I can actually be a poet. What’s most important is that the work starts to make sense for me, and in dialogue with other people. Having all these gaps allows you to see things better. The space in between allows you to see or feel something else.

 

A lot of the time I don’t actually write with my own ideas; a lot of it is me processing different people and their ideas. It’s not a zeitgeist, per se, but it’s an energy of the time. That’s what was hard about trying to shoot Songs for Dying in Korea without actually being able to be there because of the pandemic], breathe the air, talk to people. The writing itself may be united with one or two voices, but a lot of it is a collage of conversations and texts and responses. Some of it, I’m processing as I’m writing as well. There are all these different memories and encounters and they get pulled together. It’s important to me that a certain line may come from this person, this text; the characters you see in the video, they might not talk, but a lot of them are mentioned.

 

The shamans on Jeju Island, one of the locations central to Songs for Dying, work in a similar way. They tell the story of the island] starting from the cosmos, describing the way existence is rooted in the island spiritually, socially and ecologically, tracing the deep time of history all the way to the Jeju massacre the slaughter of 30,000 residents on Jeju Island, who had opposed the division of Korea in 1948]. Their worldview and method of storytelling connects the bodies of the people in the present to the past, but in encompassing cosmological and deep-historical questions, it evades being just political — and in doing so evades censorship or crackdown.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— When we think about the language being used in the video, I use the cosmological to address the nature of power. I’m able to communicate how the monarchy and the military have consolidated power in Thailand, for example, in a way that, if I do get to show this video in Thailand, is just about legal.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai

— It’s pretty natural to me. I’m privileged to have so many amazing friends I’m in constant conversation with. I want the projects to fill themselves out. It’s not really audience participation laughs], but I create this big picture which I can then fill out with specific contexts and stories from the sites the works will be shown in. Every show I do is a research opportunity as well. As an artist, you’re constantly wearing your interests and research on your sleeve; you’re touring the mass of your ideas. One of the locations that features in Songs for Dying is an archeological site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, known as the first temple in the world. I’d been trying to go to this place for three years. I’d read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011) and was interested in when hunters and gatherers became farmers; in other words, the building blocks of capitalism. I was finally able to go when I exhibited at the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019). I went to Jeju Island because I was doing the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021). I was already interested in Cold War politics and the invisible space of animism. The animistic space is one that always absorbs ambiguity.