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Join us for a roundtable conversation reflecting on the work and legacy of pioneering Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, bringing together curatorial, artistic, and critical perspectives on her practice and its enduring influence. The discussion features Roger Nelson, Heman Chong, and Grace Samboh, who will reflect on Araya’s impact across generations and geographies, and on the questions her work continues to pose around ethics, ritual, pedagogy, and the porous boundaries between humans, animals, images, and language.
The conversation also marks the launch of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Bouquet and the Wreath, the first major monograph dedicated to the artist’s four-decade career. Edited by Roger Nelson and Kittima Chareeprasit, the publication brings together newly commissioned essays, artist and curator reflections, translated Thai-language texts, and Araya’s own writing, situating her work within Thai and Southeast Asian contexts while engaging broader global contemporary art discourses.
This event coincides with Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s first large-scale retrospective, presented jointly at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai.
Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and is author of Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices, to be published by Cornell University Press in 2026. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore, and co-editor of the first book-length translation of the artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s writing. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a scholarly journal published by NUS Press.
Grace Samboh believes that everyone needs at least three copies of themselves. Through research, writing, and curatorial work, she jigs within the existing elements of the arts scene around her for she considers the claim that Indonesia is lacking art infrastructure, especially the state-owned or state run as something outdated. She believes that curating is about understanding and making at the same time. She is attached to Hyphen — (a collective which has exhibited in the 58th Carnegie International and the Singapore Biennale) and affiliated with RUBANAH Underground Hub (an art space in Jakarta). She logs her writings at gracesamboh.net.
Heman Chong is an artist whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations and writing. Characterised by acerbic wit, Chong’s art addresses contemporary geopolitics and the infrastructural ironies of our data-driven and networked society. His practice can be read as an imagining, interrogation and sometimes intervention into infrastructure as an everyday medium of politics. His work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at Singapore Art Museum, UCCA Dune, STPI, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Weserburg Museum, Jameel Arts Center, Swiss Institute New York, Art in General, Artsonje Center, Rockbund Art Museum, South London Gallery, NUS Museum, amongst many others. Chong is the co-director and founder (with Renée Staal) of The Library of Unread Books, a library made up of donated books previously unread by their owners. It was recently installed in the Serpentine Pavilion 2024, designed by Minsuk Cho and previously installed in Jameel Arts Center in 2019.
