NSW Visual Arts Preliminary and HSC Syllabus Focus:
Artists’ Practice, Conceptual Framework (Artist/World/Audience)

Artist Information

Som (Sutthirat) Supaparinya lives and works in Chiang Mai and Lamphun, Thailand. Her works encompass a wide variety of media, including installation, objects, still and moving images – mainly with a documentarian approach. Her artistic practice questions and interprets public information and reveals structures and systems of power and control. Her recent projects focus on the impact of human activities on other humans and the landscape through political, historical, and literary lenses. She deals in poetic metaphors; her works are allegories that examine themes of injustice and political corruption.

Supaparinya earned a BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University and a postgraduate diploma in Media Arts from Hochschule Fuer Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany. She often focuses on the local, but she is an artist with a global outlook and a global practice. As a visual artist among the art community in Chiang Mai, she has participated in the founding and operation of CAC – Chiangmai Art Conversation since 2013. She was a director of Asian Culture Station (ACS) in the year 2016-2019 when CAC partnered with the Japan Foundation Asia Center Tokyo to establish the project. CAC aims to promote contemporary art in Chiang Mai while ACS activated Asian culture and its network.

Supaparinya has undertaken many international residences and has been the recipient of many international awards. Most recently she was nominated for the Prudential Eye Awards 2016 shortlist in ‘Best Emerging Artist Using Digital/Video’, Singapore and a winner of Institut Français award for an artist-in-residence at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France in 2018. In 2019 she was awarded a grant from the Japan Foundation Asia Center Fellowship Program for a research project, “The Study of Crossing Cultures through International Relationship between Small Cities” in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and Myanmar, In 2021–2022 she undertook a fellowship in Berlin with the DAAD “Artists in Berlin” program.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including within Thailand, in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Europe and the USA. Her work is included in Documenta, Kassel, Germany, in 2022.

For Teachers

There are many interesting ways to incorporate Som Supaparinya’s work into Stage 6 Case Studies. Two possibilities are suggested here:

1. Incorporate Shooting Stars and Paradise of the Blind into a Case Study focused on Art and Politics, Art and Activism or Art and Protest. In addition to Supaparinya, key artists might range from the historical (Goya) to the modern (Picasso’s ‘Guernica’; Kathe Kollwitz; Hannah Höch; George Grosz) to the contemporary (Ai Weiwei; Zhang Dali; Xie Rong; Guo Jian; Richard Bell; Daniel Boyd; Blak Douglas; Guerrilla Girls; Barbara Kruger; Jenny Holzer; Pussy Riot; Shirin Neshat; Shilpa Gupta; Subodh Gupta; Dadang Christanto – and there are many more possible examples)

References for Art and Activism:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/activist-art
https://www.artshub.com.au/news/news/9-examples-of-australian-art-made-in-protest-257868-2363042/
https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/art-as-activism/
https://magazine.artland.com/the-art-of-a-movement-protest-art/

2. “Codex”: A Case Study exploring Contemporary Art and Books
Students compare Som Supaparinya’s Paradise of the Blind (2016/2022) with the following artists and their works:

Huang Yongping, The History of Chinese Art and A Concise History of Modern Painting Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987/1993)
https://walkerart.org/collections/artworks/the-history-of-chinese-painting-and-the-history-of-modern-western-art-washed-in-the-washing-machine-for-two-minutes
https://walkerart.org/magazine/two-minute-wash-cycle

Xu Bing, Book from the Sky (1987–1991)
http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/206?year=1991&type=year
https://smarthistory.org/xu-bing-book-from-the-sky/

Polit Sheer Form Office, Library (2008)
https://explore.dangrove.org/objects/1656

Tao Aimin, The Secret Language of Women (2008)
https://www.inkstudio.com.cn/artists/68-tao-aimin/
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-asia/women-artists-contemporary-china/tao-aimin
http://anartteacherinchina.blogspot.com/2017/12/subterranean-feminism-tao-aimin-gao.html

Finally, for students in Years 10 or 11, consider using books in an Artmaking unit linked to one of the case studies above.

References for Artmaking using books:

https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2012/06/01/what-is-an-artists-book/#.YqWGgT1Bypo
https://hyperallergic.com/457522/artists-and-their-books-books-and-their-artists-getty-research-institute/
https://www.designer-daily.com/10-artists-who-create-amazing-art-with-books-59609
https://insteading.com/blog/art-old-book/

Additional References for Som Supaparinya:

https://www.aseac-interviews.org/sutthirat-supaparinya
http://atelierorange.info/portfolio_arts/
https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/sutthirat-supaparinya-as-the-river-flows/

For Students

These questions can be considered during or after a gallery visit, or from observing the works online.

Paradise of the Blind, 2022, 360 empty bullet shells (5.56×45mm), 55 Banned/restricted Books in Asia and Oceania, photocopy 55 Banned or restricted Books in Asia and Oceania on Greenleaf and white papers, copper wires No.38, strip-cut banned book shreds, a paper shredder machine, handwriting catalogue cards, and a wooden box, dimension vary with each installation.

Paradise of the Blind was first shown in 2016 at The Reading Room in Bangkok. The artist created a “library” of banned books and shredded paper, with empty bullet cases suspended from the ceiling as a disturbing disruption of a seemingly cosy reading space with beanbags among the bookshelves. The photographs of the installation are from the exhibition in Bangkok.

The title of the work is the title of a banned book. “Paradise of the Blind” is a book by Duong Thu Hong that is banned in Vietnam. First published in 1988 it is described by its publisher as a “portrait of three Vietnamese women struggling to survive in a society where subservience to men is expected and Communist corruption crushes every dream”.

In Paradise of the Blind, Supaparinya explored the issue of books and censorship, reproduction and destruction, abuse of law and power, systematic elimination of the other, through an installation of banned books, both shredded and whole. The artist has been creating artworks addressing the issue of banned books since October 2015.

Examples of banned books in the exhibition are All That Is Gone by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (banned in Indonesia); Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (once banned in China); a children’s book about same-sex penguin parents And Tango Makes Three (temporarily restricted in Singapore); The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, (still banned in many countries and his whole oeuvre is banned in Malaysia); even South Korea has lists of forbidden books for its army, including Year 501: The Conquest Continues by Noam Chomsky.

• What do you think is the impact of the piles of shredded paper in this installation?

• Why do you think the artist has included the empty bullet cases in this work?

• What might she be alluding to, and what is the effect on audiences entering the installation?

• How is Som Supaparinya responding to aspects of her contemporary world?

• What do you think is the significance of the title? Who are the blind, in this context?

First, watch the video (in the gallery, or here on the artist’s website http://atelierorange.info/portfolio/shooting-stars/) and answer these questions:

• Can you identify what is making the sounds recorded for the audio?

• What mood or atmosphere does the video create?

Then read the two extracts of critical writing and the artist’s statement below, before answering the questions:

Art Critics say:

“Countless glimmering lights stream down the screen, accompanied from time to time by echoing metallic sounds. When viewers learn that this beautiful, enchanting work was inspired by the repeated clashes between protesters and the military in Thailand in 2010, the impression they receive will surely be an entirely different one.

In Shooting Stars, Sutthirat Supaparinya demonstrates the characteristic of the medium of film, or how it can transform reality into something entirely different. When we are faced with a beautiful film that is dissociated from reality, we are led to ask ourselves what we truly ought to believe.”

Press release of the Video Arts Program [The 28th Program] at the Hiroshima MOCA, 2012

“Trails of flickering light slice through the darkness whose formless expanse heightens the piercing echoing sound of metallic cartridges dropped on hard surface. This minimal yet affecting video is made from footage shot by Som as she was traveling on the night train from the north down to Bangkok just a few weeks after the military’s massacre of protesters in the capital of Thailand. The artist’s solitary cross-country journey echoes the ones made shortly before by hundreds of thousands of anonymous women and men propelled by the desire for change. The wordlessness of the video replaces the hysterical pitch of the dominant media’s demonisation of bodies murdered and flesh torn. Its capturing of light’s ephemeral yet inextinguishable nascence is a fitting tribute to the solidarity of spirit and the desiring bodies of those who had gone before.”

May Adadol Ingawanij for Out Of Frame Film Festival (OFF), Ho Chi Minh City

Artist’s Statement:

Shooting Stars is a reflection on the nature of media, capable of transforming reality into something different, or even into its own opposite. The media can tell a lie. As was made clear by the massacre in Bangkok in May 2010, those who are in power can control and manipulate images/sound of reality to be what they want to hear, to watch and to read. They can easily close down any other media that does not support their version. In Shooting Stars, moving images of dark street-light scenery along a railway from Chiang Mai to Bangkok could be seen either as shooting stars or a ray of death. It depends how one experience it.

This footage was shot while I was traveling in a train to Bangkok a few weeks after the military crackdown in there. While I was traveling, the symbolism of traveling from provinces to Bangkok, late night and moving ray of light haunted me. It referred me to protesters who travelled from small provinces to Bangkok to join the protesting. They were shot when it was dark at late night while they were about to sleep on a street.  And the rapid moving street-light scenery linked me to the rays of laser that lead direction of gun barrel and destiny of the deaths.

To distort the frightened images by turning them vertically sweep such emotion away. It could be images of shooting stars at peaceful night. In a similar way, the sound of bullet shells falling after a shooting (without the sound of the shooting itself) can create peaceful and serene emotions instead of the real fear or panic that shooting actually elicits.

Shooting Stars comments on encounters and situations that I rendered into artistic metaphors. Media can easily function as a distortion and present incomplete information about what is actually being seen.

• How does this additional information change your response to the video?

• Imagine you have been asked to write a brief description of the video for the Sydney Film Festival – in no more than 3 sentences, how will you convey the work’s conceptual intentions and aesthetic qualities to your readers?

• Compare and contrast the two works by Som Supaparinya with “They Give Evidence” by Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto. Information and images here: https://magazine.artland.com/the-art-of-a-movement-protest-art/