ROH is pleased to present Happy to Connect, an exhibition by Dusadee Huntrakul (b. 1978, Bangkok) and Faisal Habibi (b. 1984, Jakarta) where latent currents of desire and potential transfer across sculptural imprints of the artists’ environments.
Faisal Habibi’s sculptures build from the material excess of Bali where he lives and works, sifting through trash yards to collage discarded objects into new arrangements, new treatments and finishings. Melting is both a way of shaping and warping them into new forms, at other times it is a means of forging new joints between them so that they magnetize into larger structures, manifesting the extended process of transformation in which we are all bound.
Dusadee Huntrakul’s practice likewise engages with transferal and persistence, his brass sculptures describing a two-headed gecko as a guide and as a friend, an egg balanced between fingers as a wish, chicken feet as ancestral necklace, holes between branches as a door, conjoined heads as spiritual thus physical protectors, and such. Photographs of finished meals further leave traces of life and death and hunger and fulfilled desire. The inclusion of drawings by his son, his muse and his shield, Prinn Seeumpornroj Huntrakul, deepens this sense of an intergenerational relay of recognising a forest of signs in the magic of the everyday.
These works perceive the currents of objects and meaning that flow continuously through our material world. The exhibition suggests that it is in the act of connecting, and the joy derived from the action, that we can discover the potential of our landscape of waste, pleasure, and contradiction.
ARTISTS
Born 1978, Bangkok, Thailand
Lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand
Dusadee Huntrakul is a multi-disciplinary artist working across mediums of sculpture, ceramic, drawing, painting, and text. Seeking human connections that extend across time, his works span the topics of mortality, archaeology, anthropology, and urban ecological observation. Ever since seeing his late brother bring home funky fired ceramic pots that he made at a community college’s pottery class in the US in 1998, something profound moved within him. He started working with clay almost twenty years ago at his uncle’s ceramic studio in Bangkok, and remains to this day, committed to using fired clay, language, and other materials to compose spaces that are familiar yet unknown.
Huntrakul earned his Bachelor of Arts from University of California at Los Angeles, USA in 2007 and Master of Fine Arts from the University of California at Berkeley, USA in 2013. His solo exhibitions include Commoner’s House at Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand (2022); Art Jakarta with ROH at Jakarta Convention Centre, Jakarta, Indonesia (2022); A Trail at the End of the World at Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2020); They Talk at Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand (2019); There are Monsoon Songs Elsewhere at 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand (2018); and To Dance is To Be Everywhere at Chan + Hori Contemporary, Singapore (2017). He has participated in various international group exhibitions, among them Treasure at Bangkok University and Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum, Bangkok Thailand (2023); Scoring the Words at Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2022); Everyone is An Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys at K20 Museum, Dusseldorf, Germany (2021); Singapore Biennale 2019: Every Step in the Right Direction at Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2019), Thailand Biennale Krabi 2018: Edge of the Wonderland in Krabi, Thailand (2018); Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2017); Sovereign Asian Art Prize Finalists Exhibition in Hong Kong (2015); Beneath the Moon at Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2014); Singapore Biennale 2013: If the World Changed at Peranakan Museum, Singapore (2013).
Copyright belongs to The Artists
Courtesy of The Artist and ROH
Special Thanks to Bangkok City City