ShanghART is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in China by the internationally acclaimed and award-winning Thai filmmaker, video and new media artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Consisting of video installations and photographic works created between 2007 to the present, the artist himself states that the scope of the exhibition is comprised of “selected works from the past ten years that reflect a journey and discovery of places in Northeastern Thailand, from Khon Kaen where I grew up, to Chiang Mai where I now live, where fact, fiction, and dream merge.”
Long known for how his work intertwines memory with intimate experience, the title of the exhibition, Monuments, literally refers to both the solid, recurring images of statuary featured in the artist’s work, which, by extension, bears his amorphous indelible memories. This seemingly paradoxical context unifies Apichatpong’s profound sense of a spiritual realm within the boundaries of his homeland and places of alienation; the past and present, a seemingly hallucinatory memory commingled with mundane reality. His reflexive, non-linear narratives enable ephemeral elements to merge and reemerge, such as light and phantoms to be attached to his personal existence and experience. Works featured in Monuments reflect various stages of the artist’s self-exploration and persistent discovery from his birthplace in the northeastern Thailand to his current residence in Chiang Mai during the past decade.
Each work in Monuments can be read as a passageway with fragmented traces in motion, leading toward the artist’s floating world. The ascending chronological order of how the works are arranged from Haiku (2009), screened at the Tate Modern in 2016, to async – first light, (2017) the new music video collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, to the latest works on the gallery’s second floor, further emphasises the artist’s multiple diverging paths. Viewers are invited to contemplate “a future.” Video installations shown on the gallery’s first floor, Fireworks (Fans), also known as Home Movie, featured at the Biennale of Sydney last year, and Invisibility, both from 2016, which premiered at the Saitama Triennale, enrich the visitors’ experience in comprehending the pattern and trajectory of the artist’s creations. Following one work to the next the journey itself generates a dislocating ambiance as if following the artist from cave to cave in the deep Thai jungle that is featured in many of the works on view.
