Through these works Gongkan takes the viewer on a journey into his feelings, allowing the viewer in flip to enter their own “inner place”. In line along with his intention to know the vitality unleashed by our emotions, Gongkan needed a medium that was diaphanous yet strong, that was in a position to hint the ghostly, hidden picture of ourselves. Representing our ability to love and connect with others, the emotions unleashed by our coronary heart guide us by means of life. Featuring his nondescript boychild as a logo of humanity, characterised by colours corresponding to emotional states, the newly commissioned works for Inner Place impel the viewers to study the ability that dominant feelings exercise in our lives. As time passes, artwork has grow to be an avenue via which he copes with social strain, an escape to a spot the place he could nurture his personal principles-reminiscent of friendship and mutual respect-values which might be recurrent in his works. Recent statistics in Thailand indicate enhance in circumstances of depression and suicide on account of monetary insecurity and different struggles amid the pandemic, together with increased social strain that youths face right this moment-agonising to look like perfect or pretending to be who they are not.
A younger artist, Gongkan has risen to fame in recent years along with his communicative and highly relatable paintings and graphic works, including graffiti. In the years 2020-21, lives had been overturned by the chaos of the outbreak. It is through this emotional channel that we enter the subsequent register of his visible framework: Gongkan’s own expertise of coping with social stress and, especially in the works for Inner Place, the significance of introspection in our daily lives. In the early stages, he had moved to New York the place he first encountered graffiti, and was exhilarated by its giant scale, direct social communication and intrinsic anonymity that will allow him to unburden himself of the outsider feeling amid the US tradition. Here begins, as talked about earlier, the primary register of his visible language, to be able to confront the image via a set of precise standards of colourful, cartoon-like flatness and lightness as if his subjects have been floating on the surface of the canvas. This very lightness and linearity of composition in his works is paralleled by an intensely emotional dimension.
The idea of creating these binomial works is symptomatic of the way Gonkan perceives the flaws of our relationships with each other: although we might appear one way, our internal place is multilayered, advanced. The suspended plexiglass works with their cast shadows obtain this. With the plexiglass he further analyses the complexity of the human psyche, presenting full-physique figures spray painted with stencils like graffiti. Like the plexiglass works, the sculptures feature the same boychild, this time in a distinct pose. Like a flame that rises, the colours movement in gradients, more saturated at the feet and diluting to completely different hues in direction of the head. The canvases are like no different- each work includes two items that match collectively like a jigsaw puzzle. We need to take time to recognise who we actually are. However, we need to confront its content material, emotional, introspective and psychologically saturated. On one hand, we regard the picture itself, which is flat, colourful and minimal. The way he reconcile the fun with the critical, the cool with the emotional (as a result of in social media phrases one can’t be cool and sentimental), comes by way of the use of the advertising language acquired earlier in his profession, which seeks to manipulate our vulnerabilities via its personal concentrating on.
This boomerang trajectory from social disturbance to self-acceptance is one thing Gongkan incorporates in his artwork. As the exhibition reveals, only by embracing life’s conflicting emotions by means of emotional agility can we accept our true selves, even as we ride the roller coaster journey from social disturbance to self- acceptance. At that point, Gongkan quit his advertising job and embarked on his art journey. After graduating from Silpakorn University in Bangkok, where he at the moment lives, he went on to pursue a profession in advertising. The exhibition Inner Place is positioned right here, accentuating the importance of self-acceptance that ultimately leads to happiness on a roller coaster journey of feelings: sadness and joy, despair and excitement, love and hate. Once once more, the variegated colours suggest every figure’s individuality. Cool colours akin to blues and greys to heat orange, pink and red hues impart a visible perception into how exterior stimuli elicit our emotional responses.