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The 4 Foundations
December 16, 2023, to January 27, 2024
BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY
The 4 Foundations, Solo exhibition by Orawan Arunrak that transforms the gallery into a somatic prep room for reactivating the senses. Drawing inspiration from everyday forms of embodied consciousness, the exhibition, which runs from December 16, 2023, to January 27, 2024, eschews spectacle for an immersiveness of the small by offering different sensory triggers gleaned from the artist’s daily life over the past few years, much of which was spent trying to regain her sense of bearings amidst a fast-changing world.
In The 4 Foundations, Arunrak takes as her starting point the different concepts and mechanisms that she has explored to cope with the sense of displacement and disorientation from having spent the pandemic years living between Germany and Thailand. The title itself is taken from the four foundations of Mindfulness proposed by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, which includes the body, feelings, mental formations, and perception. Reflecting this fourfold structure, the centerpiece of the exhibition—two intersecting lines of suspended silicone sculptures—divides the space into four quarters, each containing a private nook concealed by a curtain in which one could contemplate in the presence of an artwork.
Unfolding across the space like a series of vignettes, the works, which range from sculpture, painting, video, to audio installation, coalesce to form a living environment where one experiences the haptic, muscular, respiratory, aural, and visual through different registers. In the silicone sculptures that traverse the space suspended at the depth of an adult swimming pool, different bodily postures that the artist was exposed to through the swimming classes that she began within the past year are presented through an array of skin-toned homunculi that double up as squeezable massage toys. On the curtains, embroidered patterns depict breathing rhythms. Behind one of the curtains, a video shows the artist wiping one of her hands using a glove towel worn by the other. In a separate video playing in another nook, the artist cleans the floor by tracing the patterns on its wooden surface using her wet finger. Outside, one could relax on the meditation cushions scattered across the space alongside isolated tessellations of anti-slip floor mats. Intermittently, church bells ring and a washing machine can be heard spinning. All these happen in the presence of twelve modified clocks that have been mounted at regular intervals on the enclosing walls. Their prominence appears to suggest the imposition of synchronized time upon our everyday lives, if not for a curious detail: in each of the clocks, the numbers are identical. One clock comprises all ones, another, all twos, and so on.
The 4 Foundations is an invitation to pause and make time with the oft-unnoticed sensory realities that shape our daily existence. Seeking out the potentialities ensconced within the routine, the profound within the familiar, the exhibition allows us to take refuge in life’s quieter moments only so as to expand our understanding of our embodied place in a living, breathing world that is always in motion.