WHAT YOU DON'T SEE WILL HURT YOU

“These untitled “paintings” (2014 and 2015) are in fact collages, their optically layered surfaces carefully built up through a laborious studio process that draws on design motifs and decorative traditions unique to the Lanna culture of northern Thailand, where the artist is based. & There, many kinds of brightly coloured paper like those in Sethaseree’s works are usually used in celebration of festivities.

Here, they take on another function, painstakingly obscuring from view large-scale printed images of archival photographs. Preparatory sketches made by the artist reveal the source materials to include images of the infamous 1976 massacre of student protestors at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, as well as of several of the nation’s twelve military coups d’etat to date (since 1932). These horrors are literally masked by the high spectacle of ornamentation that is vernacularly linked to magical beliefs; the results are magnificent yet unsettling.

The artist describes his process as meditative in its repetitive intensity; but this is not a meditation that provides healing or spiritual enlightenment. Rather, it provides only insight into the political violence and upheaval that has marred Thailand’s history for the entire of the artist’s lifetime.”

----- Roger Nelson

“Decoration in all its resplendence and labor is the facade of Sethaseree’s huge, ambitious pieces. Colorful cut paper sheets—typical Thai decorations —overlay government/military-censored images of Thai news reportage. The repressed images are deemed, by the powers-that-be, a crime. Here, instead of ornamentation as crime, the crime is, as shown in these pictures, their censorship, a “making pretty” that is the mainstream’s “normal.”

----- Laura Letinsky