BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY is proud to present Thru the Straits of Demos, a solo exhibition by Thai artist Kornkrit Jianpinidnan. The exhibition presents photo-installations drawn from three new volumes of the artist’s long-term visual-poetry project, POEM. Based on an amalgamation of research, sightseeing, and daily living, Jianpinidnan’s explorations of the relationship between experiences and memory repositions photography as a tool for the conveyance of truth and reality.

Presented within the BOOKSHOP LIBRARY, the three new volumes released with Thru the Straits of Demos brings the total count for the photobook series to 21 volumes. Taken by the possibilities of how a photograph can manifest in space, that artist’s employment of the photobook format integrates tactile qualities to the experience of the work, allowing for additional layers of interaction. The artist arrangement of text and images consisting of environmental portraits, landscape photographs, candid snapshots, and staged photographs reveal stories of Lumpini Park, travels to the Isthmus of Kra, and everyday life amidst the humdrum of pandemic lockdowns – these form the narratives of volumes 19, 20, and 21 respectively.

Within the main gallery and other incidental spaces across the BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY compound, these same texts and images take on a different incarnation as photography-installations, intervening into the space and inviting further interactions with the images. The artist’s choice of materials for his prints – drawn from an array of sources such as bridal photo studios, to traditional photograph development labs, and artisanal printers as well – allude to a hidden hierarchy implicit in the medium. Yet, the consolidation of photographs from such varied means of printing simultaneously mirrors the proliferation of photography across social strata. Moreover, the choice of supports, ranging from teak frames to aluminum frames, to acrylic and glass mounts, household furniture and even door frames, has each work intimating a sense of the sculptural in their final forms.

While Jianpinidnan’s POEM series of photobooks follows in the poetic tradition of Nirat, conveying sentiments of love-longing and wanderlust, his installations quarry the liminal space between the public and private sphere – at each turn arriving at an integration of both inner and outer realms of experience.