Chaos: Calm featuring Pinaree Santipak

18 Nov 2022

Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 returns with its third edition titled, Chao: Calm, showcasing 200 works by 73 artists from local and beyond. Spanning across multiple locations, Pinaree Sanpitak presents an immersive duo installations — Anything Can Break and Temporary Insanity, located at Queen Sirikit National Convention Center.

Anything Can Break suspends from above, featuring “flying” Origami Cubes and hand-blown glass figures which responds to human presence, triggering soundscapes. What lies below is Temporary Insanity, vibrant interactive soft sculptures oscillate according to motion and sound produced by visitors.

Pinaree Sanpitak is one of Asia’s most important contemporary artists. In the 1990s, her ground-breaking exhibition Breast Works marked the start of the artist’s reference to an emergent and defining iconography: the women’s breast, which Sanpitak has become renowned for. Over the last four decades, she has developed an enigmatic inventory of symbols distilling women’s bodies to their most elemental parts, expressed variously through vessels, breasts, eggs, and subtly curved profiles. Conflated with imagery of the alms bowl or a Buddhist stupa (shrine), Sanpitak has created a complex lexicon that weaves seamlessly between the sacred and the profane. Characterised by tenderness and ethereality, Sanpitak’s works are tethered to a captivation with her own body and motherhood.

Pinaree’s works will be on view at Queen Sirikit National Convention Center until 23 February 2023.

image: Installation view of Pinaree Sanpitak, Anything Can Break and Temporary Insanity, Bangkok Art Biennale 2022.