Biography

Tuck Muntarbhorn (b. 1994, Bangkok, Thailand) is a Thai artist based in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales and London, UK. Known for works that acts as portals to ancient civilisations and sacred locations, his ‘light photography’, often six foot squares, reflect his belief that "all things become visible when they are exposed by the light". Prior to establishing himself as an artist, Muntarbhorn co-founded the international semi-couture brand Busardi in 2009 which exhibited during Haute Couture Week in Paris. In 2017, Muntarbhorn became the first Thai artist to speak on a TED stage in the UK (TEDxSOAS). Since 2022, Muntarbhorn has been working on designing a converted chapel, the Disgwylfa Chapel in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. His works can be found in private collections in Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, the UK and USA.


Work

Text: Andrew Spira

Practice:
Nothing about Tuck Muntarbhorn is conventional. From the word ‘go’, he invites engagement. He doesn’t want to hide behind the mask of ordinariness; he wants something to happen. His artistic practise is a pretext for communication, a stage for indeterminate encounters. But while Muntarbhorn is thoroughly committed to projecting his vision into the world, each of his works creates a perfumed space that is impossible to control or capture; it is there till it dissipates and is made again. Taken together as a series, his photographs constitute a continuous meditation on the luminous transience of forms, guided not by preconceived ideas about outcomes but by the very process and materials of making. Thus while each image is minutely prepared, the long exposures that each one involves create an empty or surrendered space, such that the process itself is ultimately left to ‘grace’.

Muntarbhorn is transparent about the fact that his work is an expression of his feeling for the spiritual nature of the world. Originating at sacred sites from across the globe (in Thailand, Myanmar, India, Israel, Finland, Britain and elsewhere), the forms he photographs become abstract to the point at which they dissolve into transparent bodies of light; they relinquish their otherness. Simulating the experience of meditation, they move in and out of the field of perception, in front of which the mind is invited to forget itself. At once contemplative and highly attentive to the micro-details of production, they find the point at which the possible becomes necessary.

While Muntarbhorn’s work is primarily intuitive and experimental, it chimes across time, and pays homage to Monet's late works and the masters of the ‘northern Romantic tradition’ - from Friedrich and Turner to Whistler and Rothko. The common ground is nature. The force that causes volcanoes to erupt is the same force that enables the stars to be duplicated to perfection in the eternal stillness of a mountain pool.

Muntarbhorn is a young artist. He is riding a rising wave. He is not ashamed to be excited like a child by the infinite possibilities that the experience of life offers; he is not in doubt about the amount of expressive freedom he is entitled to imagine. Although he clearly feels the currents of creativity in himself, they are not him or his; it is to the world that they belong and through his work that they pass.

The Holy Land (2018):
Tuck Muntarbhorn’s most recent collection of photographic works, The Holy Land, represents a further stage in the artist’s quest to translate an ineffable perception of the Sacred into a series of contemplative spaces, accessed through visual experience. Although the works seem to be abstract or non-objective, they are in fact photographs of sacred sites that Muntarbhorn took during a trip to Israel and the West Bank in 2017. Concentrated in and around Jerusalem, the sites in question are sacred to the three major monotheistic religions of the world - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They include one of the oldest synagogues in the world - at Capernaum, where Christ is said to have preached; the Sea of Galilee; the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the Western ‘Wailing’ Wall and the Dome of the Rock which is especially sacred to both Jews and Muslims. Although these sites are highly charged with religious and political implications - now more than ever - they are abstracted here to the point at which their distinctive features cease to be recognisable. It is as if the images offer non-objective contemplation as a means through which to transcend religious differences, and the conflict and misery to which they lead.

At a purely visual level, The Holy Land invites comparison with the Rothko Chapel paintings of 1964-67 and, closer to home, Rothko’s Seagram murals (1958-9) at Tate Modern. Their solemn colours, their large scale - in some cases six foot square - and the subtlety of the relationships that they capture between tones and colours are all reminiscent of Rothko’s attempt to attract the attention of viewers to the numinous, indeterminate space of depth that hovers beyond the limiting surfaces of the seen world. However, whilst every brush stroke of a Rothko painting is consciously applied by the artist, Muntarbhorn capitalises on the ability of photography to displace the activity of creativity away from the ‘artist’ towards the autonomous processes of nature, and thereby to encompass aspects of the world that are not determined by the artist’s capacity to see and represent them. Moreover, he capitalises on the luminosity of light - in contrast to the opacity of paint - that is innate in the medium of photography. Speaking of his own working process, Muntarbhorn has said: “as I stand in front of an object, I ask for nature’s light to use me and the camera to reveal her sacred Beauty and, in this very case, unity – I don’t desire my conditioning to dull her Truth – that’s not my job. Hence, I am more comfortable in defining my works as nature’s ‘light’ than ‘my photographs’.” 

Although the associations of Muntarbhorn’s work with the great monotheistic religions infuses them with an aura of both sanctity and antiquity, they ignore - or ‘are ig-norant of’ - any fundamental ground for religious difference. On the contrary, they aspire to capture something of the dignity and mystery that characterises the austere religiosity of each of these ancient civilisations. One such association is the colour purple which, throughout antiquity, was invested with literally ‘awe-some’ characteristics. Largely due to the immense cost of the dye that was used to create this deep hue, the colour was reserved for the ruling classes. Indeed in Byzantium, it was associated exclusively with the imperial family. Mosaics from the sixth century show the emperor and empress draped in its magnificence. In some exceptional cases, the same honour was extended to sacred texts, especially gospel books. In several manuscripts from the same period, pages of parchment were stained ‘royal purple’ and their texts were written in gold, and sometimes silver, as if the words were directly transcribed from a transcendental source without ever being uttered in the world.

The Holy Land resonates with these elusive qualities, evoking a depth in time and majesty, just as it evokes a depth in space. It is a feeling for these depths that Muntarbhorn seeks to address in his viewers. But while the works are solemn, they are not grave. Rothko’s descent into darkness was paralleled by his descent into depression and eventual suicide, but Muntarbhorn’s work never signifies a metaphorical loss of light. On the contrary it is made of light, and constitutes a free meditation on graded zones of luminosity: indeed, by working on the same image in both positive and negative form, it explores the iconic effects of darkness and light equally - contemplating the act of seeing itself. Having said that, in some ways his images also resemble what one sees when one’s eyes are closed - a faint suggestion of light filtered through the blood of one’s eyes. As such, they also belong to an innately interior and living world; or, given that they sometimes resemble nebulae - an infinite number of stars and suns, both rising and eclipsed - perhaps an inner ‘universe’ might be more apt? Rich in imaginative associations, but also in the immediacy of sensation, Muntarbhorn’s work suggests that when sacred space expands, distant times and places can become included in the monumental moment of presence. Everywhere becomes The Holy Land.

© All rights reserved
Using Format