The overture
We begin the exhibition in the foyer of Museum MACAN. Through the tall glass windows, West Jakarta hums in the distance — a restless urban landscape in harmony with the buzzing atmosphere inside, as guests gather to meet the celebrated Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai. He is about to give us a tour of his new exhibition entitled Sing Dance Cry Breathe | as their world collides on to the screen.
On the right–hand side of the entrance, stretching across the length of the whole wall, hangs a monumental painting — our first encounter with Korakrit Arunanondchai’s world. It is a clue, a doorway, and a summation of what lies ahead.
The painting overlays Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights with Arunanondchai’s own iconography. Here, the Dutch Renaissance painter’s intricate, chaotic garden is reimagined: the scene rests on the back of a turtle, a phoenix-like wind creature hovers above, and a Naga — the mythic serpent of Southeast Asian belief — carries the universe on its back. “For me, every time you recreate The Garden of Earthly Delights, you’re trying to recreate a diagram for the whole universe,” the artist explains.
Bosch’s triptych is among the most reproduced artworks in art history. It has spread far beyond its original context, appearing on posters, album covers, and digital screens — flattened and fragmented into the language of popular culture. In this way, Bosch’s garden becomes a fitting foundation for Arunanondchai’s practice: a visual reference that speaks simultaneously to myth, excess, and the way we consume images today.
Arunanondchai introduces his own lexicon of symbols to the work, grounding his universe in the language of colour. “Green becomes the forest, the Naga, the military, or the shaman, and everything we relate to nature,” he says. “Blue becomes the sky, the void.” The colours carry political resonance, particularly in Thailand, where they reflect deep divisions: yellow for royalists, green for the military, and red for anti-royalists. These themes of division and transformation, myth and memory, weave throughout the exhibition.
The backstage
The first room, which Arunanondchai refers to as the “backstage,” sets the tone for what follows. At its centre stands a sculpture of Garuda — his form fragmented and stripped of its wings. In Balinese Hinduism, the bird deity Garuda is a protector of temples and sacred spaces. And his presence is tied to state power in Thailand, where he perches high on government buildings as a symbol of authority.
Here, however, Garuda is fragile. His broken form suggests a departure from dominance, a state of becoming rather than being. The bird appears again in other forms — as a phoenix, the creature that rises from its ashes, and as a “mockingjay” from the popular movie series The Hunger Games, which embodies rebellion and survival.
Popular culture, for Arunanondchai, is part of the same continuum as myth and ritual — a set of stories we construct to make sense of our world. “I have a really good friend who told me that usually you become an artist because you’re either a failed dancer, a failed pop star, or a failed actor,” he shares. “I actually tried to become a pop star in high school, but it didn’t work out. So I think now I’m making the stage.” This slippage between the sacred and the contemporary — between Garuda and Mockingjay — reflects the artist’s fascination with symbols that travel across time and levels of meaning.
The birds, sculpted into the paintings in front of us, are made of denim and metallic foil, materials that carry associations of trade, industry, and consumer culture. “The coloration happens through exposing [the materials to] different temperatures of heat,” Arunanondchai explains. He refers to this process as “spiritual upcycling” — transforming overlooked, low-value materials, through fire, into something precious and charged with significance.
The interlude: ghosts
The next space presents the 2018 video installation No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5. The work recounts the 2018 Thai cave rescue, where a group of young footballers became trapped underground — an event that gripped Thailand and the world. For Arunanondchai, the rescue became more than a news story, revealing the forces that shape Thailand’s national identity. “The king, the military, Christian missionaries, and even Elon Musk all became involved,” he reflects, observing how these figures, rooted in Thailand’s historical and cultural systems, activated themselves as symbols of power and salvation.
This ties into Arunanondchai’s ongoing interest in the unseen forces that shape us. Mysticism and animism — often assumed to be intrinsic to Thai culture — are, he points out, not as timeless as they appear. Much of their contemporary forms were heavily constructed during the Cold War, a time when narratives of tradition were strategically intertwined with politics to consolidate state power. “I’m making a story to take apart other stories,” he explains.
The video plays in a space that feels cave-like. To the right, a sculpture emits green laser beams from its chest. This piece, titled Breath (2024), includes a head and hands cast in resin, LED lights, and scattered sea shells. The green lasers, radiating outward, suggest an intersection of technology and spirituality.
In much of Arunanondchai’s work, the roles of caretaker and recipient of care emerge as important threads. Large parts of his practice reflect on his relationship with his grandfather, particularly in the final stages of the latter’s life, which were marked by memory loss. This relationship is central to works such as Songs for Dying (2021), shown earlier this year at the Indonesia Bertutur festival in Bali.
Although this particular piece is not part of the exhibition, its presence lingers in the next room. Here, we are met with a pair of animatronic hands playing a piano. The work is both eerie and tender, with the mechanical hands — sculpted to resemble those of Arunanondchai’s grandfather — performing an amalgamation of songs he used to play.
If this exhibition is a theatre, then the actors here are ghosts. These ghosts are histories we refuse to deal with, parts of ourselves we bury and avoid. They are not only mythic presences but also drones, screens, and fragments of technology that surround us.
In his work, Arunanondchai has invoked the “Ghost Cinema” tradition of Northeast Thailand, where monks screen films not for human spectators but as offerings to spirits. We can sense this atmosphere at the liminal moments when we are just about to step into (or out of) the exhibition room. Standing on the threshold, we become aware of the unseen presences already there, waiting. It is as if the space does not need us to be whole.
The ghosts guide us onward, drawing us towards “the stage,” where these unseen forces — histories, absences, and echoes — are made physical in the blackened space of the next exhibition hall.
The stage
The largest room of the exhibition, titled “the stage,” is painted entirely black, evoking the dichotomy between the “white cube” of an art gallery and the “black box” style of theatre stages. The darkness draws us, the viewers, into an immediate, physical relationship with the work, shifting the focus from detached observation to embodied experience.
This is further enforced, on a visceral level, by the very floor that we step on. The ground is covered in a mixture of ash, house paint, and soil, collected from polluted areas of Jakarta. “It’s ash that has fallen back to the earth,” Arunanondchai explains, pointing obliquely towards both the destruction the material represents and the potential it holds. Walking across this surface feels apocalyptic, as though we are stepping on the fragile remains of a world consumed by fire.
On the walls, denim canvases bear the marks of fire. Arunanondchai’s process begins with laying the canvases on the ground, exposing them to flames, and photographing them mid-consumption. These images are then printed back onto the fabric, preserving the fire’s movement as both an act and a trace. “The fire leaves its skin behind,” he explains, describing the burn marks as the surface memory of the fire’s passage. The body of the work remains the canvas itself — what endures after the flames have disappeared.
Arunanondchai also contemplates the notion of fire as the first “screen” in human history. Humans once gathered around the fire’s glow to share stories, labour, and perform rituals. But compared to our modern experience of screens, which often alienates us from one another, this experience was collective, alive, and unmediated.
But something else happened between the fire and the emergence of television and other screen gadgets. And that was painting. “Paintings played the role of screens for a large part of history,” explains the artist.
Finally, by burning his canvases, Arunanondchai introduces an element of sacrifice. “Here, you can only see the few paintings that survived the sacrifice. You cannot imagine how many canvases vanished forever,” he says. “One has to come to terms with that as an artist.” The unpredictability of the process makes the fire an active collaborator rather than a passive tool. What remains on the walls is not just a finished product, but also evidence of something volatile and uncontrollable, a balance between creation and destruction.
The epilogue
At the far end of the room, a monumental painting of a flying bird draws us in. Its head looks like a fertile organ, a cosmic eye, or, as the artist himself explains, a portal. “It’s a lead-up to the video about spirits coming back into the flesh in the process of being born. The spirits dance around a body, and that’s when the bird is born,” the artist explains.
Instead of only emphasising the painting’s surface, however, the artist invites us to step behind it. “There’s something special here,” he says. “A sort of a spiritual, religious experience.”
The back of the painting is bare — a dark, blank surface that feels like a void. It becomes a moment to pause, with the absence of imagery holding as much weight as its presence. It’s a meditative act very much in line with the artist’s Buddhist heritage.
The exhibition ends with another screen, showing Arunanondchai’s Songs for living (2021). Made in collaboration with cinematographer Alex Gvojic, the film unfolds as a collage of grief, transformation, and spiritual power. The work, like the exhibition as a whole, reflects on cycles of life and death, destruction and creation. It invites us to confront loss — not as an ending, but as a space for something new to be born.
Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Sing Dance Cry Breathe unfolds as a series of thresholds — between earth and sky, destruction and creation, memory and forgetting, real and digital, high art and popular culture. Fire runs through it all, making fertile soil for rebirth. The flying birds of Garuda, Phoenix, and Mockingjay act as guides, symbols of endurance and transformation, bridging religion, myth, and popular culture.
In the universe Arunanondchai creates, there are no definitive answers or hierarchies. Instead, the artist’s universe mirrors what the anthropologist Anna Tsing describes in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World as a world of patches and assemblages, where meaning emerges from fragments and interconnections rather than singular narratives. In this theatre of ash and renewal, Arunanondchai invites us to pause, to move through his layered world, and, as the exhibition’s title exhorts: to sing, dance, cry, and breathe.
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Korakrit Arunanondchai: Sing Dance Cry Breathe | as their world collides on to the screen runs at Museum MACAN, Jakarta, till 6 April 2025. Find out more at museummacan.org.
Header image: Installation view of Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic’s (with Tosh Basco) No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5.
