IT ALL BEGAN WITH A PINK EGG. The room was dark, with sheets of bubble wrap carpeting the floor. A woman dressed in a silvery-gray tunic held up the egg, examining its fragile shell with a sense of rapture before raising it against a snakeskin-patterned circle projected on the wall. Across the space, two undecipherable shapes wrapped in red plastic were rolling and churning like human-size egg sacs. Upon closer inspection, the forms concealed two embryonic figures illuminated by a light source from within. They stretched their hands and legs, as if trying to puncture the sacs or measure them with their limbs. As the performers hatched from their plastic confinement, the trio began a process of physical communication by pressing their heads against one another, then madly entwining their bodies to create a tricephalous creature as the popping sounds of bubble wrap permeated the room.
Wilawan Wiangthong’s first solo exhibition in Thailand, “Mom of Alterity” at Maielie, brings together a complex orchestration of seven chaptered live performances accompanied by surreal moving images, sculptures, and photography. Within this psychosomatic domain, subversive forms of bodily expression manifested, alternative connections between species flourished, and the interstices between humanity’s technosphere and nature’s ecosphere sporadically surfaced. As one might infer from the performance described above—appropriately titled Chapter 4: Eggs, 2024—the body as a mythical and provocative terra incognita emerged as the centerpiece to Wiangthong’s corporeal banquet.
Mechanization of the body is one of several unnerving themes that germinate across Wiangthong’s multivalent exhibition. The video Odd Bird, 2024, shows a cybernetic performer lying on the leaf-strewn ground of a forlorn garden. As they rise from their slumber, the character discovers a pair of metal wings strapped behind their back. Fascinated by this anatomical addition, they start pulling on the handles that control the wings, causing them to stretch and flap, like a fledgling learning the wonders of flight. Nonetheless, it became clear that this hypothetical joy was short-lived when the winged figure reemerged in the live performance Chapter 1: Prelude, 2024. In contrast to their initial glee, the figure now seemed morose and disoriented. Their vestigial wings could not lift them off the ground toward the freedom and advancement that they hoped for. Like a caged bird, they started knocking against the walls repeatedly, until they finally collapsed on a bed of their own tattered feathers. Their body, corpus machina, ensnared between scientific gadgets and unrealized dreams, tells a cautionary tale about the ominous dominance of technology over the body.
For Wiangthong, bodily commodification under neoliberal corporatism is a desacralizing force that hinders a holistic understanding of identity. In Chapter 3: “Holy Shit” fashion week, 2024, the artist and her co-explorers transform into flamboyantly dolled-up models, clad in high heels and white pencil skirts, whose knee-jerk movements and unhinged giggles disrupt their cookie-cutter catwalks. As a final climax, Wiangthong played the roles of judge, critic, and curator––whose power was accentuated by her theatrical makeup and pompous flares. As the other models obediently struck their most fabulous poses on a white pedestal, she scrutinized them with disdain, before spitting a dubious purple liquid from her glass all over their pristine ensembles. In the end, the models congregated once more for a smiley group photo, as the audience snapped away on their cell phones and cameras. No virginal-white fabrics were spared, and no face was left unsmeared: The models’ bodies were reduced to prepackaged corpora vilia, extorted for the entertainment of capitalist overlords. Wiangthong’s voguing cirque thus doubled as a mocking critique of contemporary power paradigms that enervate the bodies of workers.
To tend to this desacralized body, Wiangthong retreated into her subconscious as a site of animistic resistance against the market’s objectifying gaze. This instinctive drive materialized as hybrid figures that merge humans and animals in several photographs from her mixed-media series “Serpent,” 2023, hung in one of the rooms on Maielie’s second floor. For these pieces, the artist drew from her fieldwork at the King Cobra Village in Khon Kaen to metamorphose into a sacred serpentine goddess. The video and photographs on display showcased a fictive narrative that recounted the violence inflicted on the goddess’s body at the hand of the snake trainers––signaling the corruption of the bond between humans and nonhumans as the village gradually gained status as a tourist attraction.
The goddess’s venerable body, with her ocher-red skin, scaly black tail, and piercing gaze, assumed tangible form in another performance, titled Chapter 5: Mother, 2024. An ethos-defining moment unfurled when Wiangthong’s co-explorers, now acting as scientists, operated on her seemingly pregnant reptilian body, thus symbolically transforming themselves into the ruthless knives of natural sciences––direct descendants of the Enlightenment era. As they forcefully slit open the clay mound on top of Wiangthong’s stomach––her allegorical womb––bundles of red wire unraveled from within and coiled around the scientists’ fingers like crimson vines from a grotesque plant. The scientists began playing tug-of-war with the goddess’s plastic intestines, while trying to stuff as much of her entrails into their pockets as possible. Everything ground to a halt when the performers shed their coats to reveal red undershirts. The crimson hue, representing the snake goddess’s blood, metaphorized an internal transformation—a symbol of the interconnectedness of all bodies, regardless of their physical differences. The performance is thus a rewilding call for humans to reconnect with nature and make peace with their internalized perceptions of self and others.
Wiangthong situates the body at a junction between hybridity, spirituality, anthropology, and technology. Nonetheless, she does not attempt to transcend her human experiences to attain a posthuman status, nor does she decry the body for its limitations. Instead, she attempts to see the body as a potential bridge between species, between different spheres of culture, between the inner psyche and external nature. Exploring this malleability and multivalence in her performative practice, Wiangthong engages the infinite possibilities of corpus sacrum to make meaning of this earthly vessel we all inhabit.
