Arin Rungjang,
Arin Rungjang is on a one-year DAAD residency in Berlin. Bright-eyed, soft-spoken and mellow, the forty-four-year-old artist radiates the same focus he applies to his art, which, as he describes it, evolves from the notion that any single moment is always a concentrated aspect of the greater correlations that have brought it about. L’OFFICIEL ART: Your work uses different media, from site-specific performance pieces to video art. On your German Wikipedia page, it says you relate to Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, the aim of which is to transform society. What do you make of that? ARIN RUNGJANG:
I’m actually friends on facebook with the guy who wrote the page. He contacted me to ask whether that was correct. I don’t mind. But I wouldn’t put a label on my work. Art serves its own purpose, even before something is shown in an exhibition, or is described in a magazine. That’s where language and knowledge production come into play.
During your formative years, did you draw inspiration from particular directions in art?
Thailand was initially an agricultural country. Its entire development has to be seen against the backdrop of a gradual influence of Western industrialization and of the colonization of Southeast Asia. Back in 1932, when we changed from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, the prime minister forced people to wear hats so they would look British and to eat eggs to build muscles. Weird, right? My mom was from the first generation to be born in that climate. She still felt connected to boats in canals and water buffaloes in rice fields. That’s a lengthy explanation to give some context to my early life. The art school I entered was considered traditional. Knowledge was passed down. My teachers’ generation was the first to study abroad, and they came back with legendary stories, just like when people used to go to the forest and come back to the village to claim they’d killed a tiger. And the whole village would believe them. One teacher went to Dusseldorf. And came back and said, “Oh, Dusseldorf, Joseph Beuys!” Because we didn’t have the Internet, we’d believe someone’s story. And people would develop ideas. You know what I mean?
I get it, the story is altered, the tiger’s stripes start glowing, now he’s spitting flames and he’s flying.
Exactly! In the early 1990s, we had Rirkrit Tiravanija, who had studied in New York and had a big influence on me. Then came the fifty-four gigabyte Internet. That was in 1996. So we could learn more about Western art. I looked into Beuys, Duchamp, Warhol, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and so on. But I was also skeptical. Should I just follow the art world or follow myself? Art has to have some significance beyond its internal development. It has to work for reality, not just as form. I started engaging in a sort of conversation with myself through talking to family members. My first exhibition focused on my father, who was beaten by Neo-Nazis in Germany on a work trip, and eventually died from the injuries he sustained. His story is related to the Second World War, to poverty, and to the economic inequality between Thailand and Western countries. I began to see relations. I created art by looking at the people who surround me.
One of the shows you are currently preparing work for is “Spectrosynthesis II,” Asia’s second largest show of LGBTQ art. Up until recently, your sexual orientation was not the subject of your work.
That’s right. I didn’t think it necessary. I’d come to feel comfortable with myself. When I got the invitation, I started to think about myself, my childhood, and the difficulties I faced being gay. I realized it was important—not to share my private problems, but to point to commonalities, to larger paradigms. I was the lucky one among my friends. Some of them struggled socially, some died from AIDS. They didn’t have a chance to move on.
You were born and raised in Bangkok by a single mother.
Yes. I was two and a half years old when my dad passed away. Until then, we had a nice life. We had curious objects at home, from my father’s work trips: a plate with a Caravaggio print on it, a thermometer inside a miniature Eiffel tower. Polaroids. An 8mm projector. Not everyone had such things. I remember I felt affluent. After my father’s death, we moved to my grandmother’s house, to a ghetto-like area. My mother had to work, so we stayed at home, fairly isolated. It was only at school that I began to understand the conditions we lived in and tried to hide them. The moment that I accepted our poverty, I felt great relief. That was when I was about twelve years old. I bought a gift for myself on my birthday and told my whole family that it was from my friends [laughs]. I think life is like that: we all go through rough moments, and try to separate them from a sense of public self.
Was there a particular moment in which you felt your life change professionally?
“The Rwanda Project,” an installation I produced for the Sydney Biennial in 2012, had a huge impact on me. I worked with thirteen orphans whose parents were killed during the genocide. I could relate to those children because I am half-orphan. I researched the genocide through books, films, the internet, through different media. But I never felt the knowledge I gathered, I just held it in me. My soul wasn’t attached, until I met these children, in flesh and blood. We spoke, we threw pottery. Not only did I learn from them, but I was ultimately bound to them through the work, as a human being.
The surfaces of your work show little of the scars you address. They are polished, perfectly executed, and visually striking.
Being an artist is a privilege. But how can we use it to bring about something better? That’s why I am not a studio artist, who makes paintings. I do situation-based art through encounters with real people. There is a sublimation in the work I exhibit, so I can give dignity back to those who, in the eyes of others, may lack it.