The Restoration of Happiness
10 October - 15 November
Launch Event: 10 October, 5:30 - 7:30pm
Bloc Projects Gallery
Free and Open to All
Co-presented by Bloc Projects & Platform Asia
Krerkburin Kerngburi
Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Chulayarnnon Siriphol
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, Tropic Temper, 2024 (video still)
The Restoration of Happiness is a group exhibition of digital works by four Southeast Asian artists that examines the region’s shifting socio-political conditions through layered temporalities and imagined digital futures. The exhibition addresses Southeast Asia’s historically fraught relationship with the West, while also foregrounding internal questions of power, identity and conflict within individual nations. Working with humour, speculative fiction and futurist aesthetics, the artists mobilise digital forms as sites of juxtaposition, where past and present intersect with possible futures. In doing so, The Restoration of Happiness situates contemporary Southeast Asian art within broader debates on global modernity, postcolonial critique and the cultural politics of technology.
Krerkburin Kerngburi is an invisible photographer/artist based in Thailand. His work is a series of unusual scenes with questionable objects, symbols, and human behaviours in ordinary days of life, reflecting faith, wonderfully weird cultures, and the absurdities of reality. His latest project SurrealLand focuses on the irony of the Thai belief system and social vulnerability to superstition.
Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee is an artist, educator and research director whose practice negotiates post-tropical environments, psychic rupture, and the neo-gothic. Through new media, oration and public programming, she examines how excess and desire operate through obscured infrastructures and phenomena that shape prosaic experiences. She has exhibited work at V&A Museum, Singapore International Film Festival, Aksioma x VFX, Rockbund Art Museum, Asian Film Archive, Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, Nguyen Art Foundation, DECK, Jimei x Arles, Sinema Transtopia. She is an Associate Lecturer at the School of Media and Communication in London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.
Chulayarnnon Siriphol is a Bangkok-based artist and filmmaker whose practice spans short films, experimental videos, performance, and installations. Working with moving images and his own body, he employs narrative as a critical methodology—drawing from Thai folklore, historical fragments, and global mythologies to reflect on contemporary sociopolitical conditions. Through irony, satire, and speculative imagination, Chulayarnnon reconfigures the past to interrogate dominant ideologies and envision alternative futures. Currently residing and working in Bangkok, he continues to make thought-provoking contributions to the art and film world.
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần is an art laborer based in Saigon. She creates art both collectively and individually and also curates and writes. Her artworks combine politics and sci-fi aesthetics through the use of animation, 3D design, historical archives, and architecture. Arlette is fascinated by the idea of a futuristic Third World utopia where political ideals are reimagined, and humans and non-human beings coexist and merge. She presents a non-linear and absurd interpretation of modern histories that challenges the dominant post-Cold War narratives about the Third World. Together with visual artists Trương Công Tùng & Phan Thảo Nguyên, she co-founded the Art Labor collective, which operates at the intersection of visual arts, social, and life sciences in various public contexts and locales, working on long-term, multiple output projects.