Light, Dark, Other: Mit Jai Inn solo Exhibition

Defying conventional boundaries of painting, Mit Jai Inn enacts multiple histories and treatments of the medium through a physically rigorous and repetitive labour cycle of mixing, applying, overlaying and eroding pigment. His paintings come into being at his outdoor Chiang Mai studio, where he gives turns to the vibrating spectrum of sun and moonlight, with nocturnal interludes under white fluorescent. His colourful, densely layered work takes a on a wide range of topographical variations and moods, ranging from sombre amorphous blotches, to pastel crafted stripes to neon all-over dots, and more.

Mit’s largely solitary studio practice is rooted in perception, with relational intentions. Emerging in Berlin and Vienna in the late 1980s, Mit began a vocabulary of serial forms intended to counter aspects of formal painting and its market and exhibitionary frameworks of their time. Mit’s paintings were unstretched and unframed, mostly two-sided, touchable works that populated public spaces and galleries alike. Embedded in Mit’s painted forms are reactions to aesthetic, social and political histories. These include divisions between so-called ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ canonical painting, the sacred-secular intimacy of color, the shifting political states of Thailand, and site-specific reflections dedicated to the nations, spaces, hosts and publics of his works.

Free Flyers were created as giveaways and reference the popular pre-internet free information sharing system. In the 1992 Chiang Mai Social Installation, a relational project Mit co-founded, thousands of Free Flyers were piled on a truck bed at the Chiang Mai old city gates for members of the public to take. Wall Works are one or two-sided color fields on canvas that are variably installed, sometimes acting as optical screens, other times as carpets. Sticks have appeared as pink ladders in apartments, as obsessively painted wand-like works in the gallery, and as animal feeders planted in the earth. The small, intimate two-sided panels of bright partitioned color in Dream Works are carefully slit, allowing air and energy to pass through their gaps, flaps, and openings. The same is true of Patch Works, yet in closer reference to ideas of modularity and family and societal structures. Scrolls further extend Mit’s interest in communal ritual forms, such as the suspended prayer flag or rolled iconographic or ceremonial painting, which are intended to gather publics, to be an invitation, an opening. More recently, Tables and Pools have become forms of negotiating the energies and forces that Mit channels through painting.

Read More