Korakrit Arunanondchai: The Finiteness of Our Songs Against the Infinity of Time and Space

Korakrit Arunanondchai: The Finiteness of Our Songs Against the Infinity of Time and Space

Exhibition by Korakrit Arunanondchai entitled The Finiteness of Our Songs Against the Infinity of Time and Space is the first presentation of this Thai multimedia artist’s work in the Czech Republic. In addition, it places his earlier film With History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 4 (2017) into context for the first time with his latest film Songs for Dying (2021). The two video essays share the theme of interplay between life and death, which is treated from a highly personal perspective, also adding a strong historical-political and universal angle. The stories of ghosts and ancestors help us to distinguish the differences between a good and a bad death, and the artist's emotive, macro- and microscopic view of the life reminds us of the dimensions of existence that transcend us – as individuals and as a human society. Arunanondchai encourages us to think about the stories we tell and the songs we listen to. After all, hearing is the longest persisting of our senses that often accompanies us until our very last moment.

Korakrit Arunanondchai: The Finiteness of Our Songs against the Infinity of Time and Space

What does a dying person experience is a question to which science has hardly found a definitive answer. Death remains the ultimate mystery. A recent study amongst palliative care patients showed that hearing is the last sense to go in the dying process. Therefore, some doctors and nurses recommend relatives or close persons to talk or sing to a dying person. In Korakrit Arunanondchai’s most recent video, we see the artist holding the hand of his dying grandfather and singing his favourite song. Fragments of personal life (including footage with his grandparents) were always an integral part of Arunanondchai’s works, and the recent video Songs for Dying goes probably the furthest in this respect. At the same time, it expresses most straight-forwardly the artist’s long-term interest in the cycle of life and death. Arunanondchai uses a form of a video essay, a collage of images and sounds, which itself has the nature of a stream, a re-cycle of motifs and footage (documentary, found, and staged) that re-emerge across the body of his work and create a personal mythology incorporating and appropriating elements from various cultural milieus, reflecting Arunanondchai’s own position as an artist living between East (where he was born) and West (where he studied). As the artist describes: “I grew up with the opposition of Western enlightenment/empiricism and Eastern spiritualism; a technologically advanced, future-forward West and an East stuck in old traditions.”

In the complex, non-linear compositions of his videos, namely Songs for Dying (2021) and With History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 4 (2017), we can identify three main layers: personal, historical-political, and universal. All these layers, consisting of fragments of individual stories, are interconnected through reoccurring symbols and metaphors.

The main focus of With History… is on memory and consciousness. We watch the artist’s grandmother, who is slowly slipping into dementia, and at the same time are invited to think about subjectivity separated from the living body – this is represented by a machine, a drone named Chantri who is a recurring figure in Arunanondchai’s videos and acts as the embodiment of Garuda, the divine bird of Buddhist mythology. The voice of the artist talking to Chantri speculates about a kinship that is both futuristic and based on ancient beliefs: “Someone explained the idea of reincarnation to me once. The universe is made up of one big river of spirits, both yours and mine and everything else that exits. The spirits are constantly reincarnating on a timeline that is neither the future, the past, nor the present. So Chantri, in this sense, you could be my grandmother.”

The interconnectedness and cyclicity of all life and matter is further articulated in Songs for Dying through three concepts of life and death and all that is in between. First, reincarnation as a spiritual and religious principle/concept is represented by the traditional Buddhist burial ceremony of the artist’s grandfather. After that, we observe the principle of recycling matter – living as well as inanimate entities decompose and enable other forms to “be born” – a principle that in a way connects materialism and animism. We don’t know if the film starts in the moment of dawn or dusk, if we are watching the high tide or low tide, and we are reminded of the endless cycles of nature that represent eternity in the deepest sense. The third way of understanding the concept of life and death is addressed by the political and historical narrative that introduces the story of Jeju Island and the “political ghosts” – victims of a military conflict.

This mixture of different viewpoints/perspectives takes us on an emotional journey that reflects on mortality and transcendence but also on the power structures of storytelling and dominant (official) narratives. The artist’s long-term fascination with ghosts, spirits, shamanism, and animism is itself rooted in an interest in liminal spaces and silenced (hi)stories. For example, he adopts the figure of the naga (embodied in his works mostly by his friend, performer Tosh Basco) – a divine, or semi-divine race of half-human, half-serpent beings that reside in the netherworld and are found in various spiritual traditions across East Asia, including both Hinduism and Buddhism. They represent a bridge between the mortal realm and heaven, are believed to act as protectors from invisible, malicious forces, and play a role in rain control. In Cambodia, the Khmer people even believe themselves to be the descendants of the nagas. Today, nagas are also still venerated in Northern Thailand and in the Golden Triangle – on the border of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos, where national identities become blurred and people are connected by a strong belief in the nagas’ influence on their everyday lives. In this sense, for the artist, the naga represents an anarchic force which cannot be categorised and controlled by state power. Nagas are believed to live in mysterious places and in-between worlds – in bodies of water (which connects them with myths and tales from different places around the world) or in caverns.

On the island of Jeju, caverns became the “homes” of a modern kind of spirit – the victims of a huge massacre that happened between 1948 and 1954 when Korean authorities and right-wing vigilantes, with the US military’s compliance and oversight, brutally suppressed a popular uprising. Approximately thirty thousand civilians, including small children, were killed, people were tortured and humiliated, woman were raped… Memories of these atrocities remain present amongst the population of Jeju, but it was only in 2000 that a law took effect requiring a formal investigation. In 2006, the South Korean government apologised for the indiscriminate butchering of innocent islanders in the name of fighting communism. In 2008, the government opened a large Jeju “Peace Park” honouring the victims, but these official commemorations are part of the state’s narrative, and the survivors and relatives of the victims have to deal with the ghosts of the past in their own way. As the researcher and US Fulbright fellow Heesun Kim explains: “In Korean/Jeju shamanism, those who have died by violence, accidents, warfare, and pandemics, as well as those who have committed suicide, are all categorized as ‘wonhon,’ spiteful souls. They are the dead who could not be given typical funeral ceremonies. Due to their tragic life and death, they are condemned to roam the earth and have harmful effects on their offspring, impacting their emotional and physical welfare negatively.” Heesun Kim also notes: “Unfortunately, the April 3rd Uprising and Massacre had been a taboo topic of conversation for a very long time. The government systematically concealed the event and silenced the people. The grief and proper mourning were disfranchised, and the suffering has been passed down from generation to generation. […] The April 3rd Uprising and Massacre changed the island’s relationship to the dead, and Jeju shamanic practice has been incorporated as a healing practice to address the intergenerational trauma resulting from the massacre.” Seong Nae Kim, a professor of religious studies at Sogang University in Seoul, explains further: “[Through the rituals of shamanic spirit possessions,] ‘ghosts’ were made into ‘ancestors.’ In other words, those who had died impure or ‘bad’ deaths and thus had not received ancestral rites became ancestors who are given their place among the other ancestors.” In the context of Jeju Island, this was an important process because “most deities in the extensive pantheon of this ‘Island of 18,000 Gods’ were either once human, elevated to deity after death, or are otherwise perceived as ancestors and as members of the village.” At the same time, the process of collective mourning through shamanic rituals was also crucial in enforcing and sustaining this type of spiritual practice despite its official prohibition.

The motif of an “otherworldly”, god-like being or a ghost of a certain kind brings us to another story – the official, untouchable narrative about the Thai king. After the Second World War, during the rise of King Rama IX, Thailand became the US military’s Cold War base in Southeast Asia (and in this sense was also indirectly involved in what happened on Jeju Island and elsewhere), and state-sanctioned Buddhism was used to direct power towards the political centre of Bangkok. This history is mostly unrecorded, and there is a law called lèse-majesté that prohibits talking about the royal history of Thailand. The memory of this untouchable status of the king of Thailand is also represented by the use of soil on the floor of the gallery – when Arunanondchai used the soil for the first time, he also incorporated “a bag of dirt that I received from going to the posthumous birthday of King Rama IX of Thailand,” as the artist explains. “They gave a bag to the first 30,000 people that arrived. Apparently they collected dirt from every single province that he had stepped on, so it was this material that has archived the aura of this man, a certain magical touch formed through a historical narrative of an era.” 

In contrast to this state ideology, Songs for Dying presents footage from the civic protests in Thailand. Since the military coup in 2014, a pro-democracy movement has been protesting the ruling military regime and laws that grant unchecked power to the institution of the monarchy. Sequences of images from various civic protests like the 2017 Women’s March on Washington after Trump’s inauguration, the #Time’sUp movement, or the demonstrations of ecological activists appear in Arunanondchai’s videos in a fast rhythm, evoking a DMT-like trip of collective consciousness in the moment of passing away…

In Arunanondchai’s videos, the personal and historical-political dimensions of dying are inextricably connected with the more-than-human worlds. We see the artist holding the leg of his turtle – a companion who (as we witness in older videos) was also present in intimate moments with his grandparents, a companion who represents a temporality different from that of humans – her life span will most likely exceed that of a human, and, at the same time, the turtle is associated with world creation myths. In this sense, the temporality of a turtle precedes us and exceeds us. Another significant animal with a specific time reference is the rat, which we encounter both in the videos as well as on the print on the outer wall of the black box. To Arunanondchai, the rat represents an animal that can survive a massive catastrophic event and evolve and prosper even after the extinction of the human race. This perspective brings us to perceive death in a more than individual sense. Eventually, humankind can vanish, and our (hi)stories will become the past. The question is more when and how than if. The difficulty of embracing this prospect is similar to that of accepting one’s own mortality. But the inevitability of death does not take away the responsibility of how we live – both individually and, even more importantly, as societies – and how we support and sustain the life and peaceful death of others – humans as well as non-humans. As we can learn from Jeju Island, we need to make peace with the spirits, ghosts, and ancestors from the past, because their stories affect our future and because we need to pay attention to the difference between a good death and a bad death.