Aranya Art Center is pleased to present Studio Visits, a group exhibition featuring new works by artists Orawan Arunrak, Michelle Chang Qin, Erwan Sene, and Hiroshi Sugito.
Studio visits are an integral aspect of a curator's work. Being present in the context in which artworks are created, and observing their development process, provides an intuitive and direct understanding of an artist's practice. However, with the evolving materiality of art forms, as well as the growing uncertainty of global mobility, and rising rental fees due to gentrification, artists are gradually adjusting their conventional relationship with studios. This exhibition sheds light on this shift through four case studies, transforming the galleries into temporary spaces that exist between creation and display. Viewers are invited to step directly into the creative process of artists.
Thai artist Orawan Arunrak, who has traveled and lived in many countries, often transforms various sites (temples, food markets, and others) into temporary workspaces. Having moved to Berlin in 2016, Arunrak has yet to find a long-term studio. Taking this exhibition as an opportunity, she envisions a mobile studio composed of foldable furniture. Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugito perhaps maintains a more traditional approach to the studio. He brings both his workstation and the cardboard boxes he collects on a daily basis (a primary source of his paintings) into the gallery to reveal his thoughts and artistic process in the studio.
Chinese artist Michelle Chang Qin and French artist Erwan Sene extend their studios into urban spaces. Qin reorganizes local materials collected in Amsterdam and Beidaihe, addressing present-day environmental complexity, as well as questions of precariousness and artificiality. On the other hand, Sene finds discarded materials from the streets of Paris, collects sound recordings, and simulates his imagined urban ecology with fragments of the metropolis, inviting the viewer to zoom in on the forgotten landscapes of the city's underbelly.
For this exhibition, the Aranya Art Center also opens Gallery 1 as an ad hoc studio to the public, inviting visitors to create, display, and exchange their works freely. At the same time, we present a selection of works by children who participated in our drawing workshops in the past.
This exhibition is organized by Aranya Art Center's exhibition coordinator, Wu Yiyang, and curatorial assistants, Wang Jiaming and Jiang Ruoyu. The exhibition is on view from July 14 through October 13, 2024.
This exhibition is supported by Ambassade de France en Chine and Japan Foundation, Beijing.
Orawan Arunrak
Born in 1985 in Bangkok, TH; lives and works in Bangkok and Berlin.
Orawan Arunrak's artwork – largely inspired by her everyday life – encompasses diverse forms such as drawing, painting, and installation, employing tools like pencils, pens, paper, but also photography, video, texts and the internet. Her practice meticulously engages with local communities, endeavouring to dissolve boundaries between conventional art and non-art spaces. She navigates through multifaceted terrains of national, cultural, and spiritual identities, crafting pieces that reflect both similarities and divergences of her domiciles in Asia and Europe. Each work transcends visual representation, embodying dialogues and narratives that explore the complex relationships and stories entwined with each unique location and culture, offering viewers insights into the interplay of art, identity, and geography inherent in her oeuvre.
Recent exhibitions: Solo show The 4 Foundations, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY, Bangkok (2024); See You at the Studio!, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2023); Das Brotbaumregime, Museum Haus Hövener, Südwestfälische Galerie, Brilon (2023); GHOSTING, M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, Hohenlockstedt (2023); THE EDUCATIONAL WEB, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg (2023); BPA// Exhibition 2022, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time, Bangkok (2022); Nation, Narration, Narcosis, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021).
Michelle Chang Qin
Michelle Chang Qin was born in 1996 in Chongqing, China. She obtained her dual degree in Art and Media Studies at Pomona College, Claremont in 2019. From 2022 to 2023, she was a participant at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Her work explores the opacity of how materials assemble to construct sites of inhabitancy, memory, literature, and fantasy. Capturing the pauses and repetitions of daily labor, her objects and interdisciplinary environments imagine slices of perception that slip through linguistic metrics but leave ineffable weights.
Her recent solo exhibitions include 14a, Hamburg; Organhaus, Chongqing. Her selected group exhibitions include Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; De Ateliers, Amsterdam; Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam; Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
Erwan Sene
Erwan Sene (b. 1991, Paris) is an artist and musician based in Paris. He graduated in 2016 from the École Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Reims. His work has been exhibited at Collection Lambert, Avignon; Liebeart Project, Belgium; MO.CO, Montpelier; CAC Passages, Troyes; Balice Hertling, Paris; Frac des pays de la Loire, Nantes. First Album “JUnQ” out on Berlin-based label PAN, 2023. He is represented by Balice Hertling (Paris).
The work of Sene is based on a sculptural corpus that extends over several levels and is composed in the future perfect tense. Letting himself slide along the slope of a multidimensional everyday life that he reimagines in all kinds of enigmatic tales, his practice reconsiders his own way of living and digesting the objects around him. He creates staging with a vast array of materials, between baroque remanence and day-to-day surrealism, and broaches the themes of language and science fiction. He develops strange ecosystems, a set of vibrant, dystopian and interconnected urban furniture that communicates through a language devised by the artist.
Hiroshi Sugito
Hiroshi Sugito was born in 1970 in Aichi prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Japanese Painting, Faculty of Arts, Aichi Prefectural College of Arts in 1992. He is currently Associate Professor of the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. He has exhibited extensively both in Japan and internationally since the 1990s.
His major solo exhibitions include FOCUS (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA, 2006), prime and foundation (Miyagi Museum of Art, Miyagi, Japan, 2015), frame and refrain (Musée Bernard Buffet, Shizuoka, Japan, 2015), particles and release (Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan, 2016), and Hiroshi Sugito module or lacuna (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2017). He has also held eight solo exhibitions at Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles.
His Significant group exhibitions include Winter Garden: The Exploration of the Micropop Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Art (curated by Midori Matsui, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, 2009; traveled to Japanisches Kulturinstitut, Cologne, Germany, 2009 / The Japan Foundation, Tronto, Canada, 2010 / Galeri'a Arnold Belkin, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico, 2011), Garden of painting – Japanese Art of the 00s (The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, 2010), and Logical Emotion – Contemporary Art from Japan (Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, 2014; traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow MOCAK, Krakow, Poland, 2015 / Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale), Halle, Germany, 2015) among many others.
