Korakrit Arunanondchai

the blood of the earth

Born in 1986 in Bangkok, Thailand. Works and lives between New York and Bangkok.

Supported by M Art Foundation as part of its commitment to the Consortium Museum’s Asia Pacific Society program.
With generous support from Bonandrini.

Korakrit Arunanondchai is a Thai artist, born in 1986, who divides his life between continents, residency production opportunities, and exhibition locations. Living between Bangkok and New York, he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Columbia University.

Painting, single and multi-channel filmic installations, dystopian environments bathed in orange hues and fog are part of a sinister vocabulary in which words of prayers are sculpted out of ash, paint and earth, in Neo-Gothic font. His soundscape, so to speak, like malevolent invocations, in a techno-animistic sensibility.

Exhibiting internationally for over ten years, Korakrit Arunanondchai’s immersive exhibitions have traveled to major contemporary art spaces and biennials across nearly every continent, taking him from the Palais de Tokyo in 2015, to SMAK in Ghent in 2016, to the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2020, and the Singapore Art Museum in 2022, Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial in 2019, to name a few.

Adapting post-modern rituals, such as the ongoing “Ghost Cinema” in northeastern Thailand, where monks project films on the walls of temples for an audience of ghosts. The people who watch these films take part in a ritual¹. This tradition owes its beginnings to the introduction of 8mm projectors brought in by American soldiers during the Vietnam war. The soldiers would use them to project abstract light shows in the forest at night to scare villagers as if malevolent spirits possessed the forest. Arunanondchai is interested in this tradition for its use of the cinematic apparatuses of light, sound and darkness to create a threshold that bridges the material to the immaterial.

Both in the paintings and video installation work of Arunanondchai, time becomes an important material. Specifically, time as experienced through the body as a site and a medium. The artist uses fire as both subject matter and process. The painting bear the marks of destruction along with the digital reproduction of its ritualistic burning, all as the parts of more expansive frameworks in which videos, sound and sculptures participate in a total environment gradually accumilating across venues with long series like No history in a room filled with people with funny names or Songs for Dying/Songs for Living.

Arunanondchai’s proposal has taken the large white cube hostage here in Burgundy, a region resistant to shamans but rich in biodynamic viticultural rituals, which are not so far away from pre-Cartesian cultures.

The perfect mix of a materialist and minimalist artistic strategy—as if Walter de Maria’s Earth Room² had caramelized into a cracked shiny black crust spread across the entire surface of the space—The artist imagines “The Blood of the Earth” as a painting, a stage, and a film without an image. In contrast with the void of the cinema that is constructed by the darkness of the space, the artist uses the white cube to constitute a different kind of void. Sprawling cracked surface with a prayer texted sculpted out of the ground producing a rectangle bordered with a looped litany: The Blood of the Earth, Connects us all in the landscape of mourning, The sky drenched in flames, The sun of consciousness, Will recreate this world, With unanswered prayers, Let there be splendor, Beyond the upheaval, Love after death, A song to survive reality, The Ghost takes us by the hand, Decompose…

Originally installed at the Bangkok Kunsthalle, a building that was formerly a printing house that had a monopoly on printing all government-approved educational books in Thailand. The building caught on fire 20 years ago and has since been closed until the opening of the Kunsthalle. The artist sees this architecture as a body of a giant, decomposing in time. At the heart of this body, the artist reconstitutes the ashes from the fire to form the floor in the original installation. To create a linkage between the site of the Bangkok Kunsthalle, and the Consortium, the ash from the Kunsthalle has been repurposed to create “The blood of the earth”, along with earth that is collected locally in Dijon.

Even though negative space is the medium of this piece, that is not to say this installation is without a sense of volume. The sound in the room divides the space into 3 distinct layers, one of the underworld composed of low frequency sub bass rumble, one from sky above composed from atmospheric recordings to church like choruses, and an earthly layer that links the ground to the sky through a recording of performers engaging in a performative ritual. These performers work together to generate heat for the phoenix. Afterwards, their negative presence haunts the space.