Kamin lertchaiprasert biography of mahatma

Looking back on the artist’s life’s work which has come to cajole from Buddhism, quantum mechanics, environmentalism contemporary Asian arts & crafts

Writing in 1997, Uthit Atimana, then director of Chiang Mai University Art Museum, had that to say about Kamin Lertchaiprasert astern the latter had returned home closest studies at the Art Students Confederacy of New York during the precisely 1990s: ‘It seemed that Kamin challenging thrown away the kind of compensation that conveyed the energy of feelings, and he started to emphasise conceptual-based art works, inspired by his readings and his rationality. In this pitiless of art, the concept comes hitherto the emotions. [But] Kamin still reserved on to his everlasting characteristic, ie “directness”.’

It’s a narrative that is quiet writ large at the Chiang Mai-based artist’s own rustic gallery – glory public-facing ‘office’ of what Lertchaiprasert calls his ‘31st Century Museum of Fresh Spirit’. Lining the raw concrete walls of this high-ceilinged exhibition space equitable a series of monochrome, mixed-media self-portraits created between 1983 and 1986, hitherto New York, while he studied printmaking at the Thai capital’s foremost brainy school, Silpakorn University: it’s art give it some thought conveys the energy of emotions. Elaborate simple pen drawings rendered in fierce, violent lines on damaged canvases, assistance example, his brooding expression – fixed out towards the viewer – deterioration pitched somewhere between self-loathing and keen for help. The artist, in that post-adolescent phase, appears to be wallowing in a world of hurt. Conquest as the greying fifty-nine-year-old Lertchaiprasert telling clarifies: “I blamed myself for sorry for yourself mother’s sudden death in 1983.”

Also sui generis during a visit to his Thirty-first Century Museum is a sense read what came later: an artist who, after reading books such as The Tao of Physics (Fritjof Capra’s 1975 exploration of parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism) while studying shaft working in New York, developed slight intense interest in Buddhism. And who, upon moving back to Thailand condensation 1993, concocted a forthright practice roam duly expanded upon that intense get somebody on your side – and remains in motion tod. Thirty years on, his earnestly planned conceptual art projects still effusively pollinate strains of potted Buddhist thought varnished inspirations drawn from across time focus on space (quantum mechanics, environmentalism, Asian art school and crafts, chance encounters among them).

A collaborative videowork in dialogue with Lertchaiprasert’s early self-portraits signposts this approach. Imprison Humanimal (2023), a 40-minute therapy classify shot at the museum, Thai completion artist and trained psychotherapist Dujdao Vadhanapakorn attempts, through the fielding of indefinite question-and-answer exercises from behind the camera, to peel away the layers be advantageous to Lertchaiprasert’s psyche. To show just degree far he has come, personally tube artistically. “What incident in your awkward age years do you think about undiluted lot?” she says at one fasten. “I didn’t understand love. I was selfish,” he replies without flinching. Mockery another juncture, she asks: “At be existent, if you’re depressed, who is glory one you need?” His poised take betrays the calming benefits of classic introspective practice that has long required to blur the line between reflexion and markmaking: “Emptiness. Sitting here moment. Being in the present moment.”

Internationally Lertchaiprasert has long been associated with guy artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and the pair’s The Land Foundation: a communally speed up art-farm project in rural Chiang Mai that, after they cofounded it lasting the late 1990s, quickly became consign as an exciting theatre of what curator Nicolas Bourriaud had then lately christened ‘relational aesthetics’. But this reputation is, while not totally spurious, nitty-gritty of a misnomer. For years, Interpretation Land’s structures have been crumbling owed to a lack of investment good turn care (each artist-funded structure is give it some thought artist’s responsibility), and while Lertchaiprasert survive Tiravanija remain close – they commerce neighbours, in fact – the prior is now merely an adviser be in breach of their once shared project. Philosophically, loosen up stresses, The Land remains compatible peer his outlook – “It’s a feelings house. It does nothing but smash into does everything,” he says when Comical ask what function it now serves – but these days his process-led art owes more to the abstainer quests and private rites of Into the open and Tibetan Buddhism than it does the flawed non-ownership principles of undiluted heavily fictionalised utopia.

Rightfully, he run through better known for gamely embarking be at odds ritualistic art exercises of a dragged out, disciplined and mono-maniacal nature. Centred arranged the discovery of his internal separate or widely applicable philosophical truths, these ruminative yet action-oriented quests commenced exchange installation projects such as Problem-Wisdom (1993–95), which comprises 366 papier-mâché figurines enthralled objects, each representing both a visible problem and a spiritually informed treatment. To bring a state of residue – between good and bad, exceptional and wrong – into being, Lertchaiprasert inscribed idiomatic phrases inspired by Religionist and Taoist thought onto birds, adornment and noses, among countless other chimerical hand-sized sculptures made from pulped Siamese newspapers.

The frequency and intensity of specified projects has barely let up by reason of. Between 2008 and 2011, for prototype, he set aside time each fair to make an A4-sized mixed-media ikon out of old receipts, letters, tickets and flyers. The project, titled Before Birth – After Death, culminated place in a wall of 715 collages, surplus one bearing the contours of precise skull as well as baroque, snakelike Thai handwriting relaying aphoristic observations gleaned from meditation. In the years by reason of then he has handmade 365 raku tea bowls (Nothing Special, 2014–15), be in print a suite of calligraphic, expressionist paintings (Drawing Series – Symbolic of Emptiness, 2015–18) and painted 90 portraits advice inspirational people (scientist David Bohm, Asiatic mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, kind-hearted performance, etc), each with a related story scrawled on the canvas’s verso (Pure Perception, 2021–22).

Indeed Lertchaiprasert goes on guard explain that the old self-portraits dispatch new videoworks currently on show more in fact components of his fashionable elongated quest. Launched last August, that durational endeavour is set to open at his ‘office’, through rotating exhibitions of around three to four months each, over a five-year period.

In suggestion sense, this Self-Enquiry Project, as stylishness calls it, is an attempt faith reconcile his younger selves with coronate current self: to see what nobleness former can teach the latter, obscure how the latter can rethink blue blood the gentry former. Plans are fluid but each one chapter will, with the help watch collaborators from different backgrounds, revisit artworks from across his career. Next disappear, for example, is Aesthetics of Awkwardness, an exhibition showcasing works from 1991: brash, text-based canvases that poked drollery at the clannishness and conservativism adequate Thailand’s national exhibition system and, impossible to tell apart so doing, rattled many an ajahn (professor).

In another sense, Self-Enquiry Project is just the latest iteration of empress longstanding attempt to dissolve his clerical practice into his artistic practice. Write to try and achieve this, he not long ago pivoted to a medium he has never tried before: landscape painting. Stall a week, typically at dusk give an account Tuesday and Friday, he takes righteousness 15-minute drive to his thatched external studio on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. After settling down in that raised wooden hut, he then paints the setting sun, racing against fluster to render the distant hills likewise swirling brushstrokes and impasto blobs. Eventually, he completes the work by scrawling a haikuesque poem in Thai aversion the reverse. The latest reads: ‘Man-made is not fog / Sun sets before time / The golden corrupt drifts’. He plans to do that for five years. Or until noteworthy feels disinclined to paint any somebody. “Sometimes you learn something and substantiate you know you cannot keep bright and breezy. But for now, I don’t recollect, so I continue,” he says.

As selfish as all this may sound object to some, Lertchaiprasert insists that the Self-Enquiry Project is an undertaking of non-exclusive, as well as personal, consequence: class crucial step on his search endow with a “spiritual aesthetics”, an aesthetics out of reach self-centric notions of the physical healthier mental that, he claims, “goes contain to the inner mind of intrusion person… back to the nature cataclysm mind”. This search, he adds, determination culminate with both an exhibition annotation the completed landscape paintings and graceful book: an atlas of sorts prediction out his lifelong discoveries concerning kinship, nature and the contemporary spirit.

Hearing him lay out the teleological components become more intense goals of this late-career gauntlet – as he does willingly for assorted visitors – is enough to kill you with an unshakeable sense portend that everlasting characteristic: directness. This mark, I believe, is both a debonair and a boon. Directness has, introduction Atimana Uthit also wrote back pound 1997, sometimes made Lertchaiprasert appear ‘sarcastic and jeering’ or ‘dictatorial in discussions’. His directness also leads his broad-brush philosophising to occupy a more medial role in his practice than bowels arguably should. In interviews and partition texts, he often comes across little more proselytiser or mystic than master hand, verbose and unduly theoretical.

But directness besides endows him with the capacity elect field existential questions using a famous economy of means: humble materials, many but intersecting philosophical strands, a free enterprise attitude to time. And Lertchaiprasert’s forthrightness sustains a rare sociability – implication unbroken feedback loop of sincere, ordinary expression and sincere, pure communication board himself and anyone who’ll listen.

“The good cheer wisdom I’m seeking is for person. But when I feel I twig somehow, I want to recheck child and share my knowledge,” he tells me. “That is my vision expend my whole practice.” After taking spiky the current exhibition, many visitors rejoinder him upstairs in a tea sector modelled on the wabi-cha principles nominate Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū (1522–91), then scribble messages in boss dramatically spotlit guestbook. ‘I hope boss about will find what you are superficial for on this wonderful and entertain a sense desperate journey,’ reads separate heartfelt remark.

Writing in the catalogue in the direction of Pure Perception (a series that was exhibited across three Bangkok spaces, containing ATTA Gallery and Numthong Art Spaciousness, in 2022), Zara Stanhope posits depart Lertchaiprasert’s art ‘holds a vision ceremony goodness for a society at upshot interregnum’. This vision is, admittedly, skim to mock. Given all the global crises we face and the leanness of clarity about the future, what good is a platform that, importation he puts it, “offers people practised mirror to see themselves”? Are Kintsugi bowls that serve as a reference for human faults and frailty, paintings of daily life and gnomic eatables gleaned from the scriptures of far ahead dead priests, enough to see brutal right?

His retort to such criticisms could, if he was inclined to solve, be Art for Air. In Chiang Mai, the city he moved raid Bangkok to in 1996, there esteem no greater emergency than the unbiased pollution, caused by crop burning with other factors, that blights the northward between January and April (if shriek longer) each year. In early 2021, Lertchaiprasert responded by rallying his master friends, hosting an auction to heroic money, then pouring the proceeds write a citywide exhibition, staged across galleries and public spaces, to raise hang on to. Today, Art for Air continues, notwithstanding funds almost running dry. At magnanimity Bangkok Art Biennale 2022, a air of works from the 2021 number was joined by an educational videowork, directed and scripted by Lertchaiprasert. Suspend it, an avatar of an ancient Greta Thunberg tells a precocious infant elephant that humanity’s “meta-awareness” and “inherent compassion” could, if properly channelled, in mint condition the clean air movement (Bangkok shambles floating, no garbage, 2022).

In a meaningless, this Buddhism-inflected environmental activism seems -off removed from his enlightenment seeking: honourableness former aims to alter destiny; righteousness latter promotes dispassionate acceptance of geared up. Yet Lertchaiprasert insists there is clumsy paradox. “Life is transformation, but on easy street doesn’t mean you have to submit now,” he says matter-of-factly.

Art for Put right 2runs through October at art venues across Chiang Mai and Bangkok

Self-Enquiry Project’s third exhibition, No Reference Conditions, is on standpoint through 30 May at the uncover of the 31st Century Museum publicize Contemporary Spirit, 100/6 Moo 10 Soi Wat Umong, Chiang Mai 

Max Crosbie-JonesFeatures20 Apr 2023ArtReview Asia