Pinaree Sanpitak featured in ‘Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists’ at MMCA, Seoul

3 Sep 2024

Now on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists re-examines post-1960s art by Asian women through the lens of ‘corporeality’. The exhibition brings together 130 works by women artists from 11 Asian countries, including leading Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak, presenting the body as a site of intersection for ideologies, identities, and experiences.

The artists’ works explore the complexities of the body and challenge conventional narratives. This exhibition consists of six sections: “Choreograph Life,” “Flexible Territories of Sexuality,” “Bodies·God(desse)s·Cosmology,” “Street Performances,” “Repeating Gestures Bodies·Objects·Language,” and “Bodies as Becoming‒Connecting Bodies.” Through them, it shares stories about diverse, polyphonous bodies that have redefined identity through various meanings. This aspect also relates to the exhibition’s aim of going beyond the perspective that views Asian women as ‘others’ vis-à-vis the Westerner or male and focusing on them instead as agents embodied in multilayered ways. At the same time, Connecting Bodies focuses on works that have questioned modernity while revealing the experiences of cultural otherness that have been applied to the body in the geographical and political space of Asia, as a setting where ideologies of nation-states, patriarchy, capitalism, and nationalism have been reproduced.

The exhibition also addresses long-existing aspects of women’s culture, which has sought to understand thought/sensation and art/life in integrated ways. In this way, Connecting Bodies invites viewer to discover artistic possibilities for encouraging ‘connections’ with those beyond us and engage with the artistic possibilities of reimagining the body and identity. At a time when a reappraisal of values is essential, the exhibition suggests new ways of connecting with others and envisioning a world that embraces a broader scope of being.

See Pinaree Sanpitak’s work in Connecting Bodies at the MMCA, on view until 3 March 2025.

Image: Installation view of Pinaree Sanpitak in Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists, MMCA, 2024. Courtesy of the artists and MMCA