Solo Exhibition Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery, Kyoto, Japan
Arin Rungjang (born 1975 in Bangkok; lives and works in Bangkok) is known for deftly revisiting historical material, overlapping major and minor narratives across multiple times, places, and languages. His interest lies in lesser-known aspects of Thai history and their intersection with the present in the sites and contexts of his practice. Objects, which can draw together distant events across time and space, are central to his investigations.
Mongkut puts one of Thailand’s cherished symbolic forms at the axis of his inquiry. Rungjang’s research for the work recalls Franco-Thai relations during the parallel reigns of King Rama IV (1851–68) and Napoleon III (1852–70), a period marked by the expansion of the European colonial enterprise in much of the geographic region known today as Southeast Asia.
For centuries prior to this period, Siam was the wealthiest and strongest kingdom in the region. To avoid colonization, Rama IV famously pursued friendly foreign policies and trade agreements, effectively balancing the encroaching interests of French and British imperialism. Siam became the only nation in the region to escape official colonial rule, a legacy that inspires pride but also debate.
In the multi-part work 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.
In the video, Rungjang first 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 part of the video is a portrait of Woralak Sooksawasdi Na Ayutthaya, King Mongkut’s great, great, great granddaughter and master craftswoman of theater crowns. 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 work was first shown at Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz in Paris by Jeu de Paume, and then at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 2015. The present exhibition marks the first time that the work is being shown since the two exhibitions in France. For this occasion, Rungjang has added two new elements to the work: A page from the July 6, 1861 issue of Le monde illustré depicting its front-page story, and a new replica made in 2017 of the large 1864 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme based on the same scene, titled Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie receiving the Siamese ambassadors on June 27, 1861. The 1861 replica of the crown is carefully placed in the foreground of the painting.
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.”
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