Second edition of art festival in Khon Kaen
By Worathep Akkabootara

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

Wilawan Wiangthong, ‘The Cowgirl’, 2023, C-prints, 42 x 29.7cm. Photo by Puttita Karunamit. Image courtesy of the artist.

Coined as an acronym, S.O.E. is short for Sales, Operation, and Executive. SOE, the festival, appropriates the acronym and reconceptualises its meaning: Strong, Old, Excellence. In its second edition, which took place from 11 to 25 March 2023, SOE aimed to re-enchant the oral history of the old city foundation. The first community of the old city was founded around the lake, which today is both a tourist attraction and recreational area. Earlier iterations of the old city widely embraced diverse and local narratives from the folks and guests who travelled from many places to Khon Kaen, a leading trade and administrating city.

The festival’s second edition was inspired by Nai Hoy, a leader of the caravan trade in Esan history. Nai Hoy is commonly known as a male rancher, but applies to all kinds of caravan chiefs who traded rice, herbs, pickled fish, cattle, and silk. The founders of the festival, Manaporn Robroo, Ugrid Jomyim, and Pichit Sonkom chose the figure to exemplify the trend today of art and cultural dialogues that open broadly to interact, shift, and cultivate social-engaging art forms. In particular, the exchanges that cut across physical borders, genders, and ethnicity encourage people to conceive of themselves as both visitor and guest.

None of these bold intentions is unusual to people who have been mobilised by war, migration, and pilgrimage that shape the cultural landscape of the region. The festival, supported by local infrastructure, aimed to bridge local and regional audiences and explore the dynamism of public space. It applied “panels” to mock the biennale as a large-scale and government-funded institution. The panels were located in various areas that drive city mobility. Some of these spaces symbolise the merging and juxtaposition between the old bureaucratic area and the new commercial one, to the transit area of the old bus terminal that is now abandoned.

“The festival’s second edition was inspired by Nai Hoy, a leader of the caravan trade in Esan history. The founders of the festival, Manaporn Robroo, Ugrid Jomyim, and Pichit Sonkom chose the figure to exemplify the trend today of art and cultural dialogues that open broadly to interact, shift, and cultivate social-engaging art forms.”

The venues, located throughout the city, attracted the audience on a detour urban experience, and encourage encounters with local spaces, ranging from the museum, shophouse and warehouse storage, to the beauty salon and bus terminal. These meeting points paralleled those met in the everyday life of Nai Hoy, such as the cattle market, local fresh market, and the tavern, yet here we came across spaces that could also host artists or cultural practitioners.

Low Pey Sien, ‘Memory of Windmill’, 2023, site-specific installation of windmills made with used aluminium cans, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of SOE 2023.

Kong Siden, ‘Envision’, 2023, 3 digital collages on lightboxes, 25 x 25 x 120cm each; video projection on shattered mirror on the sand pile, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of SOE 2023.

Beginning in the room under the small stadium at Mint Museum, the exhibit included an archive, providing a short introduction to the first edition of SOE. The Wooden House panel hosted works dedicated especially to neighbouring countries. There were two artists from Malaysia. Low Pey Sien's ‘Memory of Windmill’ sent her condolences to the ones who passed away after Covid-19. Nor Rasidah Hashim, a trained ecologist, expressed her first impression of the Korat plateau which encouraged cattle trading and railway trade expansion. Cambodian artist Kong Siden’s ‘Envision’ conveyed the urban transformation brought by a landfill, which caused change along the waterway landscapes.

As a city driven by trade, administration, and education, Khon Kaen's prosperity has been supported a lot by mercantilism. Among many important leaders were the Chinese and Indians who came by train. In order to trade, they needed areas such as warehouses and regional branches located near the main terminal. These important meeting points show how intensively labour and goods feed the city's vibrancy.

Voranon Suetrong, 'Everything for sale', 2023, acrylic paint, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of SOE 2023.

Phifa Collective, ‘15,000 ÷ 4 = 3,750', 2023, site-specific installation with performance, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of SOE 2023.

In the old red warehouse, which once traded timber and wood, the entrance was blanketed in the stylings of Voranon Suetrong, a calligraphic graffiti artist. Suetrong’s mural elicits curiosity, as both Thai and English meanings intertwine to form a larger visual make-up of instant impact. Inside, Phifa collective, whose members include Wilawan Wiangthong, Awika Samukrsaman, Prapassorn Konmuang and Bussaraporn Thongchai, created a process-oriented project demonstrating parallelism between art making and the assembly line, following the idea of immateriality and symbolic production. Around Phifa’s installation, one finds two works: one by Atitayaporn Sanpo, who connects herself to the myth of "Kula", a trader ethnic group, that wanders across the acrid fields of the Northeast. The other was a video diary of Ruangsak Anuwatwimon’s ‘100 Years of Silence’, which showed the artist excavating soil from the northeastern killing fields of the Messiah Movement prisoners. These prisoners aspired towards utopia and fought against exploitative tax by early centralised Siamese polity.

At the old bus terminal, the ground floor was laden with informative charts detailing land use, and economic and bureaucratic service timelines from a few decades at the old Thai Silk Company. This was an indicator showing how the exchanges among local craft, the subsistence economy, and the cash economy began. Here the panel exhibited works from mostly female artists, who reflected on their experience with gender roles and representation both in domestic and intercultural contexts. Many of the artists’ works were grouped to explore and accentuate a specific area of interest, namely ethnic identity, unitary nation centrism, and ecology concern issues. The Lanna panel, named after the Lanna people in the North, included artists from the collective Hom Joints. The curator Anusorn Tanyapalit addressed the young generation's sceptical view towards monoculture, and the exhaustion of old cultural artefacts and beliefs.

“Many of the artists’ works were grouped to explore and accentuate a specific area of interest, namely ethnic identity, unitary nation centrism, and ecology concern issues.”

Installation view of Deep South panel, 2023. Image courtesy of SOE 2023.

Arjun Tongrak, ‘Replaced By the Light’, 2023, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of SOE 2023.

The Deep South panel paid attention to southernmost provinces being misconceived as sites of violence in popular media, and explored multiculturalism and incongruent histories. The curator and artist Anuwat Apimukmongkol set up a local market and supplied affordable art pieces, photo shooting with local cosplay, and snacks. Nordiana Beehing's ‘Organ for Sales’ blended her fascination with embroidery with her habitual caretaking for a patient who needed organ implantation. And Muhammadsuriyee Masu's ‘Postcards from Patani’ series of postcards represented his reflection on the atmosphere of surveillance in the local’s daily lives.

The festival also included outstanding works that critique ideological apparatus, teenage culture, attitudes toward religion, and consumerism by a group of mixed-media art students from Khon Kaen University. And MAIELIE art space was open for film screenings supported by Goethe Institute to showcase the narrative of border crossing and travelling, and also supplement the programme concerned with Deep South issues. In addition to artworks exhibited, there were also cultural practitioners and activists from many disciplines, such as the Salayanion Collective, who were active during the pandemic lockdown.

In conclusion, SOE’s DIY spirit was matched with relatively meagre resources. However, from this weakness emerged its strength to re-animate local histories both from personal memories and the official ones about the place and its people. The trade route as the point of departure helped people to make their cartography of the present day and used art activities to prompt the audience towards cultural revisionism.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2023, A&M’s third annual publication. Click here to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.