Korakrit Arunanondchai

Kindly donated by Korakrit Arunanondchai and C L E A R I N G, New York / Brussels / Los Angeles

Essay on the artist which appears in the Aspen Art Museum Summer Magazine:

Korakrit Arunanondchai sees himself as a storyteller. In his own words, cited on Moderna Museet’s website, where he had a solo exhibition last year: “As the author I exist in between the image and the audience, in the air of the room, telling the story. I am never completely inside one world or another.”

Working with video, sculpture, painting, music and performance, merging them into new hybrid forms, Arunanondchai begins with the personal, and from there expands outwards. Raised in Bangkok, and now living between there and New York, he draws upon his family history as well as the history and politics of Thailand and South-East Asia. His interests span time and history, the geopolitical and the spiritual, folklore and technology. Often working with regular collaborators, in his performances he explores the power of gathering.

In 2012, Arunanondchai created a “denim painter character” for himself, choosing to use denim as the support for his paintings. In an interview with the Art Newspaper in 2021, he explains: “I wanted to make a story or narrative around the word denim. For me, contemporary art has always been this globalizing force. As soon as someone painted on a canvas, that’s when they entered the Western canon of painting. Painting with a capital “P”. I felt like I wanted to paint on denim because denim constantly signifies Western globalization and the soft power of America.”

Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986, Bangkok, Thailan, lives and works in New York and Bangkok.) Arunanondchai combines music, fashion, painting, sculpture, performance, and video in both a cinematic and biographic manner. At the core of his practice is narrative-based video that parallels his life and features his friends and family. His practice is informed by Eastern and Western cultural data that he collects, appropriates, and transforms. The artist works with metaphors and symbolic characters, while figures from Buddhism also appear regularly. Arunanondchai aims to represent the geo-historical moment of the Anthropocene, concerning himself with the earth’s evolution from a post-human and animist point of view.

He is known for constructing fantastic visual worlds with both installations and videos. Interested in exploring the crossover between collective digital memory and personal experiences, Arunanondchai culls from a myriad of cultures, religions, and popular imagery. “I feel a need to connect things, as I feel very disconnected, having two very different lives in two very different places,” he has explained. Influenced by Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Olafur Eliasson, Arunanondchai began producing a cycle of videos incorporating themes as varied as Thai art history, denim, and rap. 

Arunanondchai has exhibited extensively around the world, including solo exhibitions and performances at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Kunstverein Hamburg and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (both 2021); and Secession, Vienna (2019). His work is in prominent collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Rubell Family Collection in Miami; the Astrup Fearnly Museum in Oslo; Tate, UK; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Last summer he staged an outdoor performance in Aspen with director Alex Gvojic (in collaboration with Tosh Basco).

He completed his MFA at Columbia University in 2012, New York. In 2009 he graduated from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan. He also holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.