Tuck Muntarbhorn

“Light is the wound that does not hurt – it opens you, and in its absence, you find what remains.” – Tuck Muntarbhorn

Tuck Muntarbhorn (b. 1994, Bangkok, Thailand) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist working across photography, painting, textiles, performance and installation. Their practice is organised around two key signatures – light, embodied as the sun, and shadow, embodied as the artist’s silhouette cast across the ancient sites they inhabit – exploring the “in-between” (ma) as a spiritual and material force connecting body, memory, and place. Descended from lineages of pioneering surgeons and fashion designers, Muntarbhorn treats art as “meditations, surgery and the clothing of the soul”.

Rooted in photographic pilgrimage – Thai temples, Egyptian pyramids, the Dome of the Rock – Muntarbhorn uses long-exposure film to arrest light as a “burning memory”: radiant, irreversible and charged with the weight of ritual and time. Presented as both colour positive and negative photographs, these works enact a threshold between presence and absence through opposing fields of colour. Reworked with oil paint applied using surgical instruments, or combined with Thai textiles from the artist’s family lineage to create installations, they accumulate in layers that recall the trembling planes of Mark Rothko – colour that ceases to be descriptive and becomes atmospheric, emotional and enveloping.

In 2021, Muntarbhorn developed Tuck Chapel in the United Kingdom as a permanent site for works centred on the Dome of the Rock, located near the hospital where the artist’s grandfather – Thailand’s first open-heart surgeon – held his first surgical post in 1942. In 2025, Tuck Bangkok, a newly constructed Thai architectural temple on the artist’s ancestral land, extended the project eastward. Together, the two sites constitute an East-West portal where light and shadow are not opposites but partners: an eternal cycle of presence, absence and the healing that lives between them.