New Inventions II, March 2001

Duchampian puns made of street find and garage sale items by Thai artist, Top Changtrakul, were included in New Inventions II. The exhibit displays a series of performances, videos, and objects, through which the public explores the world’s desire for control. Flirts with wishfulness, destiny, one’s inner most desire, past lives, happiness and attainment are frustrated by the artist’s logic of serendipity and fate. Irene Violet Small says, “Issues of longing, uncertainty and access form a major theme of the show, and Changtrakul is most poignant in the inventions which sharply juxtapose a sense of scientific objectiveness with the elusive and seductive realm of the unknown.”

A search to discover the unknown was staged as an inventor’s Bangkok studio and in actions documented throughout Bangkok. At great expense, the entire site of Top’s “inventor’s studio;” drawings, gadgets, and lights were excised and shipped from Bangkok and obsessively recreated for public display at Lance Fung Gallery. The entire gallery space is transformed into an enlarged Thai outhouse in which we find televised solicitations, testimonials, instructions, actions and many inventions with all their successes and failings. New Inventions II returned us to a timeless and playful consciousness where past, present and future are as confused as fact, fiction and faketion.