Quiet Noise : Manuel Ocampo, Arvin Flores, Mit Jai Inn, Thaiwijit Phuengkasemsomboon, Sudsiri Pui-Ock, Sujin Wattanawongchai

Quiet Noise running from August 4 – September 29 2012. Featuring Arvin Flores, Mit Jai Inn, Manuel Ocampo, Thaiwijit Phuengkasemsomboon, Sudsiri Pui-Ock Sujin Wattanawongchai. Curated by Brian Curtin. H Gallery Chiang Mai is very pleased to announce a group exhibition of painting and drawing that explores ideas of aesthetic experience and the critical possibilities of visual art. The title, Quiet Noise, suggests a marriage of subtlety and the potentially challenging, or disruptive. Manuel Ocampo and Thaiwijit Phuengkasemsomboon are influenced by canonical histories of abstraction and expressionism which they engage in a manner that oscillates between continuity and critique; and, in the example of Ocampo, a certain sense of nihilism about the nature of contemporary painting emerges. The paintings of Arvin Flores and Sujin Wattanawongchai employ text as gestural and expressive, provoking considerations of the often vexed and contradictory relationship between perception and the cerebral. Mit Jai Inn continues to pick at the aestheticization of local politics and, by refusing to take a stance on the polarities within, perhaps offers the most radical stance of all. Sudsiri Pui-Ock has created a floor drawing especially for H Gallery Chiang Mai and, as the only female artist in the show, offers a prompt to reflect on the gendered dimension of artistic relationships in terms of tradition and the contemporary; and, for example, what ‘masculine’ might mean in this context. A number of works in Quiet Noise were exhibited at H Gallery Bangkok. H Gallery Chiang Mai promises to build a curatorial sub-theme by re-figuring relationships between Thai and foreign artists with the aim of provoking ever-new questions and understandings.