Lot 12: Self portrait

PORNPILAI MEEMALAI & JIRADEJ MEEMALAI (b. Thailand 1968 & 1969)
Self portrait
resin
life size

Self Portrait is a combined work by Pornpilai Zou Meemalai and Jiradej Meemalai and it was exhibited at the artists' duo show: Living Together at Ardel Gallery of Modern Art, Bangkok in September 2007. The press release of the exhibition explains the theme of the show "Their work is about visual perception, and the ways in which we experience everyday life by learning from our living condition. They involve methods of personal/social exchanges, interactivity with the viewer within the aesthetic experience being offered to him/her, in their tangible dimension as tools serving to link human together. Their roles as representation convey certain interrelated/contradicted pattern between each individual or human group in our time.

The situations and things from everyday life are taken apart and re-compose to seek the secreted value hidden by the action and conditions allowing us to comprehend something we disregard or invisible thing. The aesthetics value of strong form and imagination reflect forward and backward has brought in subtle understanding that is beyond words or conversation. This aesthetics from ordinary life has become significant not because it reduces contradiction or enhances harmony but it accepts the dialectic and reestablishes each other. Looking back where the problem of living together appear, from there we will discover that the imagination of visible form construct us again. The secret of ultimate value has turned into poem, attractive perfection and beauty, in other word, it becomes sculpture."

Specifically on the Collaborative work's Self-portrait, 2007 the release explains that "(it) takes the form of self-portrait process but interplay by comprising multipart of both portraits in the same one. The Self Portrait sculpture was molded from both artists' portrait and detached into separate parts to study the possibility to reconstruct the portraits fragment into one face within one structure. The matched pieces and the unfitted forms turn into a process for learning on the concept of deconstruction and reconstruction."