11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Mit Jai Inn / Image courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Will Seaton He has become known for confronting art-world constructs, eschewing artistic convention, and attracting controversy in the process. Central to his influence is an expansive painting practice — a sustained, considered exploration of spatial experience and materiality, rooted in abstraction. As early as the mid 1980s, he began creating series, including ‘Wall Works’, consisting of unstretched rectangular canvases painted on both sides with thick lines and bold patches, alongside ‘Scrolls’, which re-envisioned traditional forms of Asian scroll painting into rollable abstract sculptures. Using brushes, palette knives and his hands to structure thick fields of colour, Jai Inn consciously employs all his senses in the act of painting, in a process both physically rigorous and meditative. Now often staged on a dramatic scale, his practice embraces colour, light and space, and is one that, for the artist, is closely connected with consciousness, politics and spirituality. 3 Jai Inn deploys colours at times for their distinctive political connotations in Thailand, as well as in reference to his indigenous Yong heritage. He also relishes aspects of transcendence and transformation in the process and form of his works, contemplating the transfer of fields of energy from the earth (pigment) into his creations and their surroundings, seeking to find moments of reverie in the everyday. 4 Using a concoction of specially prepared pigments from oil and acrylic paints, gypsum powder and linseed oil — a combination designed for sculptural rigidity and enduring luminosity — Jai Inn’s painting practice continues to be passionately experimental today. Specific qualities and conditions of the site, both physical and social, are important considerations for the artist. For the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, this manifests in three different works that have been carefully orchestrated to inhabit the Queensland Art Gallery’s Watermall. Drawing on the structures of a tunnel, scroll and suspended ‘totems’, Jai Inn responds to the unique architectural characteristics of this space to explore his interests in time and transformation. With these large-scale sculptural works, the artist has created layered views that reveal and conceal to enact portals between worlds. 5 Informed by his early ‘Wall Works’ and ‘Screens’ series, Jai Inn’s recent ‘tunnel’ works comprise two-sided canvases slit to create buoyant ribbon panels that hang like warp looms, the immersive form creating a room within a room. 6 Jai Inn’s column-like suspended blocks of canvas ribbons, titled ‘totems’, further deconstruct two-dimensional painting, and are composed using a series of repeated forms and modular constructions. Like the ‘tunnels’, the ‘totems’ engage with social spaces of gathering or thoroughfare, with the solid canvas planes transformed into surfaces that are light and permeable — the canvas slits resemble threads, revealing gaps and punctures that sway and open with a touch. Jai Inn’s reconstruction of the painted coiled surface of an upright scroll takes the form of a monumental, freestanding sculpture, one which can be rolled and unfurled. Standing some three metres tall, Untitled (Scroll #APT) 2024 is made from several layers of canvas laden with heavy applications of paint that have solidified. Outer and inner surfaces are treated with serial, abstract motifs — blotches of colour on the exterior contrast with bold stripes on the interior. The work continues the artist’s three decades-long fascination with this traditional form. Curator Erin Robideaux Gleeson explains the significance of the form for the artist: Scrolls are as much the artist’s mother’s woven paa sin skirt as they are urban seas of electricity and psychedelic or genomic visualizations. Referring to Scrolls as carriers and technology for early forms of writing and imaging, Mit has called them Buddha figures, for their function in creating sangha through dharma, or teachings. Representational or iconographic ceremonial paintings in rolled, modular form once made the Buddha image accessible to wide publics by nomadic teachers. 7 Transitions between tunnel, scroll and totem emphasise notions of transformation. The tunnel carries the viewer from open ground to a narrow path built above water, and its immense form inhabits a space between ground and ceiling that is counterpoised by a scroll extending vertically from the ground, and totems descending from the ceiling above. Moving through and around the works, viewers consider how Jai Inn’s works interrupt hard surfaces, passages of water, pathways and empty space, and transition between interior and exterior spaces. In ongoing experimental arrangements, Mit Jai Inn sustains inquiries into painterly abstraction, as he does into social space, constructing a system that is endlessly playful. His work ruptures hegemonic artistic structures and proposes principles of openness and democratisation, and in the process, re-evaluates the painted canvas as a precious static commodity. In Jai Inn’s decades-long practice, a constant can be found: art should immerse and engage society, and when it does, it reveals its power for social change. TARUNNAGESH NOTES 1 Mit Jai Inn was responsible for projects such as the Week of Joint Sorrow (later renamed Week of Cooperative Suffering), which was defined as ‘cultural activities of the suffering, by the suffering and for the suffering’; see Gridthiya Gaweewong, ‘Curatorial practices and small narratives: A case study of Chiang Mai Social Installation and its trajectory’, Journal of Sociology and Anthropology , vol.34, no.2, 2015. 2 Kittima Chareeprasit, ‘Myth (Mit) making’, in Mit Jai Inn: Royal Market Place [exhibition catalogue], Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong, 2020, p.10. The work Bangkok Apartments 2022 — a project that revisited Jai Inn’s Vienna Apartments 1991 — clearly captures these ongoing concerns that are based on his ideas of ‘social architecture’. The artist invites visitors to take a free sculptural work made from recyclable material, with an agreement that the objects would be made available for public exhibition in their homes. 3 Mit Jai Inn quoted in ‘Interview with Vera May’, in Mit Jai Inn: Royal Market Place [exhibition catalogue], p.23. 4 ‘Mit Jai Inn: Dreamworld’, Ikon Gallery , 2021, <cms. ikon-gallery.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Mit-Jai-Inn- Dreamworld-15-September-21-November-2020-Ikon-Gallery- Birmingham.pdf>, viewed May 2024. 5 ‘Ocular vocabulary: Mit Jai Inn’, Silverlens [Manila], 2023, <silverlensgalleries.com/exhibitions/2023-03-02/ocular- vocabulary>, viewed May 2024. 6 See ‘Mit Jai Inn: Dreamworld’. 7 Erin Robideaux Gleeson, ‘Mit Jai Inn’, Silverlens [New York], 2023, <silverlensgalleries.com/exhibitions/2023-11-16/mit- jai-inn>, viewed May 2024. ARTISTS+PROJECTS 116 — 117