K11 NIGHT: A Memory Palace

EVENT DESCRIPTION

The K11 Art Foundation is delighted to unveil the title and theme for this year’s K11 NIGHT: A Memory Palace, an expansive celebration of art and life, fantasy and reality, science, and spirituality. An annual celebration dedicated to artistic expression and creativity, the title sponsor for this year’s event is UBS, with additional support from Visa, BMW, Dior Parfums, Perrier-Jouët, and SUPREME, a premium brand of Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong.

From 17 December 2023 to 14 January 2024, the internationally known rising Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondcha’s immersive video installation Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 will be presented at K11 MUSEA. Adapted specially for K11 MUSEA in close collaboration with the artist, the video installation will include the “body” with an oversized pond resembling an outline of a figure – which was first seen in its first public appearance in 2015.

Painting with history (…) is the fourth instalment in a series of video installations that Arunanondchai began creating in 2012. Encompassing sculpture, film, performance, and painting, the installation explores the co-existence of humans, machine, and spirits in 21st-century Bangkok, a city where animistic tendencies and the desire for modernisation both prevail in everyday life.

Arunanondchai is an internationally renowned Thai artist. Early in his career, he received the prestigious Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2013). He was later invited to participate in many exhibitions held in famous museums around the world, including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France (2015) and Museum of Art, Sydney, Australia (2022). Living and working between Bangkok, Thailand and New York, USA, Arunanondchai develops his art in the form of hybrid storytelling. Painting with history (…) is the artist’s ode to “Sans Soleil”, an experimental film by director Chris Marker. Using the idea of film as a constructed medium as a starting point, Arunanondchai imagines a conversation between a character called “Chantri”, embodied as both a spirit and a drone camera, and the “Denim Painter”, a fictionalised version of the artist himself.

Anchored by a consistent cast of characters and drawing inspiration from Buddhism and Animist beliefs, Arunanondcha’s installation attempts to build something that feels like living thing, breathing out inanimate objects and discarded memories.

Painting with history (…) is only visible in its entirety from above. Across the exhibition space, viewers will find denim canvases covered with handprints and gestural marks in primary colours, created by the artist using his body as a paintbrush. The central form in the canvases and the shape of the pond in the exhibition resembles the outline of a yellow figure, a shape that was drawn by a go-go dancer in her body painting performance on the reality television show “Thailand’s Got Talent”, which sparked media outrage in Thailand in 2012. The public opinions that split between the Buddhist moralistic values against the known image of Thailand’s sex tourism became the binary which the artist tries to break down and takes on as a mythic origin point. This painted manifestation, as a landscape and a stage which the viewer is free to explore, is also replete with “performers” — mannequins and fabric characters adorned in costumes and coated in paint. The installation constitutes one big painting that is meant to be seen by Chantri from the perspective of a drone looking down from the sky.