New York gallery Tyler Rollins holds rare showing of Thai artist Jakkai Siributr

THAI ARTIST NEW YORK RELIGIOUS ART

Showing at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, a New York gallery which specializes in Asian art, Jakkai Siributr’s Karma Cash and Carry features a series of textile compositions alongside installation and video works.

Karma Cash and Carry installation view

Not a first for Siributr, the theme of materialism and Thai cultural heritage, a significant part of which is the Buddhist religion, resurfaces with Karma Cash and Carry. In 2008, Tyler Rollins featured an installation by the artist called Temple Fair, challenging notions of religion, society and politics in the Thai context.

Red Buddha at Karma Cash and Carry

Siributr’s current exhibition extrapolates the concept of everyday materialism in religion as a Karmic convenience store, where merit can be bought and sold. Making use of daily objects and ritual practices, his work puts forth powerful visual stimulus to encourage an understanding of the growing consumerism that afflicts every social practice.

Buddhist shrine- part of the installation at Karma Cash and Carry

Drawing from an ancient legacy of Thai textile art, the artist’s work primarily uses the textile medium with a contemporary sensibility. Maintaining a crucial relationship with the legacy of Thai textile, Siributr’s use of fabric in Karma Cash and Carry pushes the boundaries of the medium.

Additionally, Siributr uses the video format for the first time here.  Evoking a cosmopolitan space where popular culture mixes freely with ancient faith, the installation presents the loss of the sanctity of the essentially non-materialistic Buddhist faith. Siributr himself is a practicing Buddhist and has often articulated deep concerns about the commercialization of the Buddhist faith. In Thailand however, such articulations are unwelcome by the Government and the largely Buddhist polity. To battle this, Siributr tactfully appoints irony and satire to veil his dissent.

Jakkai Siributr is considered one of Southeast Asia’s pre-eminent textile based artists and his work is often politically charged. He also featured in Viewpoints and Viewing Points – 2009 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan.

Karma Cash and Carry is on at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, until 5 June, 2010.

AM/KN

Related Posts:

• Four Asian artists nominated for NYC Pulse awards – March 2010
• First New York exhibition for celebrated Thai artist Pinaree Santipak – February 2010
• A perspective on Viewing and Viewing points- 2009 Asian Art Biennale – January 2010
• First New York exhibition for Cambodian artist at Tyler Rollins – November 2009
• Asian contemporary art week at New York – April 2009

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for more on Southeast Asian artists

Advertisement

Lisa Reihana’s electronic Maori art at Anna Landa new media biennial 2009 Australia – video

NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL ART AUSTRALIA

Combining ancestral culture and slow art with new media

Mâori artist Lisa Reihana (born New Zealand 1964, lives  Auckland) has produced an intriguing and inspiring body of work collectively called Digital marae (2001,2008) which is now on show in Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the new media biennial, the Anna Landa award.

Reihana by her own admission likes to work slowly so she is giving herself until 2020 to complete this piece which will comprise life size prints of female, male and transgender figures/deities who will be exhibited  between panels of digitally-manipulated patterns taken from 70s textiles and recombined to form Maori patterns.

She believes that there is “far too much stuff” in the world and that each work that she makes must have a strong reason for being.

As well as a fascination with gender, Reihana’s works reference the inclusiveness of the Maori culture in which there is space for everyone.

The marae is an ancestral home for Mâori people, a meeting space and a site for exchange. Her life-size digital prints depict friends and family dressed as male deities (atua) that appear in Mâori creation stories. This Digital marae is a double of the original meeting house, but it is also a transformation.

See the works being hung and listen to Reihana explain how Maori idiom acts as inspiration for her contemporary new media artworks: the surfboard under the feet of Maui, the stream of city lights in the background of Urban warrior, the astronomical imagery in Ranginui and the 19th-century suit in the cross-gendered Dandy.

Video Anna Landa award 2009 Lisa Reihana

See also the excellent 10 minute video made in 2007 for the Elizabeth A. Sackler foundation for Feminist Art in which Reihanna talks about the Mahuika, the fire goddess and other works.

About the Anna Landa Award

Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain, Sydney, Australia – 7 May – 19 July 2009

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is currently exhibiting Double Take, the third Anne Landa Award, which was the first biennial exhibition in Australia for moving image and new media work, with an acquisitive award of $25 000. The award was established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW who died in 2002.

The artists in this year’s exhibition consider what it means to transform the self into another persona – as a doppelgänger, a karaoke performer, an avatar, a robot or a fantasy alter-ego.

• TV Moore, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano create private performances on video
• Lisa Reihana’s digital photographs present friends and family posing as ancestral Mâori spirit figures
• Mari Velonaki creates robotic avatars
• Cao Fei and Phil Collins bring together loose collectives of people around a desire to adopt imaginary identities

These performances are not the pure fantasies of popular digital culture, where it is so easy to masquerade as another persona. These artists are more circumspect. Real time lurks within. This is the ‘double’ – because while the performances have a presence in our everyday world, they also take an imaginary guise. They shuttle between two worlds: reality and fantasy.

The exhibition includes video, interactive robotics and digital photography.

Watch curator Victoria Lynn talk on video about Double Take

Related posts:

• First of its kind in Asia – Taiwan’s Digital Art Center officially opens – Jul 09
• Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto – 4 fascinating video interviews – May 09
• New roles for art collectors created by Cao Fei on Second Life – Jan 09
• Emerging Taiwanese artist Huang Hsin-Chien at Shanghai Biennale 2008 – Oct 08

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia