* 1957 in Trad (TH), lives and works in Chiang Mai (TH)

Dow Song Duang (The Two Planets Series), 2008

In four short sequences Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s film Dow Song Duang (The Two Planet Series) depicts a group of villagers set against the backdrop of various countryside locations in Thailand. Canonical European masterpieces of the nineteenth-century landscape genre by Jean-François Millet, Édouard Manet, and Vincent van Gogh have been placed before them for critical assessment. Within the extent of their own experience and points of reference, they huddle together to humorously ponder the relationships between the persons represented in the paintings and the nature of their depicted activities – such as in Millet’s The Gleaners – and contemplate on the vast beautiful landscapes the subjects in the paintings are surrounded by. Rasdjarmrearnsook, in turn, frames the villagers in the awe-provoking landscapes of rural Thailand.
In the film, the artist juxtaposes the European academic approach to art analysis to the analysis of the innocent eye, where the meaning of the artwork is shifted through their standpoint as formed by their sociocultural context. Rasdjarmrearnsook, who has relocated from the countryside to the city herself, aims to display the clash of two worlds within Thailand itself: the academic arena of urban cosmopolitism and the rural simple life of farmers. The work ponders the translation of visual culture, the influence of European artifacts, as well as discourses and what happens to forms, theories, and contents when confronted outside the influence of the Euro-American academic arena. (AMB)