Chaichana Luetrakun

(b. 1991)

Waterscape II

Footnotes

Provenance
Swiss Collection

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"This may only be a painting now but who knows? It could well be a future of our waste generation."

― Chaichana Luetrakun (on Wastespace, 2019, for UOB Artist's Studio, 11 December 2019)

Chaichana Luetrakun (b. 1991) is among Thailand's most notable up-and-coming young artists. The winner of the UOB Painting of the Year Competition, he was awarded "Most Promising Artist of the Year" in 2018 and the Grand Prize in 2019. He is the first and only artist to have won the competition consecutively.

Chaichana draws urgent attention to what these abandoned items tell us about our world today. He invites viewers to imagine what "old" will mean in the future, as even humongous and imposing airplanes are eventually left for scrap without as much as a bat of an eye. His Waterscape II, 2020, almost reads as a counterpart to Wastespace, 2019, that bagged him Grand Prize in the 38th UOB Painting of the Year competition. Chaichana's evocative works are a window into a landscape of wreckage and trash. Through his mind-bogglingly detailed and vivid depictions of piles of debris, we start to comprehend the bleak future that lies ahead if we continue to mindlessly build and destroy, feeding our insatiable appetite for renewal.

The work offers a bird's-eye view of these abandoned items' rapid multiplication, warning us of the looming threat we face if our current practices persist. Waterspace, 2020, depicts the inevitable crisis of waste around the globe. This work almost has a wry sense of humour about it–a seascape of man's hubris, where things that once soared in the sky now rust and rot on the ground. In a twisted irony, this "waterscape" is instead a sea of metal scrap, abandoned hulls, and cockpits the future's listless boats on a sea of our own making.

Chaichana's Waterscape, 2020, feels like this generation's new Social Realism. We are already seeing the consequences of technological innovation around us. The accumulation of scrap metals and the growing threat that thoughtless progress brings harkens back to the anxieties of urban industrialisation from over half a century ago.