Counting
20July - 25 August, 2019
BANGKOK CITY CITY GALLERY, Thailand
COUNTING by Orawan Arunrak, an artist with an observant eye and a wayfarer who collects anecdotes from people of her day-to-day associations. Since 2016, her life has been shifting between Bangkok and Berlin, conversations and observations with city dwellers of a vicinity accumulated into multiple sketches. An assemblage of stories implemented into drawing and writing, Arunrak’s first solo exhibition with the gallery invites audiences to count and assimilate a rhythmic pattern of her shifting life by walking through architectural elements as an index of inhabitation, a foundation of home.
For Arunrak, an off-site drawing potentially generates interesting conversations, and she has been employing this tactical process to produce her artwork. Unlike an arranged interview, an organic exchange between the artist and passersby offers more room, a drift to wider observation of the surroundings—in other words, a social illustration of city dwellers. Her artistic language maneuvers in the careful lines, mellow color, and soft words, constructs multiples trails of reading, and slowly morphs into a silhouette of her own body.
In COUNTING exhibition, the prefabricated concrete blocks are materials available in the space, the transitional space that stories await for people to find and collect. The accumulation of stories are kept within the piles of concrete from which places Arunrak spent time crafting her narratives. The act of counting is a meditation, a slow discovery—from the artist to audiences, from the footpath to the gallery. Her artwork is like a communication between softness of drawing and roughness of concrete. It also resembles how kids often play and draw on the street.