Korakrit Arunanondchai is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice unfolds between New York and Bangkok, weaving together references from pop culture, spirituality, geopolitics, and technology. His work combines painting, performance, and video to build hybrid narratives where reality and fiction, past and future, individual and collective intermingle. For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, the artist presents a video installation that deepens his ongoing exploration of the Asian horror genre as a vehicle for examining postcolonial relations and the extractive structures of Western art.
In Unity for Nostalgia (2025), Arunanondchai plays the role of an artist who travels to Thailand in search of an alleged “origen culture,” personified by the figure of a ghost that needs human flesh to continue existing. This figure comes to embody the Western consciousness in its encounter with the “Spiritual East.” The ghost, in turn, serves as a living metaphor for the persistence of memories and structures erased by dominant historical narratives. The work employs the grammar of horror to reflect on cultural erasure and extraction as forms of ongoing violence.
The narrative unfolds across two contrasting yet interconnected settings: a stage made of ashes, where the artist performs, and an abandoned cinema overtaken by monkeys. These environments are traversed by cycles of heat, energy, and spirit, suggesting a choreography between the material and the immaterial, the spoken and the unspoken. As the artist himself points out, Asian horror in Southeast Asia operates in a way analogous to science fiction – as a space for projecting fears, hopes, and historical ghosts. Through this image, Unity for Nostalgia creates a space for encounter and conflict, revealing layers of memory and expectation that remain latent.
Internationally recognized, Arunanondchai has presented solo exhibitions at renowned institutions. He is also the founder of GHOST, a platform dedicated to video art in Asia. His work has been instrumental in examining the intersections between contemporary art, spirituality, and the reverberations of colonialism in Southeast Asia.