Nat Setthana

28 Feb

A chiaroscuro deconstruction of photography
By Dương Mạnh Hùng

Artist Nat Setthana at 100 Tonson Foundation. Photos by Preecha Pattaraumpornchai. Image courtesy of 100 Tonson Foundation and the Artist.

Born into a city layered with visual cultures, Bangkok-based artist Nat Setthana took an early interest in using his camera to explore urban landscapes, particularly sites that bear the impact of socio-political shift and commercial gentrification. For him, photography becomes a magical tool that allows him to capture moments of transition and revisit sites to discover hidden things that he has overlooked. Combining his photographic curiosity with an interest in creating site-specific installations, Setthana has experimented with projects that incorporate found elements within a space to excavate, and sometimes bend, its intertwining narratives.

Setthana’s first solo show ‘Photopsia’ (2024-25) at 100 Tonson Foundation marks a significant turn in his conceptual figuration of photography, as he decides to shift his focus on it as a medium to that of a subject. Unpacking the basics of photography, namely projection and perception, he transforms the two exhibition rooms at 100 Tonson into two contrasting realms. One resembles a camera’s black box where the passage of time and light is recorded through a video showing a fabric’s fluttering movement. The other is a blinding white void-space, where overexposure to light triggers photopsia and visual distortion of depth. The artist explores optical disturbance as an experiential medium in space, where one can freely imagine the infinite potentials embedded in an image.

Nat Setthana, ‘Photopsia’, 2024, site-specific installation, quartz, cyclorama room, light, and warning text, variable dimensions. Photo by Preecha Pattaraumpornchai. Image courtesy of 100 Tonson Foundation and the artist.

The white room, inundated with intense white light, thus undergoes an architectural transformation to create Setthana’s desired visual effect. Inspired by the ambience of a photography studio, where emptiness signifies a sense of becoming, the artist tweaks the space’s components to disrupt its boundaries. Eradicating corners and repainting the room in a stark white colour, Setthana creates a site of optical illusion, where its ceiling, walls, and floor seem to meld together, resulting in an endless terra infirma. This void becomes a metaphoric backdrop for thought projection and idea contemplation, which alludes to photography’s function of visualisation and future-figuring.

Nat Setthana, ‘Rendering of thin air (100 Tonson Foundation)’, 2024, site-specific video installation. 1-channel video projecting on wooden screen with black glass, 51 min 45 sec, H 358 x D 26.5 x W 292cm. Photo by Preecha Pattaraumpornchai. Image courtesy of 100 Tonson Foundation and the artist.

Transiting to the black room, which serves as 100 Tonson’s library, Setthana sets up a projection of his video, in which he recorded the movement of sunlight and a hung piece of fabric through the library’s window. As the scenery on screen transitions from pitch darkness to gradual illumination, the fabric continues to flutter in latency, undulating with the movement of air and time. Once more, Setthana draws references from the physical darkroom as well as the etymology camera obscura to gesture toward photography’s time-bending power. The physical transition between these two rooms also resembles the tension between dark and light, that colours not only the technology but also the philosophy behind photography. Setthana’s chiaroscuro installation thus presents a deconstructive way through which photography can be unpacked through space, light, and projection.

Click here to read our dialogue with Nat Setthana, where he discusses his photography practice and Yeast, a multimedia design team he co-founded that specializes in experiential design and immersive installations.