Korakrit Arunanondchai: Between Bangkok and New York with Fresh Eyes
Many Jakartans are becoming more familiar with the Thai-born US-based artist, Korakrit Arunanondchai with his first solo exhibition in Indonesia titled Sing Dance Cry Breathe | as their world collides on to the screen officially opening back on November 30th at MACAN Museum. The multidisciplinary artist brings narratives of animism, multiplicity, birth, and rebirth in his work—expertly building complex narratives throughout the exhibition that leave each visitor wanting more.
Like many artists, Korakrit's fascination with art as a storytelling medium began in his youth. He loved to read manga, which helped him pass the time as part of a swim team. “I was a swimmer in a swim team for like 13 years of my life and especially when I was younger it was a very anti-social sport you know?” he began to recall. “Where you, as a kid, you wanna play and talk but instead you’re underwater for really long amounts of time. I think I swam 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the evening. So, to entertain myself, I would kind of like recreate all the characters that I kind of see in anime and create a kind of parallel universe in my head to entertain myself and I think that’s probably, a lot of that swimming time parallel imaginary universe really shaped the kind of art I make today.”
Throughout his career, Korakrit's work has been exhibited in numerous galleries around the world. In 2014, his first solo museum exhibition titled 2012-2055 was hosted at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Working between Thailand and the US has inevitably impacted his creative work and, for Korakrit, being based in both New York and Bangkok allows him to see the two cities with fresh eyes. He elaborates, “I think that the glory and also the downfall of travelling a lot is that on one hand you get this refreshed sense of awareness. So, sometimes, certain things are better to sit with and have depth with while other things are better, especially for film making, sometimes it’s better to have a fresh eye or an outsider take at it.” He continued to explain that living in New York for some time allows him to see and approach Bangkok from a refreshed angle and vice versa. One of the pieces in Sing Dance Cry Breathe | as their world collides on to the screen at Museum MACAN, Songs for Living (2021), is a post-COVID film Korakrit created in New York after spending a year and a half in Bangkok during the pandemic lockdown. “I returned to New York after the kind of unlocking, after the vaccine, I made this video, and I think for me it was when I was allowed to have this almost refreshed take on New York.”
Korakrit's creative narrative is rife with symbols of rebirth and the afterlife, with the appearance of phoenixes and/or garuda prevalent throughout his work. “I’m interested in these sort of animistic or lore-building symbols because you find them in the past. You find them in ancient artefacts but you also find them in popular culture like anime, video games, you know? You even find renditions of them being used to kind of represent the state.” Korakrit began to explain. “You know you find hard and soft versions of it and you can find realistic versions and also fantasy versions of it everywhere and I think that’s why for me there’s like a bird, a phoenix, a garuda, in every room and the work becomes the motion of transformation in between them.” Korakrit believes that the relationships they hold remain the same but there is a careful balance between the constantness of these symbols and the multiplicity in the numerous ways we choose to interpret them.
Film plays a prominent role in nearly all of Korakrit's exhibitions. For Korakrit, exploring video on his work is akin to playing with time, with his films featuring many rapid cuts. “So you can think about the cuts as almost a kind of splintering and fracturing of linear time right? And oftentimes, my videos will cut to a solid color or even cut to black, and it’s interesting when we dream, we dream when we close our eyes right? So, much of my interest is a sort of consciousness that’s very much in between, almost equivalent to being between a documentary image and a created image, like a dream image,” Korakrit expounded. This is palpable inSing Dance Cry Breathe | as their world collides on to the screen, which features the aforementionedSongs for Living (2021) andNo history in a room filled with people with funny names 5(2018), the latter being part of the seriesTogether with history in a room filled with people with funny names.“I think the exhibition has its own kind of rhythm. Almost as if, when you open your eyes or close your eyes, when you visit this exhibition perhaps, it is precisely this cinematic quality that comes from the program of light and sound. Specifically, we were very conscious of crafting the negative space, when the sound is off and the light is off or even the blackness of the space. I think that's very important. When I make videos I try to edit as if I'm painting. And when I'm painting and creating installations, I try to approach it like a video.”
Many of his works also feature some very interesting locations. No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2018) features drone footage of Ramasun Camp Radio Station, a previous United States stronghold in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Songs for Dying (2021), a film in the same series as Songs for Living (2021), is set in Jeju Island, South Korea, and references the Jeju Uprising of 1984. “I think a lot of these sites contain a lot of very loaded traumatic experiences and often those very loaded and traumatic experiences like exploitation, war, that's often the site that is most hidden in terms of both narrative and visibility,” Korakrit explained. “I think a lot of my work is interested in materials that are just not immediately readily available or visible. I think it goes back to that ‘eyes closed, dreaming’ state in the way dreams are not always positive or light. Sometimes it can be violent, sometimes it can be the human unconscious. It's in degrees. I think for me those invisible things form us as much as the visible. And I think maybe that's why as an artist, I think I see art as a field of work where you can explore these gaps.”
The relevance of the themes of creation and destruction as prominent narratives in Korakrit's work is particularly poignant in today's rapidly evolving world, whether it be technologically or culturally. “So much of technology nowadays has been about keeping. How much can we keep? And I think we keep too much and when you don't destroy certain things you end up with nothing you end up with sameness you end up with things that you can't tell the difference is anymore,” Korakrit explained. “I think culturally, there's something beautiful about Asia. We live with the past in the present and I think there's a strong similarity between animism and science-fiction. They contain desires that are projected into the collective fantasy space of the past and the future at the same time, but for me, the way I like to deal with tradition and culture and inheritance is to not attach it so much to morals and ethics. I think art is a place where you can practice that. To ask how something can continue but not often in the name of something even good or moral.”
Korakrit's solo exhibition, Sing Dance Cry Breathe | as their world collides on to the screen, is open to the public. Tickets are available for purchase on Museum MACAN's official website.
