THE RIVER: Thanet Awsinsiri

Since the Renaissance, many artists have assumed diverse social positions and modes of practice, shaped by societal conditions and by their individual interests, among many other factors. Such diversity has also fed back into their creative processes, resulting in an ever-greater variety of raw materials, media, content, and artistic forms more flexible, more adaptive, and continually changing in response to the social circumstances of their time.

 

Thanet Awsinsiri, also known as Nam-oi Awsinsiri, is an artist whose name we have come to recognize through his many roles. One of these is his identity as a painter who has maintained a continuous artistic practice for more than twenty years. His works are collected by admirers of metaphorical paintings imbued with layered, referential, and subtly ironic meanings. His principal professional role, meanwhile, is as a full-time lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at Bangkok University. More recently, he has also been active as an art writer, producing in-depth analytical essays (on an occasional basis) that closely examine exhibitions and artworks by artists both in Thailand and abroad.

 

It is precisely this multiplicity of roles and responsibilities that has sparked a sense of freedom and a desire in Ajarn Nam-oi to step beyond his “comfort zone.” Combined with his ongoing study and consistent writing on art, these experiences have sharpened and refined his thinking, allowing it to crystallize and branch out far beyond what the practice of “painting” alone could adequately satisfy. This moment thus presents an important opportunity for him to set aside the paintbrush and turn to creating sculpture, working with computers to edit video, and installing artworks within a space of more than 30 square meters. The result is an artistic language unlike anything we have previously seen or anticipated from him throughout more than two decades of his artistic practice.