Pannaphan Yodmanee draws on Buddhist cosmology to create her installations

Pannaphan Yodmanee, Thailand b.1988 / In the aftermath 2018 / Found objects, artist-made icons, plaster, resin, concrete, steel, pigment / Site-specific installation, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) / Commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) / © Pannaphan Yodmanee / Courtesy: The artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Pannaphan Yodmanee, Thailand b.1988 / In the aftermath 2018 / Found objects, artist-made icons, plaster, resin, concrete, steel, pigment / Site-specific installation, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) / Commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) / © Pannaphan Yodmanee / Courtesy: The artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore / View full image

Thai artist Pannaphan Yodmanee’s extraordinary work In the aftermath 2018, commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) was the subject of the 2019 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Foundation Appeal.

Watch the installation time-lapse

Pannaphan Yodmanee, Thailand b.1988 / In the aftermath 2018 / Found objects, artist-made icons, plaster, resin, concrete, steel, pigment / Site-specific installation, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) / Commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Collection / © Pannaphan Yodmanee / Courtesy: The artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Hear from the artist

From the age of ten, Pannaphan Yodmanee learnt traditional painting techniques at her local Buddhist temple. She now draws on Buddhist cosmology to create site-specific installations that resemble both the details of murals in the ruins of old temples and the remains of demolished urban sites. Architectural settings are constructed using building materials, including slabs of concrete, exposed iron structures and walls primed with concrete and rocks, into which Yodmanee places objects and paints detailed imagery.

Within this raw built environment, Yodmanee delicately paints scenes depicting historical events in South-East Asia, including conquests and battles, as well as journeys across land and sea, applied with gold leaf and using the vivid blues of Buddhist painting. The works also feature handmade sculptures and icons. For her work for APT9, the artist has created thoughtful connections to local history. Yodmanee is particularly interested in the roles that faith and religion play in our lives — their capacity to foster peace and happiness, and their implication in conflict and violence.

Related Pannaphan Yodmanee ‘In the Aftermath’

Steeped from childhood in traditional Buddhist painting techniques, Pannaphan Yodmanee is part of a new generation of Thai artists. Yodmanee’s In the aftermath is a sharply resolved composition of painted, sculpted and found materials that coalesce into an enthralling mise en scène. Its primary foundations are demolished concrete walls, abstractly ‘grid-lined’ by steel-reinforcing wire. It is as if the impact of an earthquake has ruptured a temple courtyard, its surviving fragments of beauty reduced to ruin. At one level, In the Aftermath is a meditation on the coexistence of faith and civic life. At another, it materially collapses the splendour and pageantry of Thailand’s past in order to reflect on recent civic upheavals.

Chris Saines CNZM is Director, QAGOMA

QAGOMA Foundation

The Foundation, the Gallery’s vital fundraising body was established in 1979 and has raised more than $140 million, with generous support enabling the acquisition of more than 8,300 artworks, over 45 per cent of the State’s Collection.

The Foundation’s 40th anniversary and 2019 artwork appeal for In the aftermath 2018 was an opportunity to reflect on the generosity of the Gallery’s many supporters who have contributed over the past four decades. Find out more about the QAGOMA Foundation.

Know Brisbane through the QAGOMA Collection / Delve into our Queensland Stories / Read more about Australian Art / Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to go behind-the-scenes

Feature image detail: Pannaphan Yodmanee In the aftermath 2018

#PannaphanYodmanee #APT9

Related Stories

  •
    Read •

    Pannaphan Yodmanee’s installations are eruptions of materials

    Pannaphan Yodmanee visited her local Buddhist temple often as a child, and it was here, at the age of ten, that she learnt to paint. Buddhist shrines and temples in Thailand are places where art, religion, history and life intertwine. Ancient stories, histories and cosmologies are depicted on their inner walls and on murals in their grounds. As old paintings and murals decay, they are repainted and restored so narratives are preserved as towns and cities evolve. Taught by a monk and extensively trained in traditional Buddhist painting techniques, Yodmanee has formed a deep understanding of the philosophies and cosmologies inherent in vernacular Buddhist art. Unencumbered by traditional conventions, she applies this knowledge in her work to reveal interactions between symbolic imagery and the world outside the sacred, and, in doing so, develops new social and artistic contexts to consider the significance of these narratives. Related video: Artist Stories Yodmanee’s dense installations are eruptions of materials and structures. Varying in size and texture, her works are composed of exposed structures and fields of detritus shrouded in small, vivid paintings and carefully layered wall treatments. Her installations resemble demolished urban sites, with stories composed along uneven surfaces and interspersed with miniature handmade objects. She creates storyboards of journeys and fables in landscapes of broken concrete and exposed girders. They are embedded with vivid temperas, gold pigments and mineral paints, and feature crumbling stupas and Buddhist icons that merge spirituality, the cosmos and local histories. The sprawling congregation of materials and images resembles a mural lying in ruin, with fragmented figures and motifs forming small chapters of a story that continues amidst the rubble. Stay Connected: Subscribe to QAGOMA Blog Watch the installation time-lapse Yodmanee’s works are as much about material and structure as they are about spirituality and narrative, and are based around three elements: rocks and stones from the artist’s hometown representing the natural world, found objects and broken fragments of buildings slated for demolition, and miniatures of Buddhist icons created by the artist using experimental techniques. Along with illustrating Buddhist narratives, Yodmanee chronicles the formation of individual and regional identities, and explores South-East Asian histories of migration and conflict, and the destructive tensions within society. The rough, industrial aesthetic of her work lies in stark contrast to the precise painting style Yodmanee was once taught in the quiet confines of her local temple, yet, somehow, harmony is achieved between the hard-edged, large-scale debris and the delicate paintings and sculptures scattered throughout. Her installations offer a new platform and contextualisation for Buddhist art and practice, a direction that has been influential in the development of contemporary art in Thailand since the early 1990s, as Thai artists have sought new possibilities to express faith in experimental forms of contemporary art. Related: Pannaphan Yodmanee and ‘In the Aftermath’ In her use of urban materials, Pannaphan Yodmanee highlights the cycle of destruction and renewal in our contemporary world, which, in Thailand, parallels the pervading presence of Buddhist belief and custom with the continual development of cities. Her work conjures the power of faith to transcend the destructive forces inherent in modern development, and offers a place to engage with the constants of history and spirituality in an ever-changing environment. Tarun Nagesh is Curator, Asian Art, QAGOMA Listen to Pannaphan Yodmanee SUBSCRIBE to QAGOMA YouTube to go behind-the-scenes at events and exhibitions QAGOMA Foundation In 2019, as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Foundation, Thai artist Pannaphan Yodmanee’s extraordinary work In the aftermath 2018, commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) is the subject of our 2019 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Foundation Appeal. The Foundation, the Gallery’s vital fundraising body was established in 1979 and has raised more than $140 million, with generous support enabling the acquisition of more than 8,300 artworks, over 45 per cent of the State’s Collection. The Foundation’s 40th anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the generosity of the Gallery’s many supporters who have contributed over the past four decades. Find out more about the QAGOMA Foundation and the 2019 Foundation Appeal. With your support, the 2019 QAGOMA Foundation Appeal will bring this significant work into the Collection. It will be a remarkable APT9 acquisition and addition to QAGOMA’s renowned collection of contemporary Asian and Pacific works, by one of the region’s rising stars. Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to be the first to go behind-the-scenes / Watch or Read about Asia Pacific artists Read more about Pannaphan Yodmanee in The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art available online or in store. The publication represents an important and lasting document of the current artistic landscape of Australia, Asia and the Pacific. Feature image detail: Pannaphan Yodmanee’s In the aftermath 2018 #PannaphanYodmanee #APT9 #QAGOMA
  •
    Read •

    Jenny Watson: Private views & rear visions

    This year, the QAGOMA Foundation Appeal invites support for the acquisition of leading Australian artist Jenny Watson’s extraordinary Private views and rear visions 2021–22. Until 7 July 2024, visitors to the Queensland Art Gallery can view this important work in Gallery 1. Flashes of distant memories and glimpses of recent events are writ large in Private views and rear visions (illustrated). Comprising 48 paintings stacked along a wall, with each frame holding an individual scene, these pictures are taken from Watson’s personal recollections, ranging from treasured familial interactions to daydreams and unexceptional everyday occurrences. Horses and lone women are hallmarks of the artist’s practice, and within the multifarious scenes across Private views and rear visions they provide a sense of rhythm by reappearing in different guises. In one picture, a blonde woman, decked out in royal blue, is consumed by her phone (illustrated); in another, a female figure lays spread-eagled, with a vision of a whirlpool overhead conveying the sense of vertigo suffered after a horseriding accident (illustrated). Private views and rear visions is painted on printer’s proofs of the exhibition catalogue for Watson’s 2016 solo show ‘Chronicles’, held at Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. Throughout her career, the artist has complicated the relationship between ideas of originality and standardisation, as well as between painting and conceptual art, and this blurring of dualities is continued by the two layers of images in Private views and rear visions. Included in the Chronicles catalogue proofs are some of Watson’s early paintings of department-store advertising, such as A painted page: Myers Christmas catalogue 1979, where mass print is translated into unique paintings. Yet, in Private views and rear visions, these artworks are themselves transformed into mass-produced imagery. By using multiple copies of the catalogue as a backdrop, the repeatedly reproduced artworks become akin to the motifs or patterns found in the printed and embroidered textiles that the artist is renowned for using as a painting substrate. In Chronicles, artworks from across Watson’s 50-year career appear in reproduction. The sense of a linear career trajectory that was created in the chronologically structured catalogue is scrambled by Private views and rear visions, as the pages appear out of order and often upside down. Time condenses and stretches, with paintings from different eras of Watson’s extensive oeuvre sitting side by side and the new artwork layered on top. This manipulation of time is further compounded by the newly painted content, which includes a mix of old memories and recent observations. In Private views and rear visions, Watson conveys the way that emotion, memory and humour inform the way we experience the tempo of life. Ellie Buttrose is Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, QAGOMA 2024 QAGOMA Foundation Appeal Your support will help to bring this remarkable work by an internationally recognised Brisbane-based artist into the Gallery’s Collection. For more information or to make a donation, visit qagoma.qld.gov.au/appeal, or contact the Foundation on (07) 3840 7262. The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Foundation is the Gallery’s vital fundraising body. The Foundation supports the development of the state art collection; the presentation of major national and international exhibitions; community-based public programs, including regional and children’s exhibitions; and the production of award-winning QAGOMA publications.