The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 136 (above and opposite) It’s unclearly clear, as yet incomplete (details) 2017–21 Paper collage, Buddhist monk robes, urethane, metal / Three parts: 400 x 800cm (each) / Commissioned for APT10. Purchased 2021 with funds from Metamorphic Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Images courtesy: The artist It’s unclearly clear, as yet incomplete 2017–21 is the result of more than a year of the artist’s research and has taken almost three years to create. Comprising 30–40 layers of paper on material, including stretched Buddhist monks’ robes, the triptych employs specific papers as content within compositions associated with structural problems in modern and contemporary Thailand, and beyond. Sethaseree uses scale and spectacle to mimic how aesthetics are employed to ulterior, manipulative ends in Thai government and business to entertain and distract citizens from discord with the state of national affairs. Thasnai Sethaseree is passionately interested in how power and seduction fold into state and commercial imagery — particularly in his homeland, Thailand — and his practice investigates the relation of images to political projects dating from the Cold War onwards. His large-scale collages are distinguished by their iconography and the substantial collaging of cut or shredded coloured paper, a style based on a traditional Thai paper-cutting technique, and which one writer has connected to Northern Thai Lanna weaving in its vibrancy, colour and use for ritual and celebration. 1 For Sethaseree, this is an historical project: the authoritative use of imagery or aesthetics in Thailand is evident from the Siamese era and reign of King Rama the Fifth in the mid-nineteenth century — the period of the adoption of photography (in particular, portraiture) by royalty and the elite. Similarly, the Thai military increasingly took control of imagery with the 1947 coup, followed by the dominance of commodity culture from the period of the 1958–73 economic restructuring policy. For Setharesee, these factors have contributed to a corruption of ‘Thainess’, the warping of nationalist imagery in which daily life, commerce, Buddhism and culture are reworked for state, military and/or corporate ends far from democracy or egalitarianism. The references to Hell, Heaven and Earth suggest the triptych is equated with physical, spiritual and mythological zones of human existence. While appearing abstract from a distance, this cosmos is situated in urban Bangkok. The initial layer of each work is a photograph of the skylines of three of Bangkok’s financial and business districts — Silom, Pratunam and Siam Square areas — inverted, as if the artist hopes to reveal the underbelly of these districts. A flux of forms, defined by paper strips, are suspended on top. Images of cancer cells, scientific diagrams of tumours, prisms, images of the twilight sky, biological forms, lava flow, ghosts and skulls, ocean creatures, perspective images and sky maps from the date of coups in 2014, 2006 and 1991, respectively, are layered together. The latter — maps charting the stars on the dates chosen for political disruption — reflect the artist's critique of the fickle relationship with belief systems and ethics he observes in Thailand's leaders, whose decisions often rely on irrational omens for success. The triptych is a type of psychogeography of imaginary and historical social realities; in it, Sethaseree interweaves imagery of the final holy war from the Ramayana , the hell from the Buddhist Tribhum and the 1976 student massacre. The central work includes paper printed with Paul Simon’s lyrics for the 1965 song ‘The Sound of Silence’ (suggesting ideas of censorship and diversion); text of the epic Ramayana is found amidst the shredded paper in the panel connoting Heaven; and a multitude of lottery tickets (a common expenditure for Thais) appear in the medium of the work on the right, depicting Hell. For the artist, the images form a type of historiography of Thainess in its particular mix of rational and sacred, order and improvisation, pre-modern and modern. Sethaseree’s triptych confronts what he considers the immorality of easily consumed spectacle (in a nation where royal and military pomp and ceremony are legendary) and hints at the trust in chance, profiteering, sickness and corruption that he finds in Thai modern and contemporary culture. Visual magnificence and splendour are warning signs for what lies beneath. Zara Stanhope Endnote 1 Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, 'Seeing Specters – Thasnai Sethasaree's collage works', 2018, Academia , <https://www.academia.edu/36968847/Seeing_Specters_Thasnai_ Sethasarees_collage_works>, viewed September 2021. Thasnai Sethaseree Born 1968, Bangkok, Thailand Lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand