I Am An Artist (He Said)

This is the first title in the National Gallery Singapore Art Writing imprint.

About the author
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist, best known for an iconic series of video artworks in which she performs a "dialogue" with human corpses. She began exhibiting her artworks in Thailand in 1979, winning several national prizes during the 1980s for her sombre printmaking. During the 1990s, she started working in sculpture, installation and moving images. Her artworks have consistently engaged with death, desire and the relationships between image and text and between humans and non-human animals. She has held more than 25 solo exhibitions in prestigious museums and galleries internationally, and has participated in dozens of important group exhibitions in more than 20 countries, including the Venice Biennale, Documenta and the Asia Pacific Triennial. Araya’s writing has been just as prolific, and although hitherto little-known in the anglosphere, it is as a writer that Araya is perhaps best-known within Thailand, where she lives and works. She is also Professor at Chiang Mai University.

About the translator
Kong Rithdee is one of Thailand’s best-known, most respected English-language writers about art and culture, and an accomplished literary translator. He has written on art and film for The Bangkok Post regularly since 1996 and is currently Deputy Director of the Thai Film Archive. His translation of The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by Veeraporn Nitiprapha was winner of the SEA Write Award in 2015. Kong was awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government, in recognition of his rigour, humour and skill in opening up new perspectives.

Editors: Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol and Roger Nelson.

I cannot stress enough how exciting a contribution to Art History, Global Studies, Asian Studies—and to other humanities fields—this book makes. It provides an invaluable, timely contribution not only to studies of contemporary art, but also brings readings of Thai art into a sustained engagement with (other) interdisciplinary work. The result is a vitally innovative work replete with insight into urgent questions of the global aesthetic present. The manuscript offers significant new contributions to debates in a range of fields beyond the book’s immediate purview of (Southeast) Asian art studies.
—Arnika Fuhrmann, Professor of Asian Studies, Cornell University; author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema

This is without a doubt a highly significant contribution to Southeast Asian contemporary art history. The book’s publication should do much to expand the horizon of the field both in terms of interpretive scope and expressive/stylistic possibilities. The translation is superb in the way that it catches the polyvocality, playfulness, performativity and the ever-shifting textures of Araya’s writing, while coming across as clear and at ease in the English-language.
—May Adadol Ingawanij, Professor and Co-Director, Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster