Complete Works

“It is easy, starting with the worm, to consider ironically an animal, a fish, a monkey, a man, as a tube with two orifices, anal and buccal: the nostrils, the eyes, the ears, the brain represent the complications of the buccal orifice; the penis, the testicles, or the female organs that correspond to them, are the complication of the anal. In these conditions, the violent thrusts that come from the interior of the body can be indifferently rejected to one extremity or the other, and they are discharged, in fact, where they meet the weakest resistance. All the ornaments of the head, of whatever type, mean the generalized privilege of the oral extremity; one can only contrast them with the decorative riches of the excremental extremity of apes.” – Georges Bataille, 'The Pineal Eye' in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985. I had always considered my body a sort of home until I fell seriously ill. For over a year, all the things in which I believed seemed to fail me over and again: Chinese medicine, Western medicine, and then religion. Time and again my body failed to live up to the logic of these systems to which I had once been faithful. My body seemed so willful and malicious at times, failing me at precisely the moments that I needed it to perform. Just as I thought my body was repairing itself, it would show me just how little I knew of the way that it functioned. My body felt as if it were a strange new country where I could not even discern the fundamentals of the language. Doctors tried to map out this country. Cameras invaded my body and attempted to render it in visual terms. The images that they produced, while textbook-familiar, revealed nothing. Be Takerng Pattanopas' sculptures remind us of the uncanny spaces that we inhabit in the global capitalist economy. Freud used the term unheimlich, or 'unhomely', to refer to the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become de-familiarized, de-realized, as if in a dream. In Pattanopas's work, what appears at first to be familiar to the point of being mundane becomes something unsettling and strange upon closer examination. While there is much about Pattanopas's works that point literally to the human body, it also rises above metaphor to pose difficult questions about the quality of space in global capitalism. In Hal-O 2 2008, the solidness of the sculpture's steel exterior gives way to a play on depth and perception. The monolithic exterior gives way to a series of sensual folds as the viewer's eye is lead along a series of meandering tunnels. Although the immediate reference of this work is the enigmatic computer in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the series conjures less obvious similarities to aspects of religious architecture as well as contemporary art. Three references that come to immediate mind are the tunnels attributed to King Ku Na at Wat Umong (Chiang Mai, ca. 1380 C.E.); the interstitial spaces of Gordon Matta-Clark such as A W-Hole House: Datum Cut 1973; and the way the eye is conducted in Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donnés 1946-66. At Wat Umong, pilgrims enter a series of connected tunnels underneath a hill. While the daily activities of the wat are usually conducted in pavilions closer to the temple entrance, the tunnels themselves remain the key architectural focus and the namesake of the complex. Fragments of paintings adorn the walls; their narrative meanings have faded long ago. In Matta-Clark's work, the interior spaces of common dwellings are opened up to the exterior, breaking down the boundaries between private and public life. In Duchamp's diorama, the viewer's eye is conducted through a crack in a doorway to a woman's naked torso lying in a field. Invariably, the eye falls on the woman's vagina. One gets the sense that one is looking at something one is not supposed to see but it is impossible to look away. In all of these precedents, the act of seeing is more than an intellectual exercise. Pattanopas similarly produces an environment in which the act of viewing becomes a sensual exercise. The transitory space of the body is grasped in a compelling, visceral way. The tunnels in Hal-O 2 are conduits into other, heretofore unseen spaces. These dream spaces, at once familiar and alien, are transitional territories between inside and out, between the solidness of the sculpture's exterior and the curious worlds that inhabit its interior. Susan Buck-Morss, writing about Walter Benjamin's master work, The Arcades Project, reminds us that the 19th-century covered shopping arcades that inspired Benjamin were the precise material replica of the internal unconscious of the dreaming collective. All the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there as well as all of its utopian dreams. Pattanopas's works invite viewers to consider not only the impermanent quality of the human form, but the kind of home such a form might inhabit. What does a home in the world today look like? What is the strange new dream spaces opened up by contemporary global capitalism? The history of capitalism has been a process of interiorization. Nearly everything has been brought under the roof of the market place. Global capitalism today demands that our bodies be in many places at the same time. Time and again the body is called on to perform according to this rigorous logic. And time and again it fails. What are these places where the body fails the demands of the market place and instead produces its own logic? (Left) The tunnel of Wat U-mong, Chiangmai, Thailand, (Centre) an interstitial space of Gordon Matta-Clark, (Right) Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donnés. In the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa's 5th century commentary on the Tipitaka, the body is compared to a maternity home, a hospital, a charnel ground, a privy and a urinal, a host shared by many creatures that live in dependence on all its parts and organs and feed on them. Be Takerng Pattanopas' work draws out the tension between this view and the ways that global capitalism values the space of the body as something akin to real estate. At once solid and porous, finite and endless, Pattanopas's work is a meditation on the ever moving and ultimately unknowable worlds that continue to open up within us. This text was first published in the exhibition catalogue of Interior Horizons by Catherine Schubert Fine Art Gallery in 2008. Lawrence Chua is a widely published cultural critic and author of the novel Gold by the Inch (Grove Press 1999), set in SE Asia. He is currently completing research on Thai architectural history in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning of Cornell University and is based in the Faculty of Architecture of Chulalongkorn University throughout the academic year of 2008-09. [1] Anthony Vidler, the Architectural Uncanny (MIT Press: Cambridge and London, 1999), p. 7. [2] Susan Buck-Morss, the Dialectics of Seeing, (MIT Press: Cambridge and London, 1989), p. 39. [3] Bhikkhu Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga, III, 121.

CATHERINE SCHUBERT FINE ART, BANGKOK, THAILAND by Brian Curtin Be Takerng Pattanopas's first solo exhibition in his native city seems like an anomaly when placed alongside the work of his contemporaries. The artist's large, weighty and labour-intensive sculptures stand apart from the quirky, pop cultural and usually time-based works so favoured by local galleries and the art press. Yuree Kensaku's appropriation of household objects in terms of manga-inspired surrealism is a case in point, or Navin Rawanchaikul's embracing of Bollywood vulgarity with his billboard-sized paintings. while Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook recently filmed Thai farmers discussing examples of 19th-century French painting ('Why is she naked?', one asks of a Manet). Pattanopas's concerns – questions of revelation and truth, of physical impermanence and contingency versus the universal – consciously move towards the profound end of the spectrum, pervading his monolithic encasements of (what appears to be) human flesh and tissue. The works demand careful deliberation to the extent that deliberation becomes the point. A series of photographs of earlier installations signal the artist's interest in aspects of Buddhist iconography and thought. Relief sculptures of kouroi-like figures are lit to suggest a ghostly presence due to shifting perceptions of mass and space. These works have a devotional quality and refer to statues of Buddha in Thai temples, where gilded bronze is lit to appear weightless in order to address matters of impermanence and transcendence. Pattanopas's current concern with the interior of the human body is a radical shift but he retains an interest in the illusion of corporeality and aims for contemplative rather than sensational effects. Three wall-mounted cases of rusted steel (naut-i, 2008) have apertures through which one can glimpse seemingly endless tunnels of fleshy 'stuff'. But while the red-and-yellow naut-i 1 and naut-i 3 might suggest the journey of an endoscope, nauti-2 is a cool blue-and-white interior landscape. These works refer to the idea of journeying outwards (to metaphorically journey inwards), the punning of 'not I', as well as the Pali term 'anatta', meaning selflessness. Sustained engagement with the works' interiors reveals Pattanopas's manipulation of silicone and painted wire mesh, but the infinite tunnels' enigmatic association nevertheless remain compelling. In a demanding essay that accompanies the exhibition, also titled 'Interior Horizons', Lawrence Chua writes that Pattanopas's sculptures 'remind us of the uncanny spaces that we inhabit in the global capitalist economy'. There is certainly a suggestion of how the human body may both register and resist objectification in the works; at their most powerful, however, they also resist contexts that would otherwise fix interpretation. Brian Curtin This review was first published on www.frieze.com on 28/10/08.

Dissolving boundaries International exhibition defies essentialism in the hope of solving differences Newspaper section: Outlook Against the backdrop of racial and linguistic tension, which the documentary film Citizen Juling has brought to the contemporary Thai cultural scene at this hour, an international exhibition at the Art Centre of Chulalongkorn University has shunned essentialist and utilitarian understanding of identity and language. Instead, it approaches them in ways that inspire us to relax our clenching palms which formerly clutch to the idea that "self" is an absolute, fixed and detached entity. "Unspeaking Engagements" – under the co-curatorial batons of Brian Curtin, a consistent "scene-creator" of art in Bangkok, and Steve Dutton, professor in Creative Practice at Coventry University in the UK – features works by 13 artists from Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the UK. In the exhibition, different kinds of contemporary deconstructive and performative methods have been applied to address the topic of difference, be it racial, national or sexual, however with the mandate of not essentialising it. "We want a fruitful collaboration which explicitly addresses an international basis whereby national identities are undertaken, yet not reducible to the essential sense of locality," said Curtin, of his collaboration with Dutton. Unspeaking Engagements, in other words, "explores the production of subjectivities through artworks in ways that race, sex and class are simply not taken as a given but sites of exploration." Greeting visitors upon entry to the show is the video work by Eurasian artist Tintin Cooper, which was deemed the most popular among the viewers on the opening night. The work deconstructs media representations by calling attention, through repetition, to the codes of race and masculinity that are at play in Hollywood films. "From watching her comparison of Bruce Lee with Sylvester Stallone, we can see how ideas of physical power are racialised: The elegance of Bruce Lee's martial arts skills versus the brute force of Stallone's boxing and, moreover, how Bruce Lee remains a cold, calculating a-human machine while Stallone's humanity is revealed through him being bruised and battered. The audience feels for Stallone, but Lee remains the stereotypical inscrutable Asian, and 'we' don't feel desire or sympathy for him," said Curtin. The installation Habitat and video work Adroit, a gauche, a gag: Three Tales After Gustave Flaubert by Brigid Mcleer from the UK pivot on the process of making art – trying to communicate and make a connection in a given socio-cultural context. This is in hope that the viewers will develop a better understanding of the body – both as featured in the works and the human body itself regardless of race, sex or class – as more in relation to time, space and labour. "There are times when you don't quite know what you are producing, you just trust your creative instincts and keep going forward, in the dark, much like a photograph itself appearing in the darkroom," said Mcleer, on the ontological uncertainty of a work in progress. Other works which explore processes of physical and/or durational engagement as a means of constituting the "art's work" – as opposed to the "artwork" – are Jonathan Shaw's Frenchgate Centre, Elias Wyber and Nigel Power's Drawn In and Adam James' Paris Vagabonds. Complementary with these, yet with a distinct power to prompt us "to rethink who is making what or even who is making whom", according to curator Dutton, is Litter Twin by Tanya Madsen Mahon whose repetition via chalk drawing of naughty doppelgangers exemplifies the performative dimension of subjectivity – the reproduction of the "already there". As the metaphor of the Tower of Babel would have reminded us, problems in interracial/international relations come from language difference – a soft example of which is, for instance, the fact that the European Union spends a huge amount of money each year in translation to facilitate understanding among member states. Thus, in line with its treatment of subjectivities as performative, durational and contingent, Unspeaking Engagements also challenges our everyday understanding of language in the utilitarian sense. Inasmuch as Citizen Juling refuses to condone culture absolutism – it, instead, proffers cultural plurality and appropriation as a process of peace maintenance in Southern Thailand, at least prior to the Thaksinomic era; for instance, Buddhist Thais in the deep South used to exclaim "Allah!" in their emotional rush without any reservation – Unspeaking Engagements, or the tasks that do not speak, handles language in such a way that denies its conventional function to name, describe and define, hence obliterating differences: "Language in the show comes in as a physical effect-deafening, abstract and rhythmic," said Curtin. Dematerialisation of language in this light are present in Carl Von Weiler's Not Me In Situation 1, Mcleer's video work, James' Paris Vagabonds and, very interestingly, Shaw's Frenchgate Centre despite without any headset or speaker attached to the work. Precipitously judging, Unspeaking Engagements may risk being deemed dry due to the highly cerebral concept on which the show is based. Yet with enough time, deep engagement promises emotional responses; here understanding of the human body is felt, not represented. Be Takerng Pattanopas' Pous Soup 1, one of the most outstanding in this regard, produces a markedly visceral effect on our perception of the human body. The wall-based work which features throbbing blood-like colours by artificial light and labyrinthine metaphorical intestines call for the relinquishment of the viewers' own body and others' – putting an end to the corporeal "us" and "them". Similar to Pous Soup 1, but in a much more light-hearted way, Takerng's Pous Soup 2 – an adorable rubber floor-piece with funny hairy texture which literally performs the act of breathing and is very popular among younger visitors-arouses in viewers the sense of the primordial and the void from whence we human beings derive from. Both pieces highlight the sensational dimension of the human body and our universal capacity to register touch, feeling and disgust, proving that racial, national, sexual and class differences are simply irrelevant. Unspeaking Engagements is an exhibition which effectively deploys deconstructive and performative methods to cultivate in viewers the awareness of the futility of allowing the imaginary and contingent nature of subjectivity to blind man to the point of attacking one another. Simply put, Unspeaking Engagements is an international show that radically calls into question the element of being international itself: difference. The works here together produce the ultimate effect of racial/national/sexual undecidability, be it ontologically or epistemologically – under which circumstance the position from whence difference is constituted is entirely too slippery to pin down. After all, reservations about the absolutism of identity and knowledge cultivatable in this exhibition are proved by Curtin benefit the Thai public and Thailand itself: "Thai culture insists [from politics to art] on the representation of ideas which are claimed as already and unquestionably existing. Arguably, it is unattuned to issues of how ideas are produced and manipulated and can often end up meaning differently than originally intended-look at how notions of Thainess can be widely different and are manipulated to serve political agendas, yet we believe Thainess is fundamentally a coherent and given essence." 'Unspeaking Engagements' is on view until September 26 at the Art Centre of Chulalongkorn University. The exhibition will travel to Coventry, UK in 2010. RATHSARAN SIREEKAN Relate Search: Unspeaking Engagements, Citizen Juling, Art Centre of Chulalongkorn University

'It's like putting vaginas on a Richard Serra.' Lawrence Chua, an architectural scholar at Cornell University, once described a Pattanopas sculpture, HAL-O 2, 2008, as such. HAL-O 2 is a rusted monolith with two 'peep-holes' through which the viewer can perceive two richly textured and seemingly amorphous tunnels lit by artificial light. This perceptual experience is about the space within, a fathomless space that suggests the interior spaces of the human body. Space, light and the human body continue to be Pattanopas's major concerns as sculptor of illusive spaces. For Unspeaking Engagements the artist has begun to more readily acknowledge and incorporate the fact of time. The wall-based work, pous soup 1, 2009, gives the impression of a vast cosmic space, as if visualizing the origin of time, yet its rich blood-like colors and subtly pulsating light suggest an obscure form of life. Or perhaps the work suggests a primordial 'soup' that indicates the beginning of life itself. An accompanying sculpture, pous soup 2, 2009, is a floor piece that literally breathes. A textured and 'hairy' blanket made from rubber hovers above the gallery floor, moving gently as if some strange creature exists beneath and is gasping for its last breath. Both sculptures insist on questioning the perpetuation of life and the inevitability of death: a core of Pattanopas's interest as an artist. The above text was originally published in the catalogue of Unspeaking Engagement an international exhibition, curated by Brian Curtin and Steve Dutton. The exhibition toured from the Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok in September 2009 to Lancheter Gallery of the School of Art and Design of University of Coventry, England, in February 2010.

GMT+7 art&design Gallery, Brussels, and Catherine Schubert Fine Art, Bangkok, are very pleased to announce an exhibition by Be Takerng Pattanopas. Permanent Flux showcases Pattanopas's recent sculptures with a selection of works that, over decade ago, began his explorations of the use of illusive space as a means of representing the human body. Beginning with delicately-lit concave reliefs of the body, the artist has most recently begun to work with ambiguous renderings of viscera. The trajectory of Pattanopas's oeuvre suggests a concern with generating a sense of the human body in flux; a concern that links with Buddhist notions of impermanence while acting directly on the viewers' senses. Pattanopas's sculptures are labour-intensive in their detailing of exterior and interior views of the human body. He works with disparate materials and intricate structures to create illusions of bodily space and depth. Furthermore, Pattanopas's largest sculpture to date, Porta-atroP I, treads a particularly provocative line between beauty and ugliness in terms of a seductive yet disturbing imaging of seemingly infinite corporeal passages that bespeak the human body as subject to endless change. Opening reception: Friday 06 November 2009 from 6 – 10 pm The artist and HE Pisan Manawapat, Ambassador of Thailand to the Kingdom of Belgium, Luxembourg and the European Communities, will be in attendance. Exhibition dates: 06 November – 31 December 2009

Be Takerng Pattanopas is a Thai-born artist and academic and currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture of Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. Since 1994 he has been creating sculptures, installations, photography and drawings, which address issues of space and light as representations of the human body. Be Takerng exhibits and publishes internationally and his recent exhibitions have been reviewed in Flash Art and Frieze.com.

Be Takerng Pattanopas's The Nerve that Eats Itself Brian Curtin We live under constant threats: authoritarianism, wars, natural disasters and the ever-insidious possibility of disease. The Nerve That Eats Itself is an exhibition of drawings and sculptures that explore possibilities of touching the core of viewers' bodies and minds. However chaotic the artist's compositions can seem, viewers can sense various forms of energy, from the subatomic to the cosmic. By taking time to slowly contemplate these artworks, encounters may discover a rare experience of inner peace. The title refers to ideas of gradual disappearance or the profound insight of our existence: all ends as nothing. The Nerve That Eats Itself represents a maturity in the artist's pursuit of an artistic language acute to this interest. All moves and shifts towards an ethereal infinitude. Resulting from over two years of complex artistic processes, Be Takerng's newest works are a series of expansive, wall-bound sculptures that meld surface and depth. And they disorient our sense of scale, oscillating between perceptions of microscopic views rendered large or strangely detailed landscapes that render us small. Visceral, web-like, skeletal and bristling, these intricately shaped forms suggest networks. Human cells, neurons, and also perhaps the minutiae of underwater worlds. But their denseness is also relieved by the play of light and the works can appear weightless. This shifting perception is essential to Be Takerng's practice: between the material and immaterial and recognition and the unknown. A major work in The Nerve That Eats Itself is the circular, outsized and spikey Monstrous Monstrance #1. A monstrance is a Christian receptacle for holy relics and contains the consecrated Host during Mass. Held aloft during Catholic processions, the shape reflects much other devotional iconography: a stylized wheel, sun or flower. Traditional ritual uses of these symbols plays between representation and experience. Be Takerng draws on this dynamic but to abstracted ends: the brute facticity of the materials-painted steel and aluminium-complicates symbolic deliberation. Physical engagement is felt in the brushes of those layers of paint and immediate history is recalled, against resonances of timeless significance that the form would otherwise serve. Further, the title of 'monstrous' claims the embodied and overwhelming; and thus sensational states that can momentarily defy or challenge meaning. Be Takerng's practice as an artist emerged from a scholarly study of the conventions of historic sculptures of Buddha. Here a perceptual illusion of inner energy and weightlessness is achieved by the dim lighting of temple interiors and the planar forms of the figures, and contrasts strongly with the naturalism of Greco-Roman classicism. His early installations, titled Pneuma employed relief sculptures of male torsos that were lit to suggest three dimensionality. Viewed through tunnel structures, their intangibility carried an aura of the sacred. His remarkably ambitious GAP the Mind, a temporary public installation in Singapore during 2011, continued this exploration of relations between the spatial, perceptual and a diffuse sense of the sacred or, now, spiritual. A series of large cylindrical tents made from the saffron fabric of Thai monks' robes, visitors could enter and meditate atop softly vibrating plates. Positioned between Singapore's financial centre and the waterfront promenade the installation was a metaphorical bridge between and respite from radically different worlds. Be Takerng is not a Buddhist artist. We can also note that the artist maintains a practice of drawing and painting, where swirling forms suggest invisible energy and unpredictable change. He is currently reading about dark matter, the hypothetical existence of the inverse of stars and galaxies: astronomical material that does not emit light. And images of cosmic voids litter his studio. He is also interested in the encoded and experiential aspects of American abstract expressionism and colour-field painting. But Be Takerng offers a wry response to the famed artist's ejaculatory and expansive surfaces, instead exploring an intimacy that subverts any implication of Pollock's powerful posturing. The largest piece in this exhibition TransPollock #3 [red shift, blue shift], which is over seven meters long, recalls the immersive experience of a Rothko or Noland as the play of colour shifts between closeness and distance. The sculptures in The Nerve That Eats Itself essentially take a sense of energy as the work itself. Previous formal distinctions in the artist's practice have now disappeared: representation is abstraction, interior is exterior, surface is depth and perception is experience. The works don't contain, all seems to move. And our capacity for detachment and deliberation is profoundly reduced as the sculptures bristle and provoke sensation. But what is this energy? How can we describe the sensations provoked? Sensation, the cultural theorist Sara Ahmed has written, is surface and spatial. It emerges from contact and orients and disorientates-producing an immediacy of physical experience and a sudden awareness of being in the world or temporarily suspended from it. And sensation is emotion; and emotion is bodily. Emotions push against description. They are unruly. Be Takerng's sculptures don't "tell" us such, they stage recognition of this type of encounter between the human body and the world with many of the world's symbolizations. But here the lack of certainty or assurance about what we are actually looking at-whether cells, membranes, cosmic landscapes or ritual objects-claims relationships that are uneven and unpredictable and thus fractious. But such renders us in and of the world, and perhaps allows for a pursuit of equivalence and balance, not the violence of knowing and defining difference and thus division and power. _____________ Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art writer, curator and lecturer. www.briancurtinbangkok.com References Ahmed, Sara (2015) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York and London: Routledge. Silverman, Kaja (2009) Flesh of My Flesh, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Samak Kosem Wanchai, a 23-year-old Shan, has worked at the gay massage parlour 'Free Guy' in Chiang Mai for nearly 3 years without any ID card. Having an ID card is crucial as it could give him opportunities to work elsewhere; yet these IDs would cost him as much as his income for one year. These ID cards are metaphoric borders tattooed on his body. Though he is now in a Thai city, this invisible border draws a thin line dictating what he can or cannot do. The question is why these ID cards have the controlling power over these ethnic migrants' bodies. He once said, "Though I don't have the ID card, I still have my body to work with." Wanchai uses his muscled body for sex with his clients. Selling his body and maleness makes him feel the urge to have tattoos on his body, as many of his friends do, to render his maleness clearly visible. Sometimes he feels he is nervous to the point of losing his masculinity. Or could this be the side effect of the Viagra he takes many times a day to ensure he can perform sex with his clients. It has accumulated in his body to the point that it turns into a bio-power nervousness that could control his body. Wanchai's desire for life and the imagination of nationality has bounded his soul that is connected to the whole, including his body, his maleness, and nationality. All are layered over each other under various conditions in The Nerve That Eats Itself, Be Takerng Pattanopas's solo exhibition. Be Takerng presents the nodes of fibers that connect each other in order to demonstrate the possibility that microscopic views of the body are interconnected with all matters in the cosmos. Be Takerng's five major pieces in this exhibition attempt to construct an argument on the concept of deterritorialisation by allowing lines to move and connect freely without borders or limited forms. Lines are joined multi-directionally; as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) proposed, the border that physically confines the self should be abolished, and frameworks of any kind of classification- whether institutions, discourses or borders of nation states-must be discarded. The connectedness of networks, as evident in Be Takerng's works has diluted these borders and are molten into various forms, reflecting the 'becoming' that leads to endless possibilities. Possibilities that enable individuals to enter new spaces and statuses in life and soul, searching desires and self release. Lines that are connected, inter-twined, and melted represent his imagination to move beyond existing borders or frames to establish a universe of particles that could be used or be co-conscious. For example, Blissfully Ours #1 and Relational Anesthetic #1 draw alternate realities of human beings and other things to connect with various different nodes without any sense of alienation. This become the co-consciousness that reminds us of the state of being beyond the border of nation states, physical bodies, sexes, and any defined structures. Importantly, Be Takerng wants to generate dialogues with the American abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock through such works as TransPollock #3 [red shift, blue shift]. These do not attempt to generate any representations or to pause at any time or era. The works demonstrate the artistic trajectories of both Be Takerng and Pollock in many directions, and the awareness of how each point connects with others both specifically and beyond the physical space. The Nerve That Eats Itself plays with networks that connect alternate realities of each individual's life with other things, threads everything as if they were the universe's particles, and invites us to examine the bliss, sorrow, darkness, desire, cruelty, chaos, pain, and numbness in our lives irregularly and dynamically. Underneath the nervousness hidden in each work, all is sealed into various forms, and simultaneously expanded powerfully. They expose the artist's vulnerability in terms of his own personality, his body, and his queerness where alienation emerges. A collision between nervousness and our social constructions. _______________ Samak Kosem is a Thai-born muslim queer anthropologist and artist. Reference Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (1987) A Thousands Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Be Takerng Pattanopas is based in Bangkok. A graduate from Chulalongkorn University, University of Wales, Cardiff, and later Cheltenham & Gloucester CHE with a PhD in fine art. His recent solo exhibitions include What I Don't Know That I Know (2013) at H Gallery, Bangkok; Compulsive Orders (2011) at Tally Beck Contemporary in New York City; Permanent Flux (2009) at GMT+7 in Brussels; and Interior Horizons (2008) at Catherine Schubert Fine Art in Bangkok. His largest installation to date, GAP the Mind (2012) was commissioned for i Light Marina Bay 2012 in Singapore; recent group exhibitions include Oscillations (2016), curated by Lyno Vuth at the Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok; Monologue Dialogue MD4 (2017) at the Koppel Project in London; Monologue Dialogue MD3 (2014) at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC); Gentle Matter (2013) at Richard Koh Fine Arts, Singapore; Unspeaking Engagements (2010) at Lancaster Gallery, Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry, England; From Surface to Origin: journeys through recent art from India and Thailand (2008) at Gallery Soulflower in Bangkok; and Prana: Art, Light, Space (2007) at Chulalongkorn University Art Center, Bangkok.