A ROCKING ROAD TO THE MOON
A Solo Exhibition By Tada Hengsapkul
Curated by Surawit Boonjoo
1 March - 27 April 2025
‘A ROCKING ROAD TO THE MOON,’ a solo exhibition by Tada Hengsapkul, presents an artificial image of inequality stemming from the deeply decaying administrative structure. The works are initiated by Hengsapkul’s personal experience during his journey back to his residence on the rough roads of Bangkok, Thailand. Encountering events that defy normalcy, Hengsapkul accumulates, reflects on, and connects to a set of memories he has repeatedly witnessed while traveling back and forth to his hometown on the Friendship Highway, Mittraphap Road, an expanded development from the capital to the northeastern region of Thailand – an important diplomatic gift that Thailand received from United State during the Cold War.
Tada parodies the road’s relationships’s to propaganda, which continues to be reproduced under the guise of expanding and distributing prosperity within the region. Through scenes fabricated from found objects, photographic installations, and a slit-scan video that merge into a single moving image, he forms a distorted landscape by freezing time in panoramas - scenes of the road that remain perpetually incomplete - emphasising the différance through the arrangement of torn up asphalt fragments collected from the roadside while heading to Khao Yai District, Nakhon Ratchasima. By simulating a road alongside ‘image-objects’, potholes are cast and merged with photographs of reflections of the magnificent architecture of public buildings, including government and private sector buildings in the capital. With a tone of irony and sarcastic humour, these objects become imitations or irrational movement.
Within this unity of a photographic phenomenon scene, which aims to communicate through a series of events that may seem ordinary, these reveal themselves as the hidden consequences of the relentless pursuit of profit, while simultaneously being driven by some impetus—perhaps emotional. Although it appears to be just an ordinary scene, it stimulates a silent, violent action in a puzzling way, as if this photograph of the scene were tied to a shared emotional moment and the memory of endless struggle.
About the Artist
Tada Hengsapkul (B.1987 in Korat, Thailand)
Tada Hengsapkul is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist, whose practice is often concerned with investigating and resisting various forms of control — at the level of the body, the collective, and society. He explains the context in which he works: “Now Thailand has a crisis about controlling the large amount of people who have come out to claim rights and liberties.” Tada addresses this crisis by purposefully positioning concerns specific to Thailand as being also emblematic of much more widely shared questions and experiences. The location in which the artist lives and works functions for him as a nexus point, at which manifold external and internal interests intersect.
Tada first became known for his photographic and video works, which often challenged taboos around nudity and youth culture. In recent years, he has become increasingly drawn to creating installations, which are often immersive or interactive, and draw on the aesthetics of militarized environments. The artist’s practice draws on long-term research, which he conducts in both official and informal archives, as well as through deliberate engagement with various media environments, and with specific communities. In the artist’s words: “My research is to live in a different way.”
Tada was born in 1987 in Korat, in the Isan region of northeastern Thailand. Korat has been home to American military bases since the period of the Second Indochina War, and the communities affected by lasting cultural and political legacies of this history have been a recurrent source of inspiration for the artist’s work. Aspects of the present “crisis” in Thailand are thus linked to twentieth century histories which are regional in scale, and relate to the global Cold War, as well as processes of decolonization and modernization.
- Text by Roger Nelson
About the Curator
Surawit Boonjoo (B.1996 in Lampang, Thailand)
An artistic practitioner and writer specializing in architecture and design, with a focus on intertextuality and interdisciplinary approaches of thinking and working.
Boonjoo is interested in the interactions between text-image, technology and nature. He often contemplates the overlapping before crossing disciplines to explore new possibilities within the Thai art ecosystem through his writing and practice. Boonjoo has been the curator of the exhibition 'Derivatives and integrals' by กูKult at Cartel Artspace (2021), assistant researcher of the project 'Studies of the relationship between the development of contemporary art and social participation in Southeast Asia from the 1970s to the early 2000s' (2021-2022), and project manager of 'A Primer for Forgetting' by Nipan Oranniwesna and Latthapon Korkiatarkul (2023) and 'Three Stories from Ban Wang Hma' by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (2024) at Nova Contemporary. He is also the editor of the photographic e-magazine, jamais vu.
