October Round-Up

Prasong Luemuang, Mulyana, Danh Vo, etc.
By Ho See Wah

Prasong Luemuang, ‘Festival’, 1988, tempera on canvas, 170 x 240cm. Image courtesy of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.

RIFTS: Thai contemporary artistic practices in transition, 1980s – 2000s
Bangkok Art and Culture Centre presents a retrospective of contemporary Thai art in the late 20th century, a time where the art scene changed significantly as artists challenged conventional ways of seeing and creating. Power structures in the industry were challenged, networks were formed across borders, and alternative spaces in Thailand gained prominence. Though this exhibition is organised chronologically, it does not historicise this epoch but presents new ways of understanding the decisive era via the parallels and divergences that the selected works generate. 

Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 30 August to 24 November. 

'Mulyana: A Man, A Monster and The Sea', 2019. Exhibition installation view at OCMAExpand – Santa Ana. Photography by Lauren Hillary.

Mulyana: A Man, A Monster and The Sea
As the Orange County Museum of Art awaits the opening of its new building in 2021, OCMAExpand – Santa Ana becomes the museum’s temporary abode. The third cycle of OCMAExpand features ‘Mulyana: A Man, A Monster and The Sea’, the artist’s first showcase in the United States. Mulyana presents three large-scale installations that immerse us in a fantastical underwater world. At the same time, the show is a call to action to care more for our fragile marine ecology.

OCMAExpand – Santa Ana, 21 September to 15 March 2020. 

Olan Ventura, ‘Madonna and Child with the Serpent’, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 121.9 x 121.9cm. Image courtesy of West Gallery.

Fractured Perfection
Siblings Olan and Manok Ventura explore how digital media has transformed the way we view an image. The brothers appropriate and revise seminal works from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, where art was heralded as breaking new grounds in the western art historical canon. In their respective artistic languages, the Venturas delineate modern technology’s influence on the speed and quantity we consume content daily, and its accompanying effects. 

West Gallery, 26 September to 26 October.

Danh Vo, ‘untitled’ (detail), 2019. Exhibition installation view at the South London Gallery. Photography by Nick Ash. Image courtesy of the artist.

Danh Vo: untitled
‘Danh Vo: untitled’ demonstrates the artist’s conceptual and experimental approach towards making art. Working in a transdisciplinary fashion, he engages with collaborators such as his lover, friends, gallery technicians, and even a group of children that visited his farm in Berlin. Almost like a scientist, the artist amalgamates different components to discover what the permutations can achieve. These experiments are his vessel for discovering how else contemporary life can be like, when unshackled from structural and social norms. 

South London Gallery, 19 September to 24 November.

Lai Yu Tong, ‘Newspaper Painting No. 52’, 2019, synthetic polymer paint on newspaper, 57 x 70cm. Image courtesy of DECK.

It’s strange I feel like I’ve seen this one before
This solo show by Lai Yu Tong explores visual culture through photographs found in newspapers. In a reflexive manner, Lai collects and reimagines the photos to rupture the passive way that we consume images on a daily basis. Especially in a world where visual stimuli are ever constant and taken for granted, ‘It’s strange I feel like I’ve seen this one before’ comes as a welcomed inquiry into the current state of affairs.

DECK, 24 September to 13 October.