* 1971 in Chiang Mai (TH), lives in Fukuoka (JP) and Chiang Mai

SUPER CHINA!, 2009
Curator Man and Navin, 2002

With his unconventional, dynamic, and site-specific interventions and displays, Navin Rawanchaikul, who refers to himself as a “lonely son of diaspora and product of a globalized world,” humorously scrutinizes a range of topics from cultural and national identity, pinpointing their importance in today’s internationalized art world. Developed under his company’s label Navin Productions, Rawanchaikul’s projects are conceived from the outset as community collaborations in the interplay between everyday culture and the context of art, as well as between local conditions and the various influences of globalization.
With the large-format painting SUPER CHINA!, cast in the style typical of Bollywood billboards, Rawanchaikul portrays the power players of the Chinese art scene at a time when its meteoric ascendency has already gone into decline, and the dealers have long-since been in the red. The humorous, exaggerated, almost propagandistic depiction of the actors in the Chinese art scene as heroes and superstars refers to a unique phenomenon often criticized in the West due to the combination and reciprocal influence of art producers and the market. At the same time, this boom also includes an important emancipatory moment, since now, for the first time, a market for contemporary art independent of the western art system has been established under the national label “China.”
In the work Curator Man and Navin, Rawanchaikul represents the international art world as a field of social relationships between “Community Networking,” where rivalries and dependencies rule, and various role models are fulfilled. While the curator, equipped with hand luggage and mobile phone jets from one biennial to the next, seems to have become the superstar of the “brave new (art) world,” the slightly grizzled artist in this future scenario now appears to have assumed a rather insignificant supporting role. Somewhat awkwardly, he nevertheless attempts to force his card onto this very busy person. Art now seems to have disappeared behind its marketing, management, dissemination, and interpretation. (AM)