Wasinburee Supanichvoraparch's melting ceramic works are reminiscent of Salvador Dali's pocket watch in The Persistence Of Memory. But while the Spanish master's fluid softness is a surrealist meditation on time, Wasinburee's is about fate, about subjecting his work of art to unpredictability.
Wasinburee's melting ceramics.
For some people, Wasinburee is known as the driving force of Tong Hong Tai Ceramics Factory, a family business which is one of the oldest ceramics manufacturers in Ratchaburi province. In the art scene, however, Wasinburee is a Silapathorn Award-winning artist with a long resume, including a show at the prestigious Venice Biennale last year.
In his exhibition "Burium", currently on display at RMA Institute, Wasinburee has taken ceramics, the material he knows best, but stripped away completely its aspect of practical use. The name of the exhibition "Burium" is a combination of "Buri", the name given to him when he was born, and the word "atrium".
"After Venice, I started to ask myself whether I enjoyed what I did," said Wasinburee. "It's a big festival so there was a lot of pressure and expectation. I asked myself whether it was what I wanted to do. There were many conditions which you couldn't control, there was so little time."
After the biennale, Wasinburee focused on his family business and didn't do any art for two years. In this exhibition, he seems to have gone back to have fun again, working in his way on his own. He studied fine art at Universitaet Gesamthochschule Kassel in Germany and his work in this exhibition is somewhat a continuation of ideas from his graduation thesis, which deals with reality and myth.
Wasinburee's melting ceramics in frames.
While people normally think of ceramics as constituted by four elements — earth, water, wind and fire — Wasinburee is thinking of the fifth element — the quality of something unexpected, the unpredictable element in the process of making it. In the heating process, Wasinburee intentionally turned the heat up beyond the right temperature and ceramics inevitably melted down into erratic shapes.
"What I'm interested in is recreating something that's beyond control," he said. "It's coincidence. It's destiny or fate. With paintings, we put them in frames and it's done. But with ceramics, we put it in the oven and we're never going to know what will happen in there. The electricity might get cut, something might go wrong because of the density of air."
The results are these melted art pieces as sculptures put on stands, along the wall and almost flatly on frames as if they were paintings. A few pieces are enclosed in a block of resin, capturing the very moment the ceramics are melting down.
"It's a shape of fiasco," said Wasinburee. But taking a closer look, it's more than turning the idea of failure into concrete, or ceramic, forms. Some pieces look like some sort of single-celled organism that seem to be constantly moving. Others seem defeated and dead, subject to vulnerability and time.
"I've been doing ceramics for over 20 years. At first, I was always excited when opening the oven to find how it turned out. But after a time, everything was the same — I knew exactly how it would turn out to be. This project enabled me to experience excitement again."
Photography is also another significant part of the exhibition. While at first glance photographs seem an odd mix with ceramics, there's actually a very strong link to how he approaches both techniques.
In a series of his photographs placed on walls alongside ceramics works, he captured his models at the moment they are being splashed with mud — when the torrents are approaching the models, when they're hitting the models, when they splash over them, and the aftermath.
Just as the ceramics can't be controlled, neither can the models' reactions, which lends itself to the artist's fabrication of an unexpected turn of events.
"My question is whether we can recreate this kind of event and work with it. In real life, you encounter this kind of incident all the time. We think about it, we talk about it. You can say that it's a collaboration between me and this other artist called 'coincidence' or 'fate'."
"Burium" is on display until Sept 7 at RMA Institute, 238 Soi Sai Nam Thip 2, Sukhumvit Soi 22.
Wasinburee Supanichvoraparch.
