Solo Exhibition Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz, Nogent-sur-Marne, France, off-site presentation by Jeu de Paume, Paris
The Exhibition Arin Rungjang : Mongkut, is a part of “Enter the Stream at the Turn“, curated by Erin Gleeson for the Satellite Programme 8.
In the video installation and sculpture Mongkut, Rungjang uses the present as a context for
reopening a little-known history concerning Siam’s relative sovereignty. Rama IV, known in the West as King Mongkut (meaning “crown” in Thai), twice copied his inherited royal crown. On June 27, 1861 the second replica was offered to Napoleon III by the Siamese ambassador at the Château de Fontainebleau.
Rungjang’s first video presents the visually rich mise-en-scène of the château in somber winter
light, narrated by Pierre Baptiste, renowned curator of Southeast Asian Art at the Musée Guimet. As Baptiste reviews a range of topics from the history of Franco-Thai inter-court relations to the legitimacy of diplomatic offerings and frameworks of display, a young man tours the rooms in solitude, locating the replica in situ, in the drawing rooms of Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife. Standing at the glass display cabinet, the man casually uses a small, handheld 3D scanner.
The second video is a portrait of Woralak Sooksawasdi na Ayutthaya, King Mongkut’s great, great, great granddaughter. A master craftswoman of theater crowns, she is employed by Thailand’s current queen to propagate royal arts at the Bang Sai Royal Folk Arts and Crafts Centre, north of Bangkok, although her class currently has no students. As Sooksawasdi’s narrative shifts between family genealogy and the royal craft, the camera explores the studio awash with soft tropical light. Amongst
specialized tools and materials, Sooksawasdi and her spouse reference the sensor data acquired by the young man at the château. Ignoring the infinite replication potential offered by the data, they enact the handmade. While the moving image hints at their labors’ goal, Rungjang leaves us with painstaking process. It is in the exhibition that we find Sooksawasdi’s finished masterpiece—the 2015 replica of the
1861 replica of the original 1782 Chakri Royal Crown of Siam.
The complex continuum of Mongkut disturbs the linear chronology we generally inherit. Rungjang’s delicate approach to the symbolic negotiating power of the object deliberately offers only part of the story of Thailand’s qualified sovereignty, past and present. Seen through the lens of the present—a gaze he believes is too immediate to reveal reliable evidence—the latest version of the crown becomes, according to the artist, a “bi-polar looking glass.”
Curator: Erin Gleeson.
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