KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI

Envisioned as an autofiction, where real elements of the artist’s life are blended with fictional storytelling, Love After Death is the culmination of a five-year-long journey that begins with Arunanondchai’s Songs for Living / Songs for Dying (2021), in which he processes the death of his grandfather, layered with episodes of collective traumas and memories of protest in Bangkok during the COVID pandemic. Prolonging this thread of exploring hegemonic structures and the deconstruction of narratives through rituals and personal embodiment, Arunanondchai initiated Nostalgia for Unity (2024), a site-specific, immersive installation, where he transformed the historic printing-factory building of Bangkok Kunsthalle into a charred, dessert-like soundscape that served as a church for the phoenix, a metaphor for spiritual reincarnation and the yearning for unity through collective movements.

Drawing from conceptual remnants of these previous works, Love After Death is a mélange of video footage, performances, and scenes from a film shot in an abandoned cinema in Lopburi, Thailand, once inhabited by monkeys believed to be the town’s ancestral spirits. These components are blended together through an arduous editorial process and coupled with Arunanondchai’s fictive narration, loosely based on the Lanna legend of the Sihuhata––a mythical creature worshipped for its promise of prosperity and great fortune, through its ability to consume coal and defecate gold. The moving image looks at the interchangeability between artists and spirit mediums following the post-Vietnam war tradition of the ‘ghost cinema,’ where human beings and spirits watch movies together at night, where fantasy and fear collide to create the transcendental moment promised through body, horror, and desire. Fire, one of Arunanondchai’s conceptual anchors, is here recalibrated as spiritual energy, emitting from the scenes filmed with military grade thermal cameras. Conjuring a repertoire of metaphoric symbols, from stuffed animals to bodies in slumber, from flesh consumption to ritualistic possession, Love After Death remains the artist’s quest to look for the sacred within the profane.

The installation at BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY will take features of its inaugural edition at the Taipei Biennial, namely projections on a transparent screen, programmable lighting, and atmospheric sound, while adapting them further to the gallery’s architecture. Accompanying the installation will be a new series of paintings on transparent projection mesh that hangs in BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY’s front room along with the “stage excerpts”––white, scorched floor made from a mixture of house paint and agricultural ash collected from Northern Thailand. Through these works, Arunanondchai is invested in shaping the exhibition space as an animistic body, filtering light, heat, memory, feelings and digesting and transforming it into a collective experience, imbued with spiritual energy, desire, and regenerative potentials.

Courtesy of BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY