The latest and third edition of the Bangkok Art Biennale launched in October 2022, with the title “CHAOS : CALM”, a telling metaphor for the world’s tumultuous contemporaneity. The young biennale has found itself grappling with one of the most trying times in this century, with a pandemic that still leaves trails of disease worldwide, an ongoing and ever expanding climate crisis, as well as socio-political uncertainty and unrest.
It is often said that a period of calm precedes the oncoming chaos — the calm before the storm — or even that after a period of extreme chaos, there is one of silent peace. Either way, the two cannot exist without each other, and it is in this light that the Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 brings the work of 73 artists from 35 countries around the world across 12 venues in the Thai capital to contemplate on the confusion we live in today, and offer glimpses of hope through art in this era of geopolitical shifts and ecological emergency.
As the curators write, in the recent past,
Humankind has suffered despair, isolation, fear and death. Chaos in Greek cosmology refers to the void state preceding the creation of universe or cosmos. Chaos precedes Gaea and Eros (earth and desire). In the state of utter confusion and disorder, we live with unpredictability and fear as we are not used to such intense catastrophe with its ripple effects.
They continute in their curatorial statement on “CHAOS : CALM”:
The binary opposite of chaos and calm will reflect the zeitgeist of the confusing world we live in. Artists whose works reflect turbulence, trauma and angst remind us of fragility of life at the time of pandemic, climate change, environment detriment, politics and clashes in ideologies. In the dystopian and delusional world, the artists reveal consequences of destruction of humankind and nature from their own making.
Amidst chaos, there are glimpses of hope and serendipity as human and nature slowly come to terms with survivalism. With the immensity of detriment and destruction, ways of life will never return to what once known as normalcy. Discovery of calmness in turmoil can be unexpectedly enriching through sagacity and chance. Such process covers a wide range of demands including empathy, patience, allure and humor. Calmness and tranquility can still be experienced simultaneously in our new world of post-pandemic and upheaval.
ASIA has selected a number of artworks at the Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 that, while reflecting on today’s challenges, offer a poetic landscape that reminds us of the power of human compassion and the hidden beauty of the world beyond every struggle we face.
Tiffany Chung (Vietnam-USA) — QSNCC
Alongside her acclaimed installation finding one’s shadow in ruins and rubble (2014), Tiffany Chung presents a new immersive soundscape, rise into the atmosphere (2022), a collaboration with international musicians, including exiled Syrians. The sonic work interweaves music, poetry and thoughts meditating on loss and trauma, and reimagining the realities of the countries fractured by conflict, while embracing hope and courage that defy the horrors of war.
A new three-channel video commissioned by the Bangkok Art Biennale 2022, titled if water has memories (2022), pays homage to the Vietnamese refugees who were assaulted, raped, abducted and lost their lives at sea during the height of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Thailand.
Chung collected statistics, maps and coordinates of pirate attack locations between October 1985 and June 1986 from the UNHCR archive, and worked with a Thai crew to film the body of water in the south of Thailand where Vietnamese refugees, mostly women, endured the acts of violence. Through revisiting the site of the atrocities, the work functions as a symbolic burial at sea, commemorating the lost lives and the fortitude of the survivors.
Nutdanai Jitbunjong (Thailand ) — JWD Art Space
The project Crying Sky derives from the artist’s interest in ‘mysterious echoes’ witnessed in many areas around the world, which lack any definite explanation as to their origins. These sounds from the sky are often perceived by humans as warnings for change, omens of incidents about to happen or signs of the near future falling beyond our control.
Ultimately, these sounds symbolise the interrelationship between nature, humans and their supernatural beliefs. Historically, the sky has been defined as a representative of nature, gods, kings, ancestors, ghosts, calm and chaos, among others.
Crying Sky can thus be defined as a collaboration between the artist and the sky and between humans and nature, looking at local beliefs, myth, culture, literature as well as scientific data.
The video installation comprises interviews, fabricated stories, odds and ends from tales, kite flying, sounds of Sanu (bow-shaped noise-maker attached to the top of kites), cultures, traditions, religious and local beliefs, ethnic stories, politics, power negotiation and social contexts that contribute to a definition of our sky.
Tatsuo Miyajima (Japan) — Museum Siam
Changing Landscape / Changing Wall (Wall of Change) (2022) displays one of Tatsuo Miyajima‘s signature themes, but instead of being powered by technology, it is analogue in nature. The work is a series of five large-scale digital numbers drilled into a wall, which change every day according to the numbers from 0 to 9 thrown on a ten-sided dice, as if to consult an oracle.
The landscape of the outside world seen through the holes also changes every day, like a numerical landscape cut by chance. The numbers represent time, and time equals to life. Numbers 1 to 9 symbolise life, while 0 equals death.
The installation thus represents the Buddhist cycle of life and death, as well as the Buddhist teaching that all things have life in them, which changes from moment to moment, in a constant, unpredictable flux. The Wall of Change thus contains a silent message of awe for all such life.
Jompet Kuswidananto (Indonesia) — JWD Art Space
Terang Boelan (Moonshine) (2022) takes its title from a folk song that is deeply rooted in the memory of the people in the Malay Peninsula and Nusantara archipelago. The song is believed to have originated from “La Rosalie” by 19th century French composer Pierre-Jean de Béranger. The song revives the memory of losing, longing, victory, or anything else depends on who sing it.
Kuswidananto‘s site-specific installation presents a mixed feeling of nostalgia, where beauty and chaos, and personal and historical memory intersect. Indonesia, only an abstract idea at the fall of colonialism, was born out of the fabrication of narratives by its founding fathers, including the romanticised story of descent from the 14th century Majapahit Kingdom.
Soekarno, one of such founding fathers, worked hard to build a strong national identity for Indonesia throughout his 22 years of authoritarian regime.
The work presents the memory of Soekarno through audio-recorded readings of the love letters he wrote to his nine wives in different periods of time, which may reflect how his personal narratives seep through his vision of nationalism.
Pinaree Sanpitak (Thailand) — QSNCC
Ideas of fragility and weightlessness, and reflections on sight and sightlessness intersect in Sanpitak‘s Anything Can Break (2011), a monumental installation of illuminated ‘flying’ origami cubes and breast-shaped, hand-blown glass forms. The suspended sky responds to the audience’s physical presence through motion sensors, triggering two separate multi-channel soundscapes.
The installation continues the artist’s exploration of sensory perception surrounding notions around the body and the figure, a key focus of Sanpitak’s practice. An older work also at the Bangkok Art Biennale 2022, Temporary Insanity (2004) features hundreds of brightly-coloured, interactive soft sculptures hiding an audio machine that responds directly to the movements and sounds of viewers entering the installation area. The field of bright yellow, red and orange silky beanbag-like forms becomes a meditative space infused with a life of its own.
Chiharu Shiota (Japan) — QSNCC
The Eye of the Storm (2022) looks at the interaction and contrast between the destructive force and the stillness that characterise one single phenomenon. Through this representation, Shiota references not only the natural phenomenon but also the human heart and our society.
Thousands of sheets of white paper are connected by red ropes, swirling like a typhoon. The surrounding papers are wildly whirling and rustling as if blown by the wind, but the centre stays calm and quiet.
The installation represents a typhoon, where the eye, its centre, is completely calm, with little or no rain, and even blue skies, while wind pressure gradually grows stronger moving away from its core.
Shiota notes how “the true center of a violently moving thing may be surprisingly calm because of the centrifugal forces that cause it. The further away from that center, the stronger the wind speed and the greater the damage. I cannot help but feel that this strange natural phenomenon exists within human society and within the human heart.”
Wantanee Siripattananantakul (Thailand) — QSNCC
The Web of Time (2022) is a film series inspired by the search for lost time, and the artist’s interest in our live experiences. Assigning meaning to historical events, the series creates a thread that links the past to the present as if in parallel to the future. The video installation consists of three parts.
The first is a personal diary that tells the stories of our ancestors, their beliefs and their conviction in the land of their birth, the motherland which gave birth to a pure blood lineage of themselves and their descendants.
The second is the moment of entering a spiritual realm through the body of an African gray parrot; the parrot becomes like a medium casting a watchful eye on the events happening in the world. The third, represents rebirth and a glimmer of hope, as the flow of time passes through all living matter amid the decay of a wilting world.