A title of a work of art works as a cue, a reference, a connection, an analogy. Yuree Kensaku named her most recent work When The Elephants Fight, The Grass Gets Trampled. She thinks in symbols. She has a feeling for idioms. When she thought of the painting, she thought in language. She thought of how to best represent it.
Yuree Kensaku and her work, When The Elephants Fight, The Grass Gets Trampled.
A destructive fight between two polar opposites by the largest mammals. Elephants with flames as tails. Demolishing. Bears fight over slabs of meat and sausages. The sky is red. A skeleton in a hat lies on the ground. Violent waves come crashing in. A scapegoat suspended, pushed off the top corner of the 1.6mx8m painting. Xs as eyes. Yuree did the research and she found the words.
"I think some of these words are very Thai; words we use all the time that are unique to us," Yuree said. "Since I'm talking about Thai society, I want to use Thai words to describe it."
The 35-year-old artist will represent 100 Tonson Gallery at Hong Kong's Art Basel at the end of this week, a prestigious art show in the region. Yuree's new work intends to show in the larger-than-life painting the impact of the political rift in Thailand. Two older animated video works will also be displayed.
A graduate of the Visual Arts Department, School of Fine and Applied Arts, Bangkok University, Yuree got her foot in the door when she participated in the Brand New Art Project, a collaborative initiative giving young artists the opportunity to launch their careers through solo shows. It was in 2003, around the time she was graduating. Her exhibition was entitled "Tee-Rak-Hak-Liam-Hode", a play on a common phrase — "A Friend Who Would Cut Your Throat".
In 2013, she had a show at the 100 Tonson Gallery named "Karma Police" after the Radiohead song. Over the past decade or so, Yuree has arrived at a distinct style immediately recognisable. She draws cartoons — serious cartoons that are deceptively simple. They are colourful, dimensionally flat, with the occasional playful 3D elements. The paintings are landscapes of symbols.
Beyond her simple liking for cartoons, her style rests on escapism.
"Art changes thoughts and perspectives. If I drew about stress as stress, I would be caught in a loop. I would die," she said. "When I watch the news, I change it into something beautiful. There is a certain truth in the meaning. But I find something that soothes, that makes me happier just being." She keeps the television on while she works, as background noise, as company. For "Karma Police", she picked the title after completing the project. Her contractor had just cheated her of money. She was becoming interested in religion. She went through her usual research process.
"I type something in the search engine, and it links me to more things. The internet world is wide," she said.
"Lately, I've been drawing animals and I don't want to just draw randomly. I think there are always backstories. Some animals have histories attached to them."
In a painting named Seven Deadly Sins, she uses the seven animals that represent each sin. The paintings on canvas are not stretched out, so that they act as curtains.
"I've worked with this line of thought for a while. Things are hidden behind a curtain. The curtain keeps the news from the outside world from us. They could be stage curtains," Yuree said. The medium becomes part of the works.
Yuree has crossed over many media forms, and her work has kept getting bigger and bigger. In 2011, she painted the walls of the Frank Lloyd Wright-style ramps at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. She began working on a larger scale, and participated in the "Bukluk Street Art Festival" in 2013, creating street art on a wall in the Ratchathewi area.
In 2013, she collaborated with May-T Noijinda to create 12 Cats, a video installation projected on the walls of Chom Pon Cave in Ratchaburi in the exhibition "Metro-Sapiens: Dialogues In The Cave", curated by Sakarin Krue-on. 12 Cats, which will also be presented at Art Basel, is inspired by the fable Nang Sip Song — 12 ladies who had their eyes gouged out and were captured in a cave.
In her love of words and language is the love for storytelling. Yuree creates a world within a world, negotiating thoughts, arriving at metaphors, chronicling histories.
