Gallery VER

 

Underground | All Under Heaven: Mit Jai Inn and Ariana Chaivaranon

By Ariana Chaivaranon, Soleil David, Elissa Ecker, and John Z.W. Tung       

 

The catalog unfolds in two parts corresponding with the paired solo exhibitions Underground: Mit Jai Inn (VER Gallery) and All Under Heaven: Ariana Chaivaranon (Cartel Artspace). Each part features two contributing authors. Ariana Chaivaranon’s curatorial essay feels through a journey into the night of Mit Jai Inn’s Underground—an odyssey that retools us to see in the dark, participate in underground politics, and move to free ourselves. This essay is followed by John Tung’s allegorical tale, The Original Mark, which takes up the prehistoric mark-making in the archaeological site Gorham’s Cave to reflect on the symbolism consistent across duplicated and iterative marks in Mit Jai Inn’s work. Turning to All Under Heaven, Elissa Ecker takes up the blank blue of the painting series as a glitch or error that interrupts and overturns the spatial logics of the paintings and of heavenly authority. Soleil David approaches the paintings through ekphrastic poetry and lyrical essays that open larger questions of empire, disappearance, climate, revolution, and solidarity between peoples under authoritarianism, particularly in the Philippines and Thailand.

 

Price: 850 THB

ISBN: 978-616-94361-0-2

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About Authors

Ariana Chaivaranon is a Thai-born artist and curator currently based at ‘in-tangible institute,’ Chiang Mai. For the past decade, Chaivaranon has cultivated transformative connections between the public and globally renowned art collections, including the U.S. National Gallery of Art, the Beijing Palace Museum, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, and The Frick Collection. Chaivaranon’s scholarship on Thai contemporary art appears in publications including Art & Market, MoMA (NY) Post, NUS (Singapore) Southeast of Now, and UNSW (Sydney) Di’van Journal.

Soleil David is a poet and translator. Her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, Two Lines, Ulirát: The Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines, Los Angeles Review of Books and Cream City Review, among others. Her poetry has been adapted into new music for singers and sinfonietta. Her honors include a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. She is a senior editor for translation at The Margins.

Elissa Ecker is an interdisciplinary maker, curator, and art and design educator who works on projects as varied as her titles. She co-founded LIV_ID, a feminist art and curatorial collective, while living in Bangkok, Thailand. Her curatorial and critical projects have partnered with Cartel Artspace, Bridge Art Space, Bangkok Biennale, Bangkok Art Book Fair, and the French Embassies Galleries Night. Elissa is now based in New York, USA, working at the intersection of art/design and community building.

John Z.W. Tung is an independent curator and exhibition-maker. To date, his close work with artists has realized more than 50 artwork commissions and site-specific adaptations ranging from the minute to monumental. Serving as a co-curator for the Singapore Biennale 2016 and Singapore Biennale 2019, three of the artwork commissions he curated were finalists for the Benesse Prize, with one work winning the prestigious award. His recent appointments as an independent curator include Festival Curator for the 7th & 8th Singapore International Photography Festival (2020 & 2022) and Associate Curator for the Open House programme, For the House; Against the House (2021, 2022 & 2023), and The Forest Institute, a large-scale architectural art installation dedicated to secondary forest ecologies. In 2023, he was the recipient of the inaugural Tan Boon Hui Curatorial Prize.

 

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Published

GALLERY VER LIMITED PARTNERSHIP

 

Edited by 

Ariana Chaivaranon

 

Authored by

Ariana Chaivaranon, Soleil David, Elissa Ecker, and John Tung

 

Translated by

Jirat Prasertsup

 

Project Managed by

Valerie Nikolay

 

Design and layout by 

Kan Chantharamas

 

Photography by

Marisa Srijunpleang and Will Seaton

 

Copy edited by

Will Seaton

 

Printed by Indigo Space Ltd. Part. in Thailand

First edition November 2023