Born 1960, Chiang Mai, Thailand
Lives and works in Chiang Mai

A prominent figure in the development of contemporary art in Thailand, Mit Jai Inn has cultivated an ambitious and prolific practice over four decades, which has both nurtured an artistic community and called attention to the political constructs governing it. At the beginning of his career in the 1980s, he sought exposure to international practices at a time when Thailand had limited influence on global discourses. Abandoning his studies in Bangkok, he travelled around Germany, and settled in Vienna to study and work as a studio assistant to artist Franz West (1947–2012). Before returning to Thailand in 1992, Jai Inn was instrumental in the creation of Chiang Mai Social Installation, a series of influential artist-run events staged between 1992 and 1998, devised by Jai Inn and other important figures in Thai art, including Uthit Atimana (b.1960), Montien Boonma (1953–2000) and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b.1957). Social participation and political inquiry were central to Jai Inn’s involvement in these events and, in the years since, he has continued to develop other initiatives around concepts of healing, collectivity and accessibility, while using his platform for activism and political resistance.¹ 

Among the first generation of Thai artists to reject the practice of exhibiting within a ‘white cube’ to focus on art as a social experience, Jai Inn has continued to explore interaction and intervention in his work.² He has become known for confronting art-world constructs, eschewing artistic convention, and attracting controversy in the process. Central to his influence is an expansive painting practice — a sustained, considered exploration of spatial experience and materiality, rooted in abstraction. As early as the mid 1980s, he began creating series, including ‘Wall Works’, consisting of unstretched rectangular canvases painted on both sides with thick lines and bold patches, alongside ‘Scrolls’, which re-envisioned traditional forms of Asian scroll painting into rollable abstract sculptures.

Using brushes, palette knives and his hands to structure thick fields of colour, Jai Inn consciously employs all his senses in the act of painting, in a process both physically rigorous and meditative. Now often staged on a dramatic scale, his practice embraces colour, light and space, and is one that, for the artist, is closely connected with consciousness, politics and spirituality.³ Jai Inn deploys colours at times for their distinctive political connotations in Thailand, as well as in reference to his indigenous Yong heritage. He also relishes aspects of transcendence and transformation in the process and form of his works, contemplating the transfer of fields of energy from the earth (pigment) into his creations and their surroundings, seeking to find moments of reverie in the everyday.⁴
 

Using a concoction of specially prepared pigments from oil and acrylic paints, gypsum powder and linseed oil — a combination designed for sculptural rigidity and enduring luminosity — Jai Inn’s painting practice continues to be passionately experimental today. Specific qualities and conditions of the site, both physical and social, are important considerations for the artist. For the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, this manifests in three different works that have been carefully orchestrated to inhabit the Queensland Art Gallery’s Watermall. Drawing on the structures of a tunnel, scroll and suspended ‘totems’, Jai Inn responds to the unique architectural characteristics of this space to explore his interests in time and transformation. With these large-scale sculptural works, the artist has created layered views that reveal and conceal to enact portals between worlds.⁵

Informed by his early ‘Wall Works’ and ‘Screens’ series, Jai Inn’s recent ‘tunnel’ works comprise two-sided canvases slit to create buoyant ribbon panels that hang like warp looms, the immersive form creating a room within a room.⁶ Jai Inn’s column-like suspended blocks of canvas ribbons, titled ‘totems’, further deconstruct two-dimensional painting, and are composed using a series of repeated forms and modular constructions. Like the ‘tunnels’, the ‘totems’ engage with social spaces of gathering or thoroughfare, with the solid canvas planes transformed into surfaces that are light and permeable — the canvas slits resemble threads, revealing gaps and punctures that sway and open with a touch.

Jai Inn’s reconstruction of the painted coiled surface of an upright scroll takes the form of a monumental, freestanding sculpture, one which can be rolled and unfurled. Standing some three metres tall, Untitled (Scroll #APT) 2024 is made from several layers of canvas laden with heavy applications of paint that have solidified. Outer and inner surfaces are treated with serial, abstract motifs — blotches of colour on the exterior contrast with bold stripes on the interior. The work continues the artist’s three decades-long fascination with this traditional form. Curator Erin Robideaux Gleeson explains the significance of the form for the artist:

Scrolls are as much the artist’s mother’s woven paa sin skirt as they are urban seas of electricity and psychedelic or genomic visualizations. Referring to Scrolls as carriers and technology for early forms of writing and imaging, Mit has called them Buddha figures, for their function in creating sangha through dharma, or teachings. Representational or iconographic ceremonial paintings in rolled, modular form once made the Buddha image accessible to wide publics by nomadic teachers.⁷

Transitions between tunnel, scroll and totem emphasise notions of transformation. The tunnel carries the viewer from open ground to a narrow path built above water, and its immense form inhabits a space between ground and ceiling that is counterpoised by a scroll extending vertically from the ground, and totems descending from the ceiling above. Moving through and around the works, viewers consider how Jai Inn’s works interrupt hard surfaces, passages of water, pathways and empty space, and transition between interior and exterior spaces.

In ongoing experimental arrangements, Mit Jai Inn sustains inquiries into painterly abstraction, as he does into social space, constructing a system that is endlessly playful. His work ruptures hegemonic artistic structures and proposes principles of openness and democratisation, and in the process, re-evaluates the painted canvas as a precious static commodity. In Jai Inn’s decades-long practice, a constant can be found: art should immerse and engage society, and when it does, it reveals its power for social change.