H Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of installations by three emergent Thai artists which explore dark areas of human experience. FRENZY also includes a salve to the shock of taboo. With titles such as Sexorcism and Reveal the Madness, audiences are reminded of the demands of society to push the messiness of our emotional experiences off-view.
For Thailand, this breach of private/public mores might prove particularly provocative. Ram Kanjanavanit’s collection of clothing reeks of embodied memory. Conjuring multiple associations of vulnerability, abuse, and loss, the installation speaks to the force of remembrance. For the artist, the artwork is cathartic in rendering and facing a traumatic period of his childhood. Phraeva Rujinarong analogizes societal pressures on women to conform to chains that trap and cut, drawing correspondences between ‘feminine’ practices of craft and violent subordination.
Amidst these installations is Meeratchat Rujinarong’s assemblage of plant-life as the contemplation of the very possibility of harmony. A harmony we all surely try to believe is the natural order of things.
FRENZY explores the material and immaterial terms of a corrupted humanity, conflicted desires and understandings that we typically aim to shield and contain. And also how the language we use to describe ourselves and each other only distorts even as it seeks illumination. But looking and thinking beyond corruption and distortion requires first that we confront such states.
Meeratchata Rujinarong is a product designer and photographer. He is currently completing an MA at the Nuova Accademia Di Belle Arti in Italy, further to graduating from the Communication Design Programme at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
Meeratchata has worked with the designers Mario Trimarchi, Giovanni Levanti, and Denis Santachiara. His awards include LightScape: VELASCA PROGETTO DESIGN (2016), Unipol;
and Whirlpool 1st Prize Scholarship (2015), NABA.
Phraeva Rujinarong graduated from the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at Thammasat University in Bangkok.
Phraeva was a project manager at the Department of International Trade Promotion of the Ministry of Commerce, and she also worked as a textile designer at the Queen Sirikit Department of Sericulture. Awards include Best Design (2009) from Silpakorn University and the artist has worked on many collaborative projects.
Ram Kanjanavanit graduated from Bangkok University and International Center of Photography in New York City, where he worked as a teaching assistant. Ram has worked as a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar Thailand and held a solo show at Kathmandu Photo Gallery in Bangkok in 2016.