Korakrit Arunanondchai
Monday, 11 June 2012
Work from his oeuvre.
“Arunanondchai invites the viewer into a heavenly earth, that extends in one direction towards an imagined hell, and in the other towards a heaven. Yet these visual spaces are at once inviting and forboding: the light-seeping wooden prism on the ground suggests a point of emergence into living and a sealing off of death; or perhaps is could be a portal into Second Life, a way towards a digital reality that can be both idyllic and nightmarish. Hanging above this is a sculpture, whose elements allude to a life-cycle narrative, Judeo-Christian and Buddhist foundation stories, and human fears. Opposite is “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” an 8×8 foot silk-screened painting, which borrows the structure from the renaissance original, but leaves behind its allegory and figuration.
Arunanondchai weaves such icons as the snake, the cross, and the jewel throughout his art: they are items readymade in meaning, connoting a million disparate things in different contexts. This art asks, in this moment, what does the transmigrated symbol mean? The artist transforms not only the symbol and Bosch’s art, but also his own pieces, creating more and more abstracted iterations of them until they can exists only as solitary objects, installed in a fantasy gallery in a digital world.
“Garden” presents fantasy spaces where the the heavenly and the hellish, the alive and the dead, the serious and the joke, all contend with one another. Yet beneath the dynamic conceptual dichotomies are beautifully compelling and mysterious visual objects.”- Mountain Fold, NYC