Kay Walkowiak
Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand
March 11 2023 – June 30 2023
Social values form an integral part of the culture of a society. The manner and extent to which they differ and the hopeless desire to measure them, form one of the central themes of Kay Walkowiak’s work. His interest in cultural attitudes towards abstract concepts such as the passing of time, or the value of art and craftsmanship, has led him to turn to Asia for inspiration. Walkowiak is particularly interested in the concept of mastery; in Japan and China, it is traditionally considered the highest achievement to bring one's artistic work to a point that it becomes comparable with that of the 'master'. In many parts of Asia, the collective stands above the individual, and as a result, artisanal precision is valued more highly than individual style. The opposite is the case in Europe, where individualism – the creation of something new in a break with tradition – has been adopted as the decisive marker for 'great' art.
For his solo exhibition at the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Walkowiak produced a new film titled Neon Ghost in collaboration with Thai performance artist Teerawat Mulvilai. An extensive monograph of Walkowiak’s practice will be published following the exhibition and made available to a wide audience in South East Asia.
The work of Kay Walkowiak (born 1980 in Salzburg, Austria) combines installation, sculpture, video and photography to explore the historical and socio-political handling of form within art. His work has most recently been shown at the Vienna Biennale for Change and at the 4th Mediterranean Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions of his work were shown at Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, and MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.
Phileas has previously supported an exhibition of Walkowiak in 2018 for the 1st Lahore Biennale in Pakistan.
