Mae Nam

INSTALLATION VIEW “Mae Nam“, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and SAC Gallery.

 

Mae Nam is a culmination of Tsai Kuen-Lin’s artistic residency that immerses the artist into understanding the ways of life owing to nature, and especially the river, of Bangkok and Chiang Mai during his cultural exchange over several months of research. The title Mae Nam literally translates as mother water and it embodies the vastness of nature and captures how the artist sees water as a vessel that carries memory and history.

At SAC Gallery’s Front Room, Tsai continues his series of work, Resonance Relics, which started in 2023, with added layers that combine his sonic exploration with his findings from his time in Thailand. Instead of his usual industrial pipes, which he uses in projects both outdoors (Tianmu Sports Park, Taipei, 2011; Waterloo Arts, Cleveland, 2015; Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, 2016) and indoors (Aqueduct Museum of Hsinchu City, Hsinchu, 2018; Kaohsiung Children’s Museum of Art, 2019), Tsai opts for organic approach, using ceramics that create biocosmic forms – with their own life force and seemingly their own ecology. These ceramics were created entirely in Chiang Mai and are accompanied by local ambience, recorded during the residency. In other words, what Tsai presents through his sculptures are memories and fragments of wind, earth, fire, and water of our locale, solidified by Tsai’s visual practice.

On the walls, Tsai presents small and medium size acrylic paintings and water-based prints of surroundings that he experienced during his time in Thailand. Though they are familiar sceneries, they do not represent specific place or time; rather, they are records of ambience – much like Tsai’s sounds – that evoke codes of memories in our minds.

Together with the works, you are encouraged to scan the QR codes and sense the sounds that are the source of origins of the works as you navigate around the gallery.

At first glance, Tsai Kuen-Lin’s Mae Nam exhibition appears to be vast and disconnected, but just like many rivers that merge into the grand Chao Phraya, Tsai’s works slowly come together to build picturesque environs that offer layers of sounds, visuals, depths, and materiality to offer a new way to understanding the world around us.

We would like to credit our gratitude towards the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan, for supporting this exhibition.

 

INSTALLATION VIEW “Mae Nam“, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and SAC Gallery.

 

INSTALLATION VIEW “Mae Nam“, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and SAC Gallery.

 

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