Nova Contemporary is pleased to present Embodiment, an off-site solo exhibition featuring new paintings and works on paper by Latthapon Korkiatarkul. Set within a vacant ancestral home overlooking the Chao Phraya River, the exhibition embodies Korkiatarkul’s signature abstraction and redaction, using these methods to explore themes of perception and presence.
Each piece resides as a temporary guest in the space, seeking to blend, balance, or belong. Installed onto freestanding wooden frames that stretch from floor to ceiling, Korkiatarkul evokes the Chinese myth of Pan Gu, in which a primordial giant separates heaven and earth.
This transition between worlds, one of ideas and essences, and another of materials and senses, is central to the exhibition and to the artist’s practice. He captures a dualistic worldview, reminiscent of Plato’s Theory of Forms, which posits that perfection exists only in the realm of thought. In this philosophy, everything in the physical world is an imperfect shadow of an ideal form that exists solely in the realm of ideas. Plato’s two worlds, the intelligible and the illusionistic, represent a dichotomy between an unchanging, eternal reality grasped by the mind and a sensory world of mutable, imperfect replicas.
Following this line of thought, Korkiatarkul’s works can also be seen as copies. They are amorphous echoes of familiar colors, objects, and narratives, suspended between the tangible and intangible. Although his surfaces are stripped to minimalist abstraction, they retain a sense of the known. They can be images we know: his laborious paper works fade out like waves reaching shore, another retains the metallic sheen of a coin, or the bleakness of a shadow. They respond directly to the landscape of the home and its exterior, absorbing noise, light, and temperature as intrinsic qualities. Marked by a subtle force that shapes what is allowed to remain within the frame and what is expunged, Korkiatarkul’s works stand as meticulous contextual voids. Unconcerned with direct representation, his works engage bodily instinct and movement. With musicality, they reveal the natural rhythms and restrictions of his gestures, some employing his full wingspan, while others capture repetitive staccato strokes created through miniscule brushes.
Korkiatarkul’s work draws from a long lineage of radical abstraction in Minimalism and Conceptual art. However, the cultural specificity of Thailand quietly imbues his work, alluding to Buddhist concepts of non-attachment and emptiness. Instead of presenting explicit visual cues, this body of work emphasizes the unspoken and invisible. It resists direct interpretation, seeming to depict everything and nothing at once. Embodiment creates vacuums of time and space unbound by external influence, inviting viewers to take a leap of faith and surrender to open images that simultaneously reference the cherished, the illusory and the unknown.
Text by Colette Auyang
Nova | Off-site Exhibition
Baan Thewes, Thewes Pier
Opening hours: 11am - 5pm, Wed-Sat