Pratchaya Phinthong, Undrift, 2024, aluminium, ripstop nylon, digital screensaver (color, silent, infinite loop). Photos: Singapore Art Museum.
‘My childhood at the printing house cultivated my sensitivity toward physical materials. You have to touch things to understand their reasons for being. First, we respect the material for what it is, and then try to understand it by asking questions. What is paper? Why does it exist? What is it capable of doing? Capturing that material query is central to my approach. For me, printing is the metaphorical transformation of an object into multiple iterations, each copy a distinct reflection of its original. It is a practice of locating and honoring multiplicity.
The exhibition at SAM is about carving an inquisitive space, where people can perceive reality in novel ways within the museum’s otherwise rigid structure. Sacrifice depth for breadth, 2023, explores the emptiness inside a flattened hornet’s hive—a memento that had been sitting in my house for ten years. It is considered good fortune in Thailand when hornets come to your home to nest. So, when my wife and I saw locals selling this beautiful, giant nest on a roadside in Kanchanaburi, we bought it and hung it in our house. Usually, people will slice a nest open to explore its insides, but that voyeuristic impulse feels destructive to me. Oftentimes, our desire to consume things leads to their demise. So instead, I snaked a camera inside to capture the hive’s internal structure. I then consulted a paper craftsman to convert it into a sheet. The divine richness within the nest’s hollows, now existing only in recordings, is juxtaposed with its flattened form as a reminder of material transcendence and the generative potential of altered perspective.’
Interview with Pratchaya Phinthong about his first solo exhibition “No Patents on Ideas” at Singapore Art Museum.
Read the full interview on Artforum.
