Korakrit Arunanondchai

With a history in a room filled with people with funny names 4; Will you find beauty in this sea of data? We left it behind just for you. A cloud that will rain down on your skin. And absorb into your body, 2026
Photo: Django van Ardenne

Working across painting, performance, and installation, Korakrit Arunanondchai draws on popular culture, technology, and geopolitics alongside Buddhist precepts in Thailand. In this presentation, the artist and filmmaker revisits a 2017 video and installation from a series centered on a denim painter—played by the artist-negotiating globalization and belief systems back home and weaving autobiography into “a memory palace.” The cine-essay sharpens what is at stake for the artist—the room’s lights breathing with the footage—unfolding in 2016 between the resistance to Trump’s presidency in the US and the death and national mourning of King Rama IX in Thailand. Amidst these charged events, Arunanondchai introduces his late grandmother Tipyavarna Nitibhon, observed in tender detail in her Bangkok living room. As her memory slips, the objects she reaches for outlive the memories that once made them matter. Caught in the cycle of Buddhist reincarnation mirrored by technology’s “undeath,” the work asks whether digitized memories recombine into new, alienated presents or simply decay. Recurring figures—the Naga (sacred half-human serpent-like beings) embodied by Tosh Basco and a human-sized rat—inhabit this post-apocalyptic world. The work that extends into the park shows the post-human landscape inherited by the rat, where ritualistic objects made of leftover banana leaf and found wood surrender to growth’s slow indifference. The sculptures are claimed by plants from which the text in the video protrudes. A buried instrument breathes with the video—its vibration moving from gentle tremor to abrupt rupture. Just as in the video, memory loops, but not in data, rather in decomposition, as the human-made returns to the ground.

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