Ames Yavuz announces representation of Tada Hengsapkul
18 Jan 2026
Ames Yavuz announces the representation of Thai multi-disciplinary artist Tada Hengsapkul. A sharp witness to Thailand’s contemporary political life, Hengsapkul has worked at the boundaries of national storytelling and conventions of image-making for more than 15 years. His works across photography, painting, video and installation are marked by an abiding interest in structures of control and gestures of resistance, with art-making posited as a radical form of the latter.
First gaining critical attention for his photo-portraits of Thailand’s youth culture outside its urban centres, Hengsapkul’s oeuvre has become known for its provocative exposure of the ‘underside of Thai modernity, exclusion and impoverishment’. Since then, he has created several bodies of work that activate the body as a site of the performance of power, in all its constraining, confronting and liberatory aspects. This includes his 2016 work, The Things That Take Us Apart, in which an abandoned hotel ballroom in Chiang Mai was reactivated by stranger-participants interacting in the nude over eight hours, their unscripted ‘dance’ followed closely by Hengsapul’s lens.
You lead me down, to the ocean (detail), 2018, Two-channel video, 12 minutes; Two single-channel video, 6:30 and 3 minutes
The human body in Hengsapkul’s practice relates intimately to political history, and the artist draws on long-term research for his works, conducted in official archives, informal discourse and popular media. You lead me down, to the Ocean (2011), for example, combines images of used military tanks from the Vietnam War, deployed since onto the ocean floor for a Royal project to rehabilitate coral reefs, personal correspondence between a Thai soldier in Vietnam and his family in Bangkok, and warped and manipulated photographs. Remains of the Vietnam War also become the material for his sparing 2016 text-sculptural work Bliss, in which waste mortal shells, stored in Thai armories for years, spell out the work’s title in an ironic restatement of national ideals.
“My research is to live in a different way.” — Tada Hengsapkul
Installation view of Tada Hengsapkul, An Anonymous Open Letter, 2022, Video, 4K, sound, colour, 5 min 6 sec at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, 2023-24.
Hengsapkul works to activate the remains of history and its inheritors. Taking his home region of Northeast Thailand as a nexus point, the artist sets out a charged aesthetic arena in which to approach a wider net of bodily, communal and social questions.
Tada Hengsapkul will present new works Art SG 2026 from 23–25 January 2026, and is currently part of our group exhibition What Binds Me to this Land, on view until 14 February 2026 in Singapore.
Tada Hengsapkul (b.1987, Thailand) has exhibited widely at museums and biennales including: M+ (Hong Kong), MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Thailand), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (Philippines), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Gwacheon (South Korea), Bangkok Biennale (Thailand) and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (Australia), among others.