Known for ephemeral conceptual works and politically charged, large-scale collages, Thasnai Sethaseree is a Thai contemporary artist and activist whose art engages with Thailand's culture and collective memory. His art has been shown in the Venice Biennale.
Read MoreBorn in Bangkok, Sethaseree takes the politics and fraught history of his homeland as the primary focus of his work.
From 1996, Sethaseree studied widely across Thailand, completing a BFA in Sculpture at Chiang Mai University, a BA in Philosophy at Ramkhamhaeng University in Bangkok, and BA in Political Science at Sukhothai University in Nonthaburi.
In 1998, Sethaseree was awarded a fellowship to study at the University of Chicago, from which he graduated with an MFA in Visual Arts in 2000. This was followed by a residency at the monk parakeet in Chicago. In 2000, Sethaseree produced The Carnival, a cultural project in Chicago's South Side that addressed themes of belonging by recreating the atmosphere of a Thai temple fair, complete with chanting monks. From 2004 to 2011, Sethaseree completed a PhD at Chiang Mai University.
Thasnai Sethaseree's practice encompasses conceptual projects and large-scale collages laden with coloured paper evocative of traditional Thai paper cuts. His work explores themes of race, immigration, cultural identity, politics, social memory, and time.
In the long-running conceptual project make it like home... anywhere? (2002–2014), Sethaseree meditates on the personal effects and positive memories of home that were shared with him by Thai immigrants in Chicago.
In the installations produced as part of the project, the artist explores the complex tensions between the yearning to return to a nostalgic image of the past and the fight for a better life in a new place.
Launched in Stockholm in 2011, Sethaseree's The Structure of Fear (2011–2012) is a research project that rendered the fears of people from all around the world into visual forms. The project took place around the time of the Arab Spring, several European corruption scandals, and the anti-government red-shirt protests in Bangkok.
Taking participants' responses to contemporary events, Sethaseree's team in Chiang Mai put them through two computer programmes that rendered the data into two-dimensional coloured patterns and structural lines. These were then converted into three-dimensional sculptures 'that show how fear is constructed and revolves around itself,' according to the artist.
More recently, collages thick with layers of images, text, and coloured paper streamers have become Sethaseree's signature.
Sethaseree's award-winning Untitled (Hua Lamphong) (2016) is a dense, politically charged collage layered on top of Buddhist monk robes. Past and present images of the Hua Lamphong train station, a symbolic seat of power and modernisation in Thailand's history, are cut and arranged together in layers along with text from the country's 2014 constitution.
Commenting on the nature of Thailand's covering-up and ornamentation of history, this imagery is concealed beneath layers of traditional paper streamers. The work is part of a triptych exploring contemporary and historic issues in Thailand.
Another triptych, It's unclearly clear, as yet incomplete (2017–2021), explores social and structural problems in modern and contemporary Thailand. Divided into themes referencing Hell, Heaven, and Earth, each work incorporates 30 to 40 layers of images, coloured paper strips, and monk's robes.
Situating these seemingly abstract assemblages within Bangkok, the base layer of each collage is an inverted image of one of Bangkok's three business districts. Layered on top is an array of diverse references including sky maps from the dates of the country's coups, lottery tickets, text from the Ramayana, and imagery of biological forms, cancer cells, and the 1976 student massacre. It is a holistic documentary of 'Thainess' that hides beneath its vibrant facade an underbelly of corruption, profiteering, and reliance on chance.
As well as exhibiting at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, in 2018 Sethaseree received the Juror's Choice Award for Untitled (Hua Lamphong) at the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize.
Thasnai Sethaseree has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions in Thailand and beyond.
Solo exhibitions include Cold War: the mysterious, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai (2022); Some Deaths Can't Be Buried, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore (2019); What You Don't See Will Hurt You, Gallery Ver, Bangkok (2016); Not Even Pineapples, Gallery Ver and Bangkok Art Centre, Bangkok (2009).
Group exhibitions include Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize Exhibition, Singapore Art Museum (SAM) (2018); The Way Things Go, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2015); Safe Place in the Future (?), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila (2013); Symphony No. 9: After Number Nine, There Is No Number, Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art (2011).
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
