“Don’t take away, simply chew the moment.”
This is what Thai contemporary artist Mit Jai Inn — known for his colourful, three-dimensional works that address sociopolitical issues and push the boundaries of painting — tells us over email, when we ask what he hopes audiences will take away from his works at ART SG.
It’s a whimsical answer to a prosaic question, suggesting that visitors to the third edition of Singapore’s largest art fair, launching this week at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, have a real treat in store. One of the highlight events of Singapore Art Week, this year’s fair boasts 105 galleries from 30 countries and territories, four site-specific artworks, film and talk programmes, and several new commissions from the celebrated Southeast Asian artist.
As with its previous two editions, ART SG is presented in collaboration with its Founding and Lead Partner UBS, a global bank and wealth management firm. The Swiss firm is also home to the 40,000-work-strong UBS Art Collection, considered one of the world’s most significant corporate collections of contemporary art, whose holdings are displayed across UBS offices worldwide.
For each edition of ART SG, the UBS Art Collection has commissioned work by a prominent Southeast Asian artist: in 2023, Dawn Ng (b. 1982, Singapore) with Forever Now, and in 2024, Eko Nugroho (b. 1977, Indonesia) with We Are Here Now. This year, it is Mit (b. 1960) whose colourful, interactive works will grace the UBS Lounge and UBS Art Studio.
Who is Mit Jai Inn?
With their inventive forms, distinctive textures, and candy-bright colours, Mit Jai Inn’s works are instantly recognisable for lovers of Southeast Asian contemporary art. While they seem simple at first glance, the works — made using paint and canvas, but often more closely resembling sculptures than paintings — obliquely address everything from contemporary political events and Buddhist philosophy to global art histories and Thai cultural traditions.
Born in northern Thailand, Mit studied at both Silpakorn University and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he also worked as an assistant to the Austrian sculptor and conceptual artist Franz West. It was during his time in Europe, in the late 1980s, that Mit began to develop the forms — unframed, double-sided, interactive canvases defying the conventions of painting and its markets — and concerns that would come to define his oeuvre.
Now based in Chiang Mai, Mit exhibits widely at various major international shows and biennales, with his works collected by institutions including the Singapore Art Museum, Japan’s Mori Art Museum, and Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts.
At ART SG 2025, Mit’s works may be found across two zones — the UBS Art Studio, which is open to all fair visitors, and the UBS Lounge, accessible to VIPs and invited guests.
Mit’s work at the fair
In the UBS Art Studio, visitors will find The Window and The Wall (both 2024), as well as Untitled, ST DD23 (2022), a prior work from the UBS Art Collection. The Window takes the form of a large-scale canvas, sliced through to reveal the wall it hangs on — drawing attention to the fragile and constructed nature of any piece of art.
The Wall, on the other hand, consists of Mit’s trademark double-sided paintings. Instead of simply standing in front of the paintings, viewers have to approach them as they would works of sculpture, walking around them to see them from multiple angles. In other words, the paintings fully reveal themselves only to viewers who move actively through the space.
To enter the UBS Lounge, guests will have to make their way through the tendrils of Through the Screen (2024), a series of jellyfish-like sculptures made from strips of brightly painted canvas and suspended from the ceiling. In the Lounge, they’ll find yet more double-sided paintings — The Golden Field, The Silver Field, and The Copper Field (all 2024).
Working with forms and relationships
The works on show at ART SG amply demonstrate several important aspects of Mit’s practice. First, there’s his cheerful defiance of painting’s conventional bounds. This manifests partially through medium and method — Mit deploys an eclectic mix of materials, including oil paint, acrylic, gypsum powder, glitter, and linseed oil, and eschews paintbrushes for hands and palette knives — but particularly through form.
Even when using paint and canvas, Mit does not limit himself to making two-dimensional images that lie flat against the wall. Instead, viewers of his work over the years will have encountered canvases not only sliced apart or painted on both sides, but also positioned upright or laid out on the floor. They may have walked through a tunnel covered in paint (Dream Tunnel, 2021), wandered among giant scrolls turned into column-like forms (Planes [Electric], 2019), or pondered strips of canvas woven together or draped in loose curls (Patch Work 2 and Loops, both 2019).
But beyond his experiments with form, Mit’s practice is also defined by the kinds of intangible interactions (artist-to-viewer, viewer-to-object, viewer-to-viewer, viewer-to-space) that his works create. In this sense, they are relational — “relational aesthetics” being a term used to refer to works and practices that privilege not just art objects, but rather the relationships, especially between people, that art can catalyse.
Occasionally created in collaboration with assistants, volunteers, or art students, Mit’s works often invite audience participation. Patchworks (2000), for instance, comprises dozens of small painted squares which audiences can rearrange however they like. Indeed, several of Mit’s projects, like #dreammantra (2021, 2023) and Bangkok Apartments (2022) allow visitors to freely bring parts of the work home.
While they may not include such direct participation, Mit’s ART SG works are no less interested in relationality. “The challenge for this series of work,” Mit says, “was to refine my process on how to prepare an object to meet people, and use this to set the stage for an exchange.”
“This illusion that we call life,” he adds, “is a shifting entity that not only has two sides to it, but uncountable sides. This idea is part of how I want my work to initiate an interaction. A reminder that everything we create is, at its core, an act of illusion.”
In other words, by using his work to create relationships, Mit attempts to craft a microcosm of the infinitely complex relationships that make up our world. We are quite easily alerted to the socially constructed, illusory nature of art — which will, perhaps, help us discover what else in our lives and societies is illusory too.
Engaging with the world
For, Mit’s relational aesthetics are closely linked with his art’s social themes, and the apparent simplicity of his pastel abstractions belies deep political and philosophical commitments. A cofounder of the Chiang Mai Social Installation (a festival series widely recognised as Thailand’s first public arts programme) and founder of the nonprofit, politically outspoken gallery Cartel Artspace, Mit believes artists should stand against inequality, injustice, and the forces of society that threaten freedom and insult our shared humanity. (In some ways, his use of abstraction may well be strategic: a means to evade censorship in his home country.)
In the UBS Art Studio, for instance, the multicoloured parallel stripes of Untitled, ST DD23 (2022) symbolise the harmonious coexistence of various cultures, religions, and ideologies in an ideal society. The work reflects Mit’s personal concept of art, which he often refers to as a “utopian dream” — something that imagines an escape from (or alternative to) a troubled reality.
This might then beg the question: why is Mit at an art fair? On the one hand, we have an artist known for socially engaged work, with a well-documented penchant for simply giving his works away. On the other, an art-world institution often criticised, fairly or otherwise, for having high barriers to entry — a setting where artworks are, above all, objects to be bought and sold. On paper, it seems like an incongruent match, especially in our polarised times.
Mit’s answer to us is simple, an eloquent counterpoint to such binaristic thinking. “Restricting yourself to a specific type of setting — whether commercial or not — is a self-imposed limitation. The real challenge for me is to embrace these types of shows, even if I do understand how accepting a wide spectrum of possibilities, as diverse as they come, is fundamental to changing viewpoints.”
“Engaging with the world as a practice: sometimes for survival, sometimes for curiosity, and sometimes to learn and share.”
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ART SG runs from 17–19 January 2025 (VIP Preview and Vernissage on 16 January 2025) at Marina Bay Sands. Find out more and get tickets at artsg.com.
Hungry for more? Read our other stories on Mit Jai Inn’s work Color in Cave (2020) and his exhibition Dreamworld at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery (2021) here and here.
Plural Art Mag is a media partner of ART SG.
Header image courtesy of Mit Jai Inn.
