pictured by Yingyong Wongtakee
pictured by Yingyong Wongtakee
pictured by Yingyong Wongtakee
pictured by Yingyong Wongtakee
pictured by Yingyong Wongtakee
Eclipse, 2017, 112 books and magazines, 21 of forty watt bulbs, black ink, black spray paint, 3 B&W digital prints, 2 black dye mosquito nets, a studio setting (a table and a chair, one light bulb, a sketchbook, research papers), W 330 x L 670 x H 340 cm (black books), W 42 x L 59.4 cm (each photograph), W 220 x L 300 x H 200 cm. (two mosquito nets).
อาทิตย์ดับ ๒๕๖๐ หนังสือและนิตยสารจำนวน ๑๑๒ เล่ม หลอดใส๔๐วัตต์ จำนวน๒๑หลอด หมึกสีดำ สีสเปรย์สีดำ ภาพถ่ายดิจิตอล ๓ ภาพ มุ้งย้อมสีดำ ๒ หลัง ชุดสตูดิโอ ๑ ชุดประกอบด้วย โต๊ะ ๑ ตัว เก้าอี้ ๑ ตัว ไฟ ๑ ดวง สมุดสเก็ตซ์ ๑ เล่ม เอกสารวิจัย ขนาดโดยรวมของหนังสือสีดำ กว้าง๓๓๐ x ยาว๖๗๐ x สูง๓๔๐ ซม. ขนาดของภาพถ่าย กว้าง๔๒ x ยาว๕๙.๔ x สูง๕๙.๔ ซม. ขนาดโดยรวมของมุ้งสองหลัง กว้าง๒๒๐ x ยาว๓๐๐ x สูง๒๐๐ ซม.
Concept: I encounter with a great silence after I heard the broadcast news from a radio station on October 13th, 2016. This was a moment when time seems to stand still. I never experienced this phenomena, the freezing of a moment in time, before.
Two weeks before the news, there was a flood in my storage space due to an outside drain was blocked. Around five hundred of books, magazines and catalogues got wet and pieces of my artwork were damaged. After my mind was calm, I looked for the positives in this negative situation. I got an idea using these destructive elements as materials for my new work. Many books become misshapen when they dried our and I interested in these transformative forms. However, pages of the water-damaged books stuck together. Trying to turn pages was causing pages to tear. Some pages were glue tightly together, the book's content have been obscured. The flood made these books self-censorship.
The tension from my teaching job inspired me to push the limits of a material that is considered fragile, paper. I used black ink for coating every single page of one hundred and twelve books and magazines that I'd been read and collected in my room at Chiang Mai. All images and texts on each page of books were painted over; the whole content was gone, the books lost their voices. The black ink made the books become permanently mute. The whole coating process took me around three hundred and ninety days. After the the passing of beloved Rama IX, black became a dominate colour. Dresses, social media pages, newspapers, magazine front covers, ribbons.,etc turned black and white. However, I associated the black colour in my work with silence, nor grief or death.
The first year living and working in Chiang Mai, I had some hard times. Photography was a medium that I could portray emotions; struggle, anxiety, fear and isolation. A camera became a tool to discover my inner self. The muddy road in a photographic series suggested the transition period of our country.
A studio setting in the exhibition (occupied one-third of the exhibition space) hinted an intervention of a personal space in a profit-oriented commercial art gallery. A studio setting consisted of a black table and chair that I'd been used as a studio since 2010, receipts, a pile of research papers, drawings for a new project and a sketchbook in which few pages with personal information were painted with black ink; half of the sketchbook were fulled with sketches of 'Eclipse' and the rest were work in progress sketches for an upcoming project. Each visit to the gallery during the exhibition period, I added more research papers, drawings on my work desk in order to made 'Eclipse' as a living exhibition. Two mosquito nets were functioned as partitions as well as the blurring of boundaries between private and public.
A total eclipse occurs in a short period of time as the sun is fully covered by the moon. The sun become temporarily obscured; but, sooner or later the sun will shine again.