Korakrit Arunanondchai: Painting, Prayer, Text

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s exhibition Painting, Prayer, Text, presents a suite of history paintings and spirit houses that articulate the tension between the exploration and exploitation of one’s sense of home and identity. While home may be where we start from, the development of selfhood and identity also involves the leaving behind of our origins and at times their disavowal or wreckage.

Upon entering the exhibition space, the viewer is offered two passageways through which to view the spirit house sculptures Bridge and Shore of Security. The structure for the spirit houses was originally created by Arunanondchai’s mother, who worked as a designer of commercial wooden dollhouses; these were then emptied out and burned before being reassembled by the artist with their new accoutrement of discarded scraps from traditional Thai spirit houses, which are shrines ubiquitous throughout the artist’s native country and used to offer prayers and gifts to the protective spirits of a place. The process of building and creating is a form of prayer—a home’s structure dictates the flow of bodies, expressing the wish to be well guided and the hope that our chosen forms will stand the test of time. They are spiritual strivings that are doomed to profanity—while the spirit houses are an offering to the gods, they also speak to the human hubris of daring to challenge the will of those who rule above from our based, earthly constraints.

The creative process for these sculptures is one of dismantling and collage, and is echoed in the five history paintings Arunanondchai creates by first crafting layers of paint, bodily imprints, and photo-collage on denim canvas, then setting them ablaze, with the flame emerging as a protagonist on the canvas’s stage. The artist photographs this performance process from a bird’s eye perspective; the resulting images are then recreated to scale and interwoven with the ashes and remaining denim canvas, creating a kind of trompe l’oeil where the edge of the photograph and painting meet to capture and materialize a memory of burning. The three blue “Void” paintings, made from a metallic foil transfer process, create a sky-screen, a space for projective promises neither fulfilled nor denied. Arunanondchai’s work frequently flirts with the boundary between irreverence and allegiance to that which is unassailably symbolic or sacred: exhausted markers of American masculinity such as denim and fire are turned inside out in value and form, while devotional objects become subject to scrutiny in a critical turn that accompanies true faith.