Artworks reflect a journey from northeast Thailand
Print Edition
ART lovers may not be familiar with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but movie buffs know him well as an internationally acclaimed and award-winning filmmaker.
Weerasethakul’s film “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010. And three of his films were listed in “The 21st Century’s 100 Greatest films” by BBC Culture in 2016.
Weerasethakul was born in Bangkok in 1970 but grew up in Khon Kaen in northeastern Thailand. He studied architecture in Khon Kaen University and later obtained MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
His feature films, short films and video installations have won him numerous influential awards, such as Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres and Officiers de l’ordre des arts et des lettres in 2008.
He was one of the shortlisted artists of the 2010 Hugo Boss Award. His works have been exhibited around the world including Tate Modern in London.
“Monuments” is his first solo exhibition in Shanghai. The exhibition at ShanghART reveals his multiple roles as a filmmaker, video and new media artist.
Long known for how his work intertwines memory with intimate experience, the title of the exhibition literally refers to 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 Weerasethakul’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.
Weerasethakul says the exhibition is comprised of “selected works from the past 20 years that reflect a journey and discovery of places in northeastern Thailand and other places, from Khon Kaen where I grew up, to Chiang Mai where I now live and where fact, fiction and dream merge.”
Each work in “Monuments” can be read as a passageway with fragmented traces in motion, leading toward the artist’s floating world.
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.
“Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Monuments”
Date: Through July 27, 10am-7pm
Venue: ShanghART Gallery, West Bund
Address: 2555-10 Longteng Ave
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