In a world of slippery truths, the Thai artist’s radical experiments question received wisdoms about form and function
A defining formal feature of Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong’s exhibitions is austerity. Often a gallery will contain only a few objects, with most of the contextual or even basic information outsourced to supporting literature, books or leaflets, rather than wall labels or other didactics. This visual and conceptual minimalism is exemplified in No Patents on Ideas, currently on show at the Singapore Art Museum, where six artworks are installed in a darkened, cavernous gallery, the floor of which is designed to slope gently but noticeably upwards from the entrance to the far wall.
The brightest source of light is from a video screen positioned overhead like a sunroof in a car, intermittently showing a blue sky with a small fighter jet (Untitled (Singapore), 2014), or an animated video of flying banknotes (Undrift, 2024). Spotlit in a tiny alcove on a wall is a tattered diamond-shaped cloth about the size of your palm, accompanied by a piece of shrapnel on the side. (The handout informs visitors that both are actual Second World War relics formerly owned by a British PoW, on loan from the Changi Chapel and Museum, an institution that commemorates the prisoners of war and civilians interned in Singapore’s Changi prison camp during the Japanese Occupation.) Further in and leaning against a wall is a thick, coarse brown mat (Sacrifice depth for breadth, 2023), which, it turns out, is actually an abandoned hornet’s nest that has since been flattened by a papermaking artisan.
There is aesthetic control in all of this: visual affinities, for example, in the slouched form of the mat rhyming with the shape of flying dollar bills in the video. Thematically, you could tease out some conceptual threads from the ideas of aviation, airspace and military occupation. But these are vague suggestions of connections rather than firmly articulated relationships. The overall atmosphere of the show is one of chilly reticence. A refusal to do the things we tend to expect art to do these days: to reveal everything. Instead, you encounter a series of beautiful but largely hermetic artworks whose significance and relationships remain mostly inaccessible without the curator’s notes, or your own interpretative leap. Depending on personal preference, you might find this approach either extremely seductive or aloof.
Despite the open-ended nature of his works, Phinthong is against a kind of strenuous or overly forceful analysis and favours a more experiential process. In a short publicity video for the museum’s social media pages, he says somewhat coyly that what he is most interested in achieving with this exhibition is “that you don’t think about things”. He wants visitors to be “relaxed” and “in peace”. And when we meet at the museum, the artist tells me that his work is about creating a “flow” or “movement”, which I interpret as a sense of transformative possibility in people, objects and relationships.
This is certainly evident in one of my favourite works that’s part of the show but not physically in it: Spoon (2024). It involves scattering a series of shiny metallic fragments that have been hammered into thin discs and burnished to a mirrorlike finish around Singapore. The disks’ locations are a secret known only to the artist and to those who stumble across them. They are part of an ongoing collaboration with the residents of Ban Napia, a village in northeastern Laos that Phinthong chanced upon during his travels, fabricated using melted lead and tin from disarmed cluster bombs dropped by the US to destroy Communist supply lines during the Vietnam War. The villagers had become accustomed to recycling such metals to create daily utensils and tourist trinkets, but over the past few years, Phinthong commissioned local craftsmen to use the metal in the fabrication of various artworks. Spoon tackles how people of Laos are still psychically and physically processing the ramifications of the Cold War, and furthers that process of metamorphosis by creating artworks out of those leftover munitions, allowing them to acquire new owners and uses – wouldn’t it be nice if it became a practical object again, eg a mirror? – in a foreign land. Years ago, at The Sensing Salon’s ‘fake therapy’ installations, I drew random cards out of a deck with instructions on how to heal someone. I got ‘Enhance what is already happening’. It’s what Spoon is playing at. It is art not just as a form of active creative repurposing, but a gentler and humbler artistry, born out of close observation – and amplification – of already existing phenomena.
A regular fixture on the international biennial circuit and European kunsthalles for the past two decades, Phinthong creates photographs, sculptures, videos and installations which are usually presented in a spare, succinct fashion. In recent years, his exposure in Asia has been catching up with his European reputation. Last year he opened two solo exhibitions, Today will take care of tomorrow, at Barakat Contemporary, a commercial art gallery in Seoul, and No Patents on Ideas, at the Singapore Art Museum; this year, three more will follow: at SCAI The Bathhouse in Tokyo, Bangkok City City Gallery and Para Site in Hong Kong.
While it might take on readily identifiable forms, the overall nature of Phinthong’s practice is harder to characterise, evolving from a wide constellation of research topics and interventions that emerge wherever his travels, residencies and interests take him. Among his diverse projects are Sleeping Sickness (2012), for which he researched a more environmentally friendly method of eradicating tsetse flies that transmit the fatal sleeping sickness in sub-Saharan Africa. At Documenta 13 he displayed a pair of dead tsetse flies, a fertile female and a sterile male, on a white pedestal. Another is the exhibition One, is the number divided by, two (2021), an exploration of the provenance and authenticity of the ‘Broken Hill’ skull, a hominid skull found in Zambia and believed to be from a population that lived in Africa around 300,000 years ago. It remains in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London, and a replica is in the Lusaka National Museum. At London’s Chisenhale Gallery Phinthong exhibited the replica skull on loan from the Lusaka Museum, as well as another copy he bought online. He also invited Lusaka Museum’s guide Kamfwa Chishala to London, to tell visitors about the journey of the replica skull.
Despite the range of subjects and themes in his oeuvre, a recurring theme is the idea of exchange – what art critic David Teh calls a ‘poetics of conversion and substitution’ – a process that ultimately questions how we assign value to objects and people. Give More Than You Take (2010–11) was produced during his residency at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brétigny and supported by Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Bergamo. Instead of staying in Paris, where the residency was situated, he used his production budget to travel to Swedish Lapland to work alongside a group of Thai migrant labourers who were employed as seasonal wild-berry pickers. Paid by the kilo for his harvest, Phinthong reported the weight gathered at the end of each day’s work to the curators at both institutions, who were then required to source the same weight in ‘useless’ objects from the museum’s surroundings. Later, in the exhibition, the curator could arrange the objects in any way they liked in the gallery.
In Brétigny it was refuse such as junk wood, old electronic equipment and cardboard boxes, piled up in a rectangular formation in the middle of the room; in Bergamo, fresh earth arranged in long trails along the base of walls. The work balances on a central equivalence – the weight of the fruit and the weight of the found objects. The weight of 549kg becomes a crude and absolute measure; all other metrics, such as quantity and quality of labour or the value of the collected objects, are irrelevant. The arbitrariness of Phinthong’s self-imposed ‘rule’ calls into question the very nature of value from a human perspective. For his berry-picking stint, Phinthong was paid in cash. Minus the cost of airplane tickets, accommodation and middleman fees, two months’ work earned him 2,513 Swedish krona (about £240). One of the resulting artworks from this project, An Average Thai Berry Picker’s Income (2010), features the sum of money arranged in a prim grid of notes and coins framed on the wall.
Phinthong’s early work was more diffuse in form than his current output, and the process of its creation more evident. After studying fine art at Bangkok’s Silpakorn University, he completed his masters at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Upon graduation he made a two-month journey by bus, boat and rail from Germany to Thailand, passing through Poland, Belarus, China and Vietnam. His first exhibition back home, Missing Objects (2005), featured items collected on the trip, including photographs, empty cigarette packets and souvenirs for friends. A book, titled Summer Memories, published in 2008, collects his writings made during that pilgrimage.
Later on, his works became more economical, even as his subject matter diversified and touched on topics such as sustainability, politics and science. His compressive style can be highly poetic. In A proposal to set CH4*5.75H2O on fire (work in progress) (2013), he worked with a Russian and a Japanese scientist to isolate methane hydrate, a hard-to-mine ice compound that is billed as a potential alternative source of fossil energy. The work takes the form of a 16mm film, in which the illuminated ice compound is set against a dark background. It starts to emit a weak glow, before blazing into a mesmerising blue-orange flame and gradually extinguishing. Besides showcasing the beauty of this ‘burning ice’ as a possible new resource and the incandescent process of matter becoming energy, the work also embodies a more general existential arc of finitude and expenditure.
During the mid-2010s his work took a turn towards a form of social practice in which he used artworld resources to intervene in other types of economies, especially those involving invisible forms of labour and unjust systems. Untitled (rice) (2014) shows an unpaid government IOU issued to a Thai farmer, a debt now honoured by Phinthong using the production budget he received from the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz. The work refers to a disastrous rice subsidy scheme implemented between 2011 and 2013 by former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra that promised to buy rice from Thai farmers at 50 percent higher than market price. Rice farmers deposited their rice into the government’s reserves in exchange for a debt note guaranteeing full payment within three months. When the global rice-market prices did not rise, the government was left with stores full of overpriced grain, which were plundered by corrupt officials or simply left to rot. Payment didn’t arrive, financially ruining the farmers and leading to their revolt. For Untitled (rice), Phinthong bought back the voucher of a rice farmer who had participated in the scheme. The original certificate is placed on a pedestal, the volume of which corresponds to the quantity of rice pledged.
In theory, one could say that Phinthong’s social-practice art highlights the situation of a specific individual or segment of a marginalised community, and provokes his audience to consider larger, invisible flows of power, money and labour. A lingering discomfort I have with this approach however is that his work isolates one instance of a systemic injustice, but the root cause of the suffering remains unaddressed. Not that a single artistic gesture could ever fix problems such as macroeconomic mismanagement and corruption. But the artwork instrumentalises the power asymmetry between the arts sector and a more disenfranchised demographic, in service of letting audiences reflect abstractly on wider and/or hidden patterns of social exploitation, which can come across as somewhat performative and glib. The work might bring one person in from the cold, but it also emphasises the glaring imbalance of privilege between the spheres of art and the rest of the world, and doesn’t get round to reflecting on that imbalance.
Rather than his works about exchange, I am a greater fan of his works about extension: those that broaden and prolong the already rolling processes of renewal and transformation and take them to different places. Phinthong says he is “born a Buddhist”, and there is indeed a Buddhist sensibility in his work, in its gentle tracing of karmic cause and effect, and his monastic displays, where truths are experienced and intuited rather than forcefully explained or intellectualised.
At the heart of Buddhism is anicca, the doctrine of impermanence, where everything is shifting and changing all the time, and a firm foundation on which to rest any value, or even any kind of fixed identity, is an illusion. In this vision of a radically destabilised and decentred world, or a form of process philosophy if you like, where shifting relationships between things are the only real experience of everyday living, Phinthong likes to highlight the flow towards repair. In one videowork, Today will take care of tomorrow (2022), he took an infrared camera to a forested terrain in Laos that had been bombed during the war. The green-tinted handheld footage, in which it is hard to tell whether it is night or day, captures a verdant landscape bearing scars from previous aerial bombardments: trees with disfigured trunks and shattered branches, as well as a Buddhist temple with damaged walls, to which devotees have added extra wooden beams as makeshift buttresses. Despite their trauma, the trees are tall and majestic, and the temple, with the support of crutches, is still standing; suggesting that the violence of the past can and has always been parried by the wider rehabilitative forces of nature and human resilience. The work’s title is a beautiful exhortation to let be, and for things to follow their own course. Consistent with that attitude is the relaxed, diaristic format of the 40-minute film, which makes it one of the most effusive of Phinthong’s typically compendious works, and all the more notable for its sense of surrender rather than control.
Pratchaya Phinthong’s solo show No Patents on Ideas is on view at the Singapore Art Museum through 23 March. His exhibition The Heat of the Empty Forward can be seen at SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, through 26 April
