X Museum is delighted to present Thai artist Gongkan’s solo exhibition, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. This exhibition is on view from November 1st 2024 to February 14th 2025, on the second floor at X Museum in Beijing. It features Gongkan’s most recent works, including more than ten old paintings, four new paintings and three sculptures. The exhibition title, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, is derived from the classic rock song released in 1983 by Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler. The lyrics delve into reflections on love and relationships, exploring themes of loss and helplessness, and depicting the emptiness of the heart like a total eclipse of the sun. It portrays a discursive search for the self and a yearning for love in a broader sense. In collaboration with Art Focus, a comprehensive art space, X Museum will hold a pop-up space at X Lab during the exhibition.
Gongkan often employs dreamy and vibrant visual language, placing animated figures in the midst of common natural settings such as grass, clouds, and the sky, creating a soft and warm atmosphere with delicate lines and highly saturated colors. The oval-shaped portal and recurring image of a teenager serve as the main narratives of his practices, depicting personal psychological dilemmas through surrealist techniques. The simple environment, the calm face and the static posture of the character, without emphasizing contrasts or creating conflicts, depict a utopian and untroubled inner world. The black hole at the heart is hard to ignore, seemingly serving as a window to the real inner world of the teenager. Inside this void, Gongkan paints objects of various shapes and forms – umbrellas, headphones, bandages, tangled threads, or an outstretched arm – that extend from the inside to the outside, bridging different layers of the space. These objects in this dark cavity form the core of the artist’s exploration, conveying continuous introspection, questioning, and self-care beneath the serene surface. The works search for the relationship between the individual and the other in the dislocation between the inside and the outside, and between the surface and the inside, and responding to the introspective challenges of the contemporary youth.
The exhibition showcases the longing, loneliness and self-protection of the teenager, projecting the need for communication and recognition into mundane everyday objects of the surrounding real world. The approach indicates his consistent contemplation of self-identity, capturing and analyzing moments of inner struggle, thus presenting to the audience in fragments. Each artwork maintains a consistent style but varies in detail, delivering a complete discursive narrative. These pieces show the complexity of the artist’s mind as he generates, captures and analyzes his own self, and solidifies these turbulent states. They indirectly depict restlessness and searching, yet whether the restlessness is appeased or the search finds answers remains unknown. The resolution of the narrative lingers beyond the edges of the canvases. This uncertainty might itself be an answer, allowing Gongkan’s works to balance between trendy art and the seemingly endless self-inquiry of the younger generation, creating a layered dialogue between the works and the viewer, making “self” a subject that transcends time and space.
About the Artist
Gongkan (b. 1989, Bangkok, Thailand) lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. Gongkan has graduated from Kasetsart University Laboratory School in 2007 and from Silpakorn University, Faculty of Decorative Arts in 2011. His solo exhibitions have been held at the MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art (Bangkok), Pingshan Art Museum (Shenzhen), Tang Contemporary Art (Seoul, Beijing, Bangkok), Over the Influence (Los Angeles, Paris), and River City Bangkok (Bangkok). His work is included in the public collections of MOCA Bangkok (Bangkok), X Museum (Beijing).
His work, which he named ‘Teleport Art’, gained notoriety in the New York street art scene and later in Bangkok. The element of time is a predominant concept in Gongkan’s paintings: surrealistic canvas, populated by human figures, realized with graphic flat strokes. Through presenting different visions of the present times or rewriting the past, the artist creates alternate realities in the process.
About The Artists
About The Curators
