Please join us for the opening of Actants, our first solo exhibition with Mit Jai Inn (b. 1960), a widely respected senior Thai artist known for his boundary-defying painting and socially engaged practices.

The title Actants refers to both human and non-human agents as equal participants in an ongoing set of transformations – a metaphor for the artist’s collaboration with light, color, labor, and time in contextual relation to metaphysical, political and social constructions of power and belief.

Mit extends his homage and playful dissent from tenants of modernism, with rich crossings into the realm and language of textiles and weaving. Actants sees the revered geometry of the grid and its line segments unbound, transformed into three-dimensional, pliable modular units the artist refers to as ribbons.

Ribbons play a role, across nations and cultures, to decorate and evoke ceremony and festivity. Positioned on bodies and other charged sites, such as portals marking beginnings or endings, ribbons are potent things – forms that hold politically and spiritually charged color.

Actants convenes hundreds of ribbons in three new bodies of work. These long strips of linen, heavily layered with Mit’s signature bold colors, have been meddled with – dulled with hot wax baths, smeared and scraped by contact, textured and muted with powder.

Screens (2019) are part of and transformative to Mit’s ongoing series, Wall Works. Beginning in Berlin in 1986, Wall Works were brightly colored, unframed, touchable paintings shown in both public and private spaces. From curbs to galleries, taxis to apartments, Mit was interested in relational aspects to conventional painting, market and exhibitionary frameworks. With Screens, we see two-sided, suspended Wall Works slit, creating buoyant ribbon panels. Hanging like warp looms without weights, these breathable filters are intended to act as navigational devices, luring and cleansing distracted, stagnant or wounded energies.

The series Patch Works began in 1999 with reference to dystopian and utopian potentiality around the coming of a new millennium – energies of uncertainty familiar to the artist during the Cold War in Southeast Asia from the position of rural northern Thailand. Patch Works calls for expansive ideas of familial and societal structures by the joining of pieces from different sources into a new entity, mimicking the dividing and reassembling of individual and collective consciousness before and after major shifts. While previous Patch Works combined grid-based units into quilt-like forms, the new work evolves into a large scale, wall-based weaving. Its weft of variegated ribbons are anchored by bold selvages, while its warp is snagged and looped into an anarchic composition that hints at legible forms such as musical scores or algorithms.

The exhibition also features the new series, Loops (2019). Composed of a single ribbon unit with slits, its color-bloc selvages are brought together as if a pair, naturally dropping open its tri-part structure and two-faced color. Loops are put in dialogue with a selection of early works including the intimately scaled, slit and frayed color field paintings, Dream Works (1999/2019), and the sculptural spirals, Scrolls (2003/2019) – works that reference communal ritual objects as forms intended to create merit-fields and protections for their makers and publics.

Mit Jai Inn was born in 1960 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he lives and works today. Several of his early experiences remain influential to him, including the communal and aesthetic aspects of being raised in an Indigenous Yong weaving village, a meditation and political practice drawn from six years as a Theravada Buddhist monk, and the labor and endurance of training two years as a professional Muay Thai boxer. Mit then studied art at Silpakorn University, Bangkok (1982-1986) and continued studies at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (1987-1992), during which time he worked as assistant to artist Franz West. Returning to Chiang Mai in 1992, Mit initiated social and politically focused art initiatives, including as co-founder of Chiang Mai Social Installation (1992 -), as well as involvement with Midnight University and The Land Foundation – three non-institutional projects central to Thai contemporary art practice and discourse. In 2015, Mit also founded Cartel Artspace in Bangkok, a gallery offering space to artists reflecting on Thailand and Southeast Asia’s historical and current context. Mit’s recent exhibitions include: SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia from 1980s to Today, Mori Art Museum and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts; Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong; and SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium and Engagement, The 21st Biennale of Sydney.