Opening: 08.08.2019 @4pm
Location: San Art Laboratory house
40/18 Pham Viet Chanh, Ward 19, Binh Thanh district, HCMC.

Arin Rungjang will introduce two of his most recent works Golden teardrop 2013 and Mongkut 2015

A work composed of a video and an intricate sculptural installation of teardrop-shaped brass, loosely but carefully, Golden Teardrop layers the history of the sugar trade and personal narratives of Thai, Greek, Portuguese, and Japanese individuals in the fifteenth, seventeenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with the traditional Thai egg-yolk dessert thong yod (literally, golden drops) as the starting point, presenting a reexamination of collective histories and memories and their formation.

Mongkut puts one of Thailand’s cherished symbolic forms, the crown, at the axis of Rungjang’s inquiry. Rungjang’s research recalls Franco-Thai relations during the parallel reigns of King Rama IV (1851–68) and Napoleon III (1852–70), a period marked by the expansion of the European colonial enterprise in much of the geographic region known today as Southeast Asia. In this video installation and sculpture work, he uses the present as a context for reopening a little-known history concerning Siam’s relative sovereignty. (Note: Siam is the old name of now-Thailand)

Arin Runjang (born 1974 in Bangkok) lives and works in Bangkok. He is invited by San Art to participate in ‘Prod/Ponder’ as part of Conscious Realities program. Rungjang will carry out his residency from 1^st to 31^st August 2015 in Ho Chi Minh City.