**Cement, shellac, wood stain, ink, shredded paper, ash, gold leaf on found frame**

  
_Tic-Tac-Toe_ is one of my explorations playing with found frames and continues my exploration of juxtaposing multiple perspectives within a work; on the one hand it feels like an unfinished concrete ground with a child’s game (miswritten) carved within the still wet concrete. On the other, being hung on a wall within a frame, there is a sense of display. This relates as well for me to an exploration of childhood trauma and the excavations and presentations, whether tangible or intangible, one makes with them later in life.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem _Les Fleurs_ (from where the painting takes its name), this piece has evolved over several months and experimentations and was one of the first explorations of working directly from and within a poem. One of the key developments in the process was the mixture of red and white into pink-ish hues which both reflected my feelings on the nature of its historical color symbolisms present in the poem itself (white for pure (lily), red for seduction (rose)) as well as engages with the haunting infrared war-zone photography of Richard Mosse, in his case utilizing a technology invented for war to photograph the effects of war, in my case taking that technique and encasing it within an older technique (oil) to further concretize the legacies and inevitable cycles of violence for the earth is no longer young, no longer innocent of scars.

 JADIS TU DÉTACHAS LES GRANDS CALICES… (You once unfastened giant calyxes…)

This interdisciplinary installation interweaves 7-channel sound (4 from speakers, 3 through my copper sculptures), video projection and live camera feed. The work engages with three novels by Italo Calvino and explores the interwoven inextricability of subject and system as well as confronting the contemporary vehicle of myths: film.

Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances

**Copper plate, acrylic, vinegar, salt, bolts, aural exciters, wood, speaker amplifier, with computer running Max application of sound installation (including audio files) and separate monitor for schematics display**

  
**Max/MSP Patch Programmer: Chen Shen**

**Audio Consultant, Plinth Design: Ken Goerres**

  
This audio-visual installation piece perhaps encapsulates best one of the directions I’m currently exploring and unifies my backgrounds both in visual and in aural artforms. I love working with both a physical material object and the ephemeral (sound and sight as in projection) leading to the questioning of where the art object is, or perhaps what is the Art itself. 

  
Pursuing the question of breaking the frame visually, from a sound and particularly music perspective I realized that the frame is the start and end points of the piece. This sound piece is constructed as a piece that loops in on itself ad infinitum and yet will rarely, if ever, repeat its exact composition as there are twenty-one layers of randomness built in. The sound fragments primarily consist of field recordings that I’ve gathered or found (mostly of wind and water droplets) which I then morph/distort through electronics into almost ghostly voices (Let the Wind Speak) again returning to the idea of how we name, bend and shape narratives around nature to create a kind of frame or form so that we can better ‘understand’ and comprehend it. Nestled in the fragments as well are fragments of recordings of Thai and Chinese Bells (and Balls), both part of my own cultural heritage.

  
The piece also plays with the concept of cyclic time—mythical time as opposed to historical time—the entire piece remaining ever transformative, ever in flux—a paradoxical breaking of archetypal myth-making while still caught within it—ouroboros again. The work also is a continuation of my exploration of strata, layered and excavated, while remaining always transitory and is inspired as well by Italo Calvino’s lecture _Cybernetics and Ghosts_ as well as Petrarch’s works and the essay _Two Modes of Time and Its Relation with Space_ by Bili Zhong.

Let the Wind Speak...

Let the Wind Speak, Let Water Turn to Trains of Sand, Into Gusts of Wind

**Oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, cheesecloth, rope, copper wire, ash on canvas**

  
_Bound_ was the second of my large-scale works and is perhaps one of the most overt experiments in the questioning of how myth shapes (and often distorts or contorts) our perceptions of the world. Over time, I have moved further back to the realization of how we inevitably create narratives with which we use to understand and in essence, frame the world around us; a kind of way to create structure and order with our experiences. Myths then are a vessel through which communities and culture create these unifying senses of order which are carried down through generations and come to define a culture. Of course here again the danger comes from not questioning or pushing at these which is when these myths (which often contain traces of their own ideologies) concretize and feeds into itself—hence ouroboros becoming an image that returns to me in more recent works. 

  
Here again, there is the juxtaposition of perspectives and also wordplay with the title both as being river-bound but also bound in the sense of constriction. The central figure, one of the rare figurations in my work and already sinking away into abstraction, is a continuation of my ‘drowning boy’ from _Preserved_ who was the first dead person I saw growing up. We were the same age and while traveling around Thailand, my family and I had come across this temple in the north that happened to be having his funeral rites—he had just drowned a few days prior. His family kindly invited us in and I was able to walk up to see him in the coffin. It was a strangely calm experience (unlike all the ghost stories I had heard growing up) albeit a haunting one. Over time, I’d begun to see him as an emblem (here I go creating my own narrative around that experience) of children being bound and constricted not only by one’s cultural climate but also by the education system and methodologies that can often carry very deep-seated ideologies one has to break out from later in life.

Bound

**Oil, acrylic, shellac, cement, hardware cloth, cheesecloth, gold leaf, printed photographs on paper on wood**

  
This was my first and only ‘Los Angeles’ painting and deals with one of my recurring preoccupations and inquiries, that of propaganda, the limits of propaganda and film as a unique and dangerous medium for it. This connected with my recent discovery several years ago about LA’s dark history during the war and the numerous fascist and Nazi-sympathizing communities here—seeing images of downtown LA and parks in La Canada with swastika flags was quite shocking. This connected with later on, the incident of Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks and the incident on the 405 freeway with antisemites throwing paper flyers. These and the often unquestioned notions of film’s unique power to manipulate and be used as propaganda led me to embedding multiple layers within concrete including fragments of still images from Leni Reifenstahl’s _Triumph of the Will_ and chiseling it out—again here the notion of history’s ghosts looking back at us and the need to confront these pasts.

Façades

**Oil, tape on plywood panel**

  
Among one of my most personal pieces, this painting explores the nature of history’s ghosts, the white layers showing through coming from the underpainting painted from a historical photograph, then obscured and obfuscated, yet the ghosts are still there, looking back at us from within. The photograph referenced beneath is from the 1976 student massacre in Thailand, an event which itself has cast a long shadow from my mother’s generation into mine.

  

Ghosts of '76

**Found frame, drop cloth, shredded paper, polyurethane, wood stains, cement, gesso, shellac**

  
_Framing Devices_ utilizes the same materials I used in the fragmented, floating shapes of the triptych _Three Elegies_. In fact, the material framed here is the ‘negative space’ of what was cut out for the triptych. The piece is a continuation of my exploration of framing, particularly borders being the geopolitical framing of lands shifted—arbitrarily—over time, and yet the imprints of peoples and cultures remain within the earth and across borders regardless of which lines are drawn, which lands divided. The material is Home Depot drop cloth splattered with various inks and dyes, shellac, gesso, as well as shredded paper (an important material for me particularly in its bureaucratic associations) which I then walked over and over for days before arbitrarily cutting the pieces up for the triptych and framing the remaining ‘negative space’ within a found frame.

  
To further the theme of the constant movement of borders and framing devices, I love the presentation of this piece outdoors at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, allowing light and shadow to further frame and hold the piece in perpetual motion.

  

Framing Devices

**Oil, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, ash, cement, cheesecloth, drop cloth, shredded paper on canvas**

  
_Three Elegies_ began as a contemplation on the war in Ukraine and the questioning of the arbitrariness of borders as well as the stoicism many women, including my mother, maintain through harsh and abusive situations. These were explored through a dialogue between two poetic works which are very close to my heart, Anna Akhmatova’s _Requiem_ and Edith Sitwell’s _Three Rustic Elegies_, from which the triptych’s title takes its reference. As such the works contain many layers of watercolor, acrylic, oil, ash, cheesecloth and cement, each veiled (and framed) by an/other layer, framed further by pieces of fragmented dropcloth worked over with various inks, dyes, gessos and shredded paper and being walked over for days before being arbitrarily segmented; finally framed by the three panels which make up the work.

Three Elegies (Triptych)

**Oil, acrylic, shellac, gravel, cheesecloth, rope, clay, coconut shells, ash on canvas**

  
An earlier piece that followed _Bound_, _Excavation_ (or _The Vagaries of the Exposed_) was an early experiment in the creation and excavation of a palimpsest both as a literal archeological/art object but also in the sense of Thomas De Quincey’s use of the palimpsest as a metaphor for memory. Following _Bound_ and previously _Anchored_, I played a lot with breaking out of the frame, in these cases with rope being suspended outside the frame—also the suggestion of weaving the spect-actor into the work, or the work’s inquiries reaching outwards—but it was the beginning of my exploration of the duality of materials I was working with (a continuing exploration of semiotics and how it permeates our perceptions); rope being both a material that binds and connects but also one that could harm and kill, gold being both a symbol of power and wealth but also the allure of such powers, concrete itself (here used for the first time and was to become a central material for me) begins malleable and then hardens over time which seemed very apt in my preoccupations with questioning of positioning, or coming from the position of questioning—how ideas begin malleable, how we as children begin from a malleable point of view, before being concretized through age and various influences and if one isn’t careful to constantly question and reposition one’s thoughts—and perhaps even in spite of it— things all too easily harden into ideology and dogma.

  

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Saun Santipreecha

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