Underground I All Under Haven

 

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.