New Inventions II

Introducing Thai artist TOP CHANGTRAKUL

8 March – 7 April at Lance Fung Gallery, 537 Broadway

Reception for the artist: Thursday, 8 March, 6 – 8 PM

Duchampian puns made of street find and garage sale items introduce a new

artist, Top Changtrakul, in his first solo exhibition at Lance Fung Gallery.

Chosen from among his class at San Francisco Art Institute, Top dazzled his

visiting professor, Lance Fung, with a sardonic blend of Eastern and

Western cultures in fantasy fetish works parading as an archive of “lost”

inventions.

New Inventions II displays a series of performances, videos, and objects,

through which the public explores the world’s desire for control. Flirts

with wishfulness, destiny, one’s inner most desire, past lives, happiness

and attainment are frustrated by Top’s logic of serendipity and fate. Irene

Violet Small says, “Issues of longing, uncertainty and access form a major

theme of the show, and Changrakul is most poignant in the inventions which

sharply juxtapose a sense of scientific objectiveness with the elusive and

seductive realm of the unknown.”

A search to discover the unknown is staged as an inventor’s Bangkok studio

and in actions documented throughout Bangkok. At great expense, the entire

site of Top’s “inventor’s studio;” drawings, gadgets, and lights have been

excised and shipped from Bangkok and obsessively recreated for public

display at Lance Fung Gallery. The entire gallery space is transformed into

an enlarged Thai outhouse in which we find televised solicitations,

testimonials, instructions, actions and many inventions with all their

successes and failings.

New Inventions II helps us to return to a timeless and playful

consciousness where past, present and future are as confused as fact,

fiction and faketion. So sit back, relax and watch as Top Changrakul, the

inventor of our inventor, delights us with his re-invention of invention

itself coming up next at Lance Fung Gallery.