The Frequency Between Mourning and Dancing
There is a frequency in certain kinds of music — in specific moments of club music, in certain passages of electronic sound — that is both grief and ecstasy simultaneously. Not alternating between them, not mixing them. Both at once, in a way that is one of the stranger and more genuine experiences available in contemporary life.
Korakrit Arunanondchai's video and installation work inhabits this frequency. The Thai-born, New York-based artist makes work that involves performance, video, painting, sound, and collaborators from across the arts and music worlds, and the work tends to operate in this zone where the mourning and the dancing are not opposites but aspects of the same response to being alive in a difficult world.
The works I've encountered most recently involve an ongoing collaboration with director Alex Gvojic and the recurring presence of a ghost figure — a presence that moves through the work's cosmology as a connecting figure between the living and the dead, between past and future, between Thailand and New York, between traditional and contemporary. This ghost is not horror-genre. It's ancestral — it belongs to the spirit traditions of Southeast Asia that maintain ongoing relationships with the dead.
Syncretism as Form
Arunanondchai's work is syncretic in a way that feels both intentional and organic — the Thai Buddhist and animist traditions mixing with Western contemporary art frameworks mixing with club culture mixing with personal biography in combinations that shouldn't hold together and do. The holding-together is itself part of what the work is about: the possibility of maintaining multiple cosmologies simultaneously, of being neither fully traditional nor fully contemporary but both.
This resonates with a certain contemporary experience — the experience of living between cultures, of holding multiple inheritances that don't simplify into a single identity. The work doesn't offer a synthesis of these positions. It maintains them in productive tension.
The painting element of his practice is something critics sometimes overlook. The canvases — often large, worked with denim fragments and other materials as well as paint — have a physical intensity that his video work sometimes doesn't. They're objects in space in a way that video can't be, and standing in front of them produces a different kind of engagement than the immersive video environments.
What the Rave Is For
The rave as cultural space has always been about something beyond recreation — about community, about the body's right to pleasure, about collective experience as a form of survival and resistance. Arunanondchai's work understands this and takes the rave seriously as a ritual space with genuine spiritual dimensions.
This is not unusual in the discourse around electronic music and club culture, which has long addressed the sacred dimensions of the dancefloor. What's unusual is an artist bringing this understanding into the gallery, making visual and sculptural work that carries the knowledge of the rave without simply depicting it.
The grief in the work is the grief for all the things being lost — in Thailand, in the environment, in the specific communities the work draws from. The dancing is the response to that grief that doesn't require resolution, that accepts that you can mourn and move at the same time.
I find that acceptance genuinely valuable. The work has given me a way to think about something I already felt.
I find myself thinking about the specific communities that Arunanondchai's work addresses and includes — the Thai diaspora, the rave communities, the art world people who encounter this work in galleries, the collaborators who make it with him. These are not natural constituencies. Bringing them into the same space, making work that speaks to something in each of them, is itself an act of community-building.
The work will keep developing. It's one of the more alive practices in contemporary art, one of the ones that seems genuinely uncertain about what it will become next. That uncertainty is the sign of something still in motion. I want to keep watching.
