The Answer is Blowing in the Wind | Tada Hengsapkul's solo exhibition at Maielie

MAIELIE art space is excited to announce the upcoming solo exhibition from renowned Thai artist, Tada Hengsapkul. The Answer is Blowing in the Wind will be on display at MAIELIE Khon Kean, Thailand from December 17, 2022 to March 31, 2023. Tada is known for his unique blend of photography, video, installation, and interactive elements, creating works that are both thought-provoking and emotional. In this exhibition, Tada continues to push the boundaries of contemporary art with a bold and brave exploration of the world around him. Using recognizable elements of daily life, Tada presents images of the extraordinary and unimaginable.

The exhibition's title, The Answer is Blowing in the Wind, represents Tada's determination to resist the tropes that have become common in contemporary art practice. His works in this exhibition gesture towards aspects of the present that feel like portents of the future, offering a glimpse into a world that is not easy, but one that is full of possibility and hope. The exhibition also highlights the widely lamented economic and political stagnation of post-2014 coup Thailand and the recent youth protests movement against dictatorship.

 

The Answer is Blowing in the Wind will feature a range of media, including mechanical painting, installation, video work, kinetic photography, sculpture and colorful smoke bomb paintings. One of the standout works in the exhibition is the Wind of Change series of kinetic photographs. These photographs depict landmarks around Khon Kaen that are precarious in the present and uncertain for the future. We Gonna Stay Like This is an art installation made using thermochromic paint on corrugated metal. The words, which are often spoken by people who have been forced to leave their homes due to natural disasters, economic struggles, or political persecution, are written on the type of metal commonly used for inexpensive tin roofing. It's easy to imagine these words being uttered by people whose only home is a tin roof.

The diverse forms of media used in the exhibition offer a rich and immersive experience for visitors, inviting them to engage with the art on a deeper level and to consider the world around them in a new light. Perhaps some people who visit this exhibition might know some people facing these or similar situations.

 

*This press release text is written by ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a
prototype AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot developed by OpenAI.

 

About the artist
Tada Hengsapkul (B.1987, Nakhon Ratchasima)
Tada Hengsapkul is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist, whose practice is often concerned with investigating and resisting various forms of control — at the level of the body, the collective, and society. He explains the context in which he works: “Now Thailand has a crisis about controlling the large amount of people who have come out to claim rights and liberties.” Tada addresses this crisis by purposefully positioning concerns specific to Thailand as being also emblematic of much more widely shared questions and experiences. The location in which the artist lives and works functions for him as a nexus point, at which manifold external and internal interests intersect. Tada first became known for his photographic and video works, which often challenged taboos around nudity and youth culture. In recent years, he has become increasingly drawn to creating installations, which are often immersive or interactive, and draw on the aesthetics of militarized environments. The artist’s practice draws on long-term research, which he conducts in both official and informal archives, as well as through deliberate engagement with various media environments, and with specific communities. In the artist’s words: “My research is to live in a different way.” Tada was born in 1987 in Korat, in the Isan region of northeastern Thailand. Korat has been home to American military bases since the period of the Second Indochina War, and the communities affected by lasting cultural and political legacies of this history have been a recurrent source of inspiration for the artist’s work. Aspects of the present “crisis” in Thailand are thus linked to twentieth century histories which are regional in scale, and relate to the global Cold War, as well as processes of decolonization and modernization.

 

Tada’s work is represented by Nova Contemporary.