BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, MEMORY MACHINE by Dhanut Tungsuwan, an artist who has a strong affinity for romantic impulse and pursues a painting as his territory of artistic practice. Along with his artistic endeavor as a painter, Dhanut has immersed himself in a young creative industry between the two cities—London and Bangkok. Fused with diverse contexts into his first solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist transfigures his elusive memories into physical presence of canvas, brush stroke, and crisp color imbued with beautiful ambivalence. Such a painting method resembles chronesthesia or mental time travel which is less about retrospective but more about prospective, the exhibition is thus a recollection of memories against the backdrop of the present time.

Memories are fragile and ephemeral; they exist, even if one does not recognize. Through a time-honored method of painting, Dhanut unfolds memories he can’t remember—memories as an unknown territory, desolate landscape, and unfamiliar space of the mind. The color palette of the artwork bears some resemblance to the color of the underwater and the outer space: a metaphorical space of memories and an index of the inner world. For Dhanut, his painting is thus a portal to multiple realities running in parallel to human psyche.

So, what is ‘Memory Machine’? Since Dhanut was born in the generation of hyperconnectivity and information technology, he has immersed himself with uncountable images that are recollected, reproduced, and recirculated, and ultimately regenerated. Such an overwhelming presence of images and information activates some kind of memories, and perhaps in-between moments—are they leaving or have they just arrived? The artist enacts a painting process as an act of recollecting and re-editing memories, transforming his body like a machine.