Chulayarnnon Siriphol

Artist Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s semi-retrospective show “I a Pixel, We the People” renders his moving-image practice of nearly two decades into a meta-film, splicing his videos with a mélange of quotidian media. Embodying the artist’s time-honored methodology, wherein his body and experiences serve as media, the show reanimates local mythologies and explores political ideologies. A master editor, Siriphol alchemizes these pixelated narratives into a twenty-four-chapter sci-fi saga about the mythical Golden Snail, who grew up in the house of Mother—a pink-clad, tyrannical caricature of Thailand’s monarchy and military. The film traces Golden Snail’s journey from Mother’s oppressive regime to his eventual escape and transformation into an artist—a narrative device that Siriphol uses to encapsulate both the plight and the resilience of the Thai people. Drawing from Siriphol’s personal experience with censorship as an artist and his struggle as a citizen under state suppression, the work entwines his private memories with episodes of Thailand’s sociopolitical upheavals. The work also highlights art as a creative form of protest, allowing dissident citizens to unite and wield their power against violent regimes.

Balancing the ideological weight of Siriphol’s filmic odyssey is the exhibition’s poignantly intimate mise-en-scène. Undulating across the vast ground are hills and caves stitched from old clothes that the artist’s mother and grandmother hoarded in their house—an act that mirrors Siriphol’s penchant for “hoarding” video footage as a moving-image artist. Within each cave, viewers can discover a makeshift screening room chock-full of used VHS tapes and souvenirs. Alternating between showing his whole film on the gallery’s major screen and selective montages on hidden cave-screens, Siriphol entrenches the personal–collective duality in every aspect of his creative labor. The exhibition is symbolic of Siriphol’s iconoclastic vision of himself as a pixel that, when merged with other human-pixels, disrupts stagnant paradigms and births realities that are yet unimagined.