Tuck Muntarbhorn
Tuck Muntarbhorn (b. 1994, Thailand) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist working across photography, painting, textiles, performance and installation. Raised between Thailand and the United Kingdom, their practice explores light and the generative space of the “in-between” (ma) as both spiritual and material forces connecting body, memory and place. Descended from lineages of pioneering surgeons and fashion designers, Muntarbhorn brings together the languages of incision and stitching – treating art as what they describe as “surgery to clothe the soul”.
Their practice often begins with photographic pilgrimages to ancient sacred sites – from Thai temples and Egyptian pyramids to the Dome of the Rock – using long-exposure film to capture light as what the artist calls a “burning memory”. The resulting images are frequently presented as both colour positive and negative photographs, articulating a threshold between presence and absence through opposing fields of colour. These photographs and their silhouettes are sometimes reworked with oil paint applied using surgical instruments or combined with Thai textiles drawn from the artist’s fashion lineage, forming contemplative installations that explore healing through the meeting of material, ritual and light.
In 2021, Muntarbhorn acquired land and a former chapel in the United Kingdom, developing Tuck Chapel into a permanent site for presenting their photographic works of the Dome of the Rock. These installations evoke the meditative paintings in Mark Rothko’s chapel in Houston while grounding the project in personal history, located near the hospital where the artist’s grandfather – Thailand’s first open-heart surgeon – held his first surgical post in 1942. In 2025, the project was extended with Tuck Bangkok, a newly constructed Thai architectural temple on land belonging to the artist’s grandfather in Thailand. Together these sites form an East-West portal: an ongoing investigation of the “in-between” of memory and place between two continents, inviting visitors into spaces for healing and reflection on the memories that continually shape the cycle of life.