Arin Rungjang
Arin Rungjang (อริญชย์ รุ่งแจ้ง)
b. 1975 in Bangkok, Thailand; based in Bangkok
Works in exhibition
Golden Teardrop, 2013
Single-channel video and site-specific sculptural installation
HD video, sound, wooden construction incorporating wood from Ayutthaya house, iron beams from decommissioned post-World War II factory, and 6,000 cast brass pieces
Video: 32 min. 27 sec.
Collection of the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC), Ministry of Culture, Thailand
Bones, Books, Artificial Lights, and Fireflies, 2015
Multi-channel video and site-specific sculptural installation
HD video, two-channel stereo sound; sculpture made with lighting products; vitrine table containing two firefly specimens (one from Thailand and one from Japan), two books by Jeremias Van Vliet (Japanese translation and Thai translation), pieces of bone left from the artist’s grandmother’s funeral pyre
Video: main screen 37 min. 52 sec., loop screen 22 min. 53 sec.
See all installation views at higher resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/parasophia/sets/72157656460089428
Arin Rungjang studied Graphic Arts at the Silpakorn University in Bangkok (BFA, 2002), and has participated in exchange programs and artist-in-residence programs in Paris, the Philippines, Taipei, London, Antwerp, and New York. Finalist, Signature Art Prize 2014 (winner to be announced in November 2014).
In 2013, Rungjang was one of two artists representing Thailand at the Venice Biennale, where he showed Golden Teardrop (2013), a work composed of a video and an intricate sculptural installation of teardrop-shaped brass. Loosely but carefully, Golden Teardrop layers the history of the sugar trade and personal narratives of Thai, Greek, Portuguese, and Japanese individuals in the fifteenth, seventeenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with the traditional Thai egg-yolk dessert thong yod (literally, golden drops) as the starting point, presenting a reexamination of collective histories and memories and their formation.
In June 2014, Rungjang visited Kyoto to start shooting for Bones, Books, Artificial Lights, and Fireflies, which brings together personal memories and histories through bones (from the artist’s grandmother’s funeral pyre), books (by a 17th-century Dutch merchant), artificial lights (in his grandmother’s memories and in the installation), and fireflies (present throughout the different narratives, and featuring an entomologist).
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Arin Rungjang, Bones, Books, Artificial Lights, and Fireflies, 2015. Installation view at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art for Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. Photo by Norimasa Kawata
