Walking through Pratchaya Phinthong’s exhibition “No Patents on Ideas” at Singapore Art Museum (SAM) is akin to visiting a temple of ascetic aesthetics. All found objects in his first Singapore solo show were thoroughly alchemized: A flattened hornet’s nest morphs into a perplexing sculpture; chile sauce jars comprise unassuming pyramidal forms; strips of sun-exposed film are neatly arranged to induce a weighted darkness. Freeing these objects of their intended functions, Phinthong has reincarnated them into semi-Minimalist artworks interwoven with layered narratives. Under a cold, dim light, the works hum a quiet hymn of material transformation while gesturing viewers toward hidden stories—of personal quests to understand materiality and collective existential anguish—that nestle within our vision’s periphery.
I WAS BORN INTO my parents’ printing house. An avid student of Buddhist philosophy and chief monk at his hometown temple in Ubon Ratchathani, my father opened a free public school and authored books that detail his religious disciplines. Though these principles remained important to him, he ultimately quit monkhood in 1962, opening our printing house a year later, firstly to print his books, and then anything from receipts to pamphlets. My siblings and I were expected to come home right after school to help the family business. We learned how to neatly fold newspapers and make wrapping containers for villagers at the market.
My childhood at the printing house cultivated my sensitivity toward physical materials. You have to touch things to understand their reasons for being. First, we respect the material for what it is, and then try to understand it by asking questions. What is paper? Why does it exist? What is it capable of doing? Capturing that material query is central to my approach. For me, printing is the metaphorical transformation of an object into multiple iterations, each copy a distinct reflection of its original. It is a practice of locating and honoring multiplicity.
The exhibition at SAM is about carving an inquisitive space, where people can perceive reality in novel ways within the museum’s otherwise rigid structure. Sacrifice depth for breadth, 2023, explores the emptiness inside a flattened hornet’s hive—a memento that had been sitting in my house for ten years. It is considered good fortune in Thailand when hornets come to your home to nest. So, when my wife and I saw locals selling this beautiful, giant nest on a roadside in Kanchanaburi, we bought it and hung it in our house. Usually, people will slice a nest open to explore its insides, but that voyeuristic impulse feels destructive to me. Oftentimes, our desire to consume things leads to their demise. So instead, I snaked a camera inside to capture the hive’s internal structure. I then consulted a paper craftsman to convert it into a sheet. The divine richness within the nest’s hollows, now existing only in recordings, is juxtaposed with its flattened form as a reminder of material transcendence and the generative potential of altered perspective.
Undrift, 2024, expands my material investigation to the sociopolitical sphere. The piece emerged from my attempt to understand money as a material, along with its complex links to nation-states, military warfare, and digital technology in the context of Singapore—where I did a three-month residency in 2014. I repurposed a stretch of parachute fabric into an upside-down screen hanging from the ceiling, onto which I projected a screen saver featuring a variety of banknotes flying around. Money raining down can be fortuitous, signifying power and wealth; yet money also has a more sinister function, transferring the capital that upholds empires. That work’s ethos is echoed in Spoon, 2024, which expands beyond the gallery walls. For it, I sprinkled two hundred melted spoons—originally made from artillery shells of bombs dropped on Laos during the Cold War—at random spots around the city, building on the connection between money and militarism. Much like the banknotes on the screen, these scattered fragments act as material relics of capitalist empire, foretelling its possible collapse. Yet their deformity subtly performs another functional catharsis, transforming them from war weapons to public abstract installations.
Distorting an object’s original purpose allows me to formulate alternative access to a narrative. Suasana, 2015, took shape during my aforementioned Singapore residency, when my wife and I crossed three borders from Singapore to Pattani to meet Onuma, a widow who lost her husband to one of the Thai military’s early-2000s attacks on Muslim insurgency in Southern Thailand. Together with other widows, she formed a collective named Nam Prik Zauquna, who make nam prik (chile sauce) as a means to earn their livelihood. While our initial aim in traveling to meet the women was to visually document this conflict’s aftermath, witnessing the actual catastrophes on the ground forced me to abandon the camera and locate a new visual language to speak about it. So I asked the Zauquna widows to roll out my filmstrips and expose them to the sun until they were damaged. The women all wore niqabs, and the width of the filmstrips matched that of their niqabs’ eye gaps. As I placed the filmstrips into rows behind Plexiglas, I also learned from one lady that, after her husband passed, her eye gap felt narrower. By using the filmstrips to capture darkness—physically and metaphorically—I manage to speak of military-induced suffering without the abrasiveness that often accompanies factual documentation.
If you shift perspectives, you can liberate found objects from being functionally imprisoned. It is an uncomfortable game, detaching from my expectations of things, yet it challenges me to think innovatively about how to use them in my work. Poetics is birthed out of perception. What I am afraid of is getting used to things—of conceptual confinement. I strive to defy those mental prisons by holding space to see through novel lenses. That is how I liberate my ideas and find new forms.
