8 August 2025, 10:20am - 10:35am
This paper presentation explores the artistic practice of Sutee Kunavichayanont through five major series—History Class, Blackboard Drawing, Water Writing, Melt: Film Series, and Melt: Ice Series. His works revolve around the tension between remembrance and forgetting, permanence and ephemerality, and the role of the viewer in co-creating meaning. Starting with participatory carvings on student desks in History Class, Sutee invites audiences to reproduce and possess historical narratives through rubbing techniques. In Blackboard Drawing, history becomes more fluid, written and erased like memory itself, while works such as Nora: Tangible & Intangible Memories question how cultural heritage is preserved or lost. Water Writing literalizes disappearance, using water as a medium to emphasize the fleeting nature of life and art. The Melt series presents a poignant visual archive, where decades of personal photographic negatives and sculpted ice forms dissolve, leaving behind only traces. Across these projects, the artist resists traditional memorialization, instead creating participatory, transient encounters that foreground presence, process, and the poetic instability of memory. His work invites viewers to engage with the act of remembering not as a fixed truth, but as an evolving dialogue—both personal and collective.
Sutee Kunavichayanont, born in 1965 in Bangkok, is a Thai contemporary artist known for conceptually rich, participatory works like ‘History Class’ (2000). His art explores Thai identity, power, and history amid socio-political change. He has exhibited globally, with works held in major international museum collections.