ลมๆแล้งๆ/ plain·song

Sorawit Songsataya

February 22 – April 19, 2026

 

 

ลมๆแล้งๆ/ plain·song is an exhibition by Sorawit Songsataya that brings together new and ongoing bodies of work developed from the artist's long-term research on aurality, sonic ecology, and the tactile traces of sonic memories and experiences. Thinking through the conceptual, textural, and regenerative potentials in discarded scores and residues of acoustic acts, ลมๆแล้งๆ/ plain·song explores what cultural theorist bell hooks described as “spaces of vocally absences… where counter-language may emerge; a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.”

 

Presenting as multiple excerpts from a larger body of work currently still in development, ลมๆแล้งๆ/ plain·song begins with a portrait of a jackfruit tree. Traditionally used as the main body of the Khim instrument, jackfruit wood provides a clear and resonating sonic quality and is also considered an auspicious material in Thai belief systems. Filmed with a swirly bokeh lens, in RAW_Jackfruit_unedited, the surrounding trees’ leaves transformed into bubble-like shapes, shimmering and vibrating, conjuring the unsound, the not-yet audible. Including the unedited sound of the artist behind the camera, the work abandons the forwarding of narrative, and instead stays, being present and face-to-face with the trees; greeting, learning, listening.

 

Adjacent to the video work, almost encased in a vitrine-like cabinet, hung a series of bare and bent rattan vines that reimagined and reminisced the staves––the five horizontal lines (with its predecessor version having four lines) developed by Guido d'Arezzo (990–1050) that is now commonly used in Western musical notation system. Accompanied by a couple of textural handmade papers on the wall, Voice Break materialised, deconstructed, and re-spatialised remnants of acoustic acts; a kind of failed performance, or a complete disruption to a score of an otherwise.

 

Transferring still images of swirly ‘leaf-bubbles’ from the video work into printed patterns, Lichens, textured by the artist’s hands are grafted onto the gallery’s supporting pillars, soundlessly morphing and mutating. The lichen-like shapes made from paper pulp tease the boundaries between material and surface, rethinking and repurposing the use of paper in relation to the history of sheet music. Here, the surface becomes form, with the wave-like ridges representing and archiving the remains of a sonic act.

 

Around the far corner of the building, a looped sequence displays on a holographic LED fan. pulse contains fragments of trees and plants recorded at a private garden belonging to a musical instrument maker. The sequences ruminate on the wider, gentler ecology of sound, considering the slower process of the becoming of sound. Positioned by the windows with visible perching tree branches nearby, the work calls in the rhythm from the lively world outside, feeding the visual echoes back into the gallery.

 

Tucked away in the inner space of the gallery are two Listening device sculptures. First developed in 2024, the initial idea was for people to take the sculpture for a walk, to listen to the rhythmic, irregular contours of the land as the device traverses and generates impact sounds with the ground. Vibrating, impacting, and resonating sounds generated from the device become a sonic and bodily encounter with land––a meeting and greeting point with place. Listening device proposes another embodied sonic experience that blurs the boundaries between biology, geography, and ecology.

 

ลมๆแล้งๆ/ plain·song proposes the unsound and the silenced as imaginative modes of resistance, questioning the demands and motives in making quiet realms loud and transparent. The variety of media presented in the exhibition coexist to imagine a kind of experimental graphic notation, in which the audience’s body engages conceptually and physically throughout the gallery space in the listening and playing of an inaudible composition. The exhibition evokes the unseen and the unheard, not as forms of inertia nor passivity, but as a possible score of solidarity and a quiet attunement.

 

 

 

About the artist: Sorawit Songsataya

 

Drawing from material cultures, situated knowledge, and ecological belief systems related to Thai, distant Vietnamese family heritage, and Aotearoa New Zealand; the artist’s home for 25 years, Sorawit Songsataya's practice foregrounds the interrelated aspects of the social and the dynamic natural world through a range of material specificities, including Ōamaru limestone, rattan, and Chanthaburi sedge. Giving particular attention to Thai artisanship while drawing sonic and geopoetic connections to Aotearoa New Zealand, the artist deploys 3D animation, moving image, sculpture, site-responsive installation, and sound to explore the complex relationship between places and experiences; addressing positionality, relationality, and reciprocity – commingling the personal and the planetary dimensions within their artistic care.

 

Sorawit's recent exhibitions include pure intention, Singapore Biennale (2025); Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world, Bundanon Art Museum (2025); Image Economy, Monash University Museum of Art (2024); Seeing in the Dark, Busan Biennale (2024); The Charge That Binds, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2024); Fibrous Soul, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (2024); Orbiting Body, Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre (2024); Nature and State, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022); Thinking Hands, Touching Each Other, the 6th Ural Industrial Biennial (2021); The Interior, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2019). They were artist in residence at the Singapore Art Museum (2024), Gasworks, London (2023), the IASPIS in Stockholm (2018), and the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, University of Otago (2022).

 

 

 

Work list

 

RAW_Jackfruit_unedited, 2026

16:9 HD video, colour and sound

07:38 min. loop

 

Voice Break, 2026

Rattan vine, UV print on handmade paper

Dimension variable

 

Lichens, 2026

UV print on handmade paper

Dimension variable

 

pulse, 2026

Digital video, LED holographic fan, colour silent

14:50 min. loop

 

Listening device, 2026

Rattan vine, Windowpane oyster shell, brass wire, acrylic bead

850 x 850 mm. Each

 

 

Acknowledgement: 

 

STORAGE programme is supported by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture (Fiscal Year 2026)

 

Photo: Atelier 247 

Installation: Paraform Studio 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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