Cartographies of Relation: Notes from the Making of the Thailand Biennale

“I always wrote a travel narrative before I set off on a trip, so that during the journey I’d have something to quote from. I was often speechless when I traveled. This time it was particularly useful that I’d written my report beforehand. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known what to say about Siberia. Of course, I might have quoted from my diary, but I have to admit that I made up the diary afterward, having neglected to keep one during the journey.”

—Yoko Tawada, Where Europe Begin

In the journey to Phuket for the making of the 4th Thailand Biennale, artistic directors Arin Rungjang and David Teh, and curators Marisa Phandharakrajadej and myself found ourselves on an island in which we had not prewritten our travel log for. What ensued was an adventure in the rubber plantations, amidst the coral reefs, chasing spiritual possession processions through town, and tracking the movements of the moon by night. In the making of Eternal [Kalpa], multiple, overlapping, and contradictory sources of translation were used—particularly to facilitate my participation along with those of the non-Thai-speaking artists. Not simply a transfer of meaning, this becomes a state of living between languages. Words shift form, accumulate humour, and sometimes lose parts of themselves along the way. To be outside of language is can be an advantage, to have words and works come to life only in their translated interpretation, unmoored from a system that gives stability to meaning.

The ethical foundations of collaboration begins from this same premise: entering into relation of shifting sands. To work across fields—between art and environmentalism, social practice and oral knowledge, technology and minerals—requires an awareness of asymmetry, of the uneven distributions of access, time, and legitimacy that shape every exchange. Collaboration becomes a form of research citation into how knowledge moves and who has the power to name. When practiced with rigor, collaboration resists the extractive logic that often defines art’s engagement with the world. It reimagines resource not as something to be used or possessed, but as a series of shared relation—one that depends on reciprocity and hospitality.

These questions surface in the presentation of work by Doloh Chetae (1962–2024), whose contribution is composed by Anuwat Apimukmongkon (another exhibiting artist in the Biennale), which offers a view of collaboration and resource rooted in local practice. A fisherman, ecologist, and philosopher from Pattani, Chetae began making maps in the 1980s to document the ecological transformations along the Bay of Pattani. His drawings record changing fish populations, water currents, and the loss of mangrove forests under the pressures of industrial development. Made for communication rather than display, these maps served as teaching tools within the community and as reference points for visiting scientists. They are both data and testimony—an alternative cartography grounded in lived experience. Apimukmongkon’s framing brings this body of work into the exhibition space without severing it from its origins, foregrounding collaboration as a method of continuity rather than appropriation. Chetae’s drawings remind us that the most vital resources are not materials or data, but the relationships that sustain knowledge across generations.

Elsewhere, Ariane Sutthavong’s project revisits the multifaceted practice of Suwanni Sukhontha (1932–1984) through her work as a novelist, painter, and founding editor of Lalana magazine in the 1970s. In Lalana, serialized fiction appeared alongside essays, fashion spreads, and critical commentary, articulating a modern Thai femininity that was intellectual, sensuous, and socially alert. Sutthavong approaches this composite practice as a living methodology rather than a historical artifact. Set within a former high-street bank once central to Thailand’s Cold War-era consumer culture, Sutthavong’s installation gathers fragments of Sukhontha’s editorial layouts, writings, and images into a lyrical composition. Translation becomes a rhythmic process of reading and reassessing across time.

To curate in Phuket, a place hosting the Biennale for the first time, is to move between voices—one’s own and those that came before. The hospitality that marks the region is not ceremony or display, but a lived practice that has evolved through centuries of contact and negotiation. It carries with it a cosmopolitanism that feels continuous rather than imported, formed through the everyday gestures of welcoming and being welcomed. The local context holds a strong sense of itself, shaped by layered histories of movement across land and sea. Within such conditions, curating becomes less about authorship than about channeling: allowing other voices, human and more-than-human, to resonate through the work. To speak here is to be slightly outside of language, inhabiting the porous space where meaning circulates, transforms, and falls apart again.



A member of the Thailand Biennale 2025 curatorial team, Hera Chan is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam by way of Hong Kong. Her work engages with performative infrastructures such as elections—as co-producer of KomBIJ1 TV, a political talk show aired in the Netherlands the occupied Dutch Antilles leading up to the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2021, pageantry—as co-founder and curator of platform Miss Ruthless International in Hong Kong, and diasporic networks—as founding director of para-institution Atelier Céladon in Montreal. Currently, she is Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific, supported by Asymmetry, at Tate.



Thailand Biennale: Eternal [Kalpa] will be free and open to the public from November 29, 2025 to April 30, 2026



Feature image: Melati Suryodarmo, Ancescape, 2025. Commissioned by Thailand Biennale, Phuket. Image courtesy of the artist.