→[ Artist Info：Anish Kapoor ]

The video Phantoms of Nabua forms the core of the new exhibition. This is one of the works created for the "Primitive" project that he presented last year at three venues in Europe: Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and FACT Liverpool. Most of Apichatpong's works are set in Thailand, and feature many ordinary people rather than professional actors. Phantoms of Nabua was produced during time spent in Nabua, a small village in the north of Thailand.

Nabua was once a quiet village, home to farming people with no interest in politics, but it was placed under tight military control from the 1960s to the 1980s for suspicion of hosting communist sympathizers. The farmers of Nabua who resisted this unwarranted imposition were assaulted or slaughtered by the army, and those who survived were driven into the jungle. Now that the Cold War is over, Nabua's tragic past has been forgotten, and even the people who live in the village have no interest in the events of only thirty years before. Nabua has an old legend that tells of a widow ghost who abducts all the men and takes them away to the other world. This legend was apparently part of the inspiration behind Apichatpong's work.

The Phantoms of Nabua is set at night in a field in Nabua. Lit by a flickering strip light, teenagers kick a flaming ball around. Eventually the ball hits a projection screen set up in the field, setting the screen alight. The work depicts the dark of the Nabua night, light from the flames and the fluorescent tube, flashes of lightning projected on the screen, and the beam from the projector, together with the silhouettes of the young men blocking the light. The light and dark communicate in this nighttime Nabua field, seemingly portraying memories, history, and legends quietly being extinguished.

→[ Artist Info： Apichatpong WEERASETHAKUL ]

Tomoaki Suzuki takes a traditional approach to creating his works, working with the model in front of him for close examination. As he talks to the model, he holds his carving material in his arms, a method that limits the work to a size that can be comfortably grasped as he carves. This simple, straightforward and representational expressive method garners attention for its unusual appearance amongst the plethora of styles in art today. Suzuki has a very promising future, including a solo exhibition scheduled to tour from the latter half of 2010, with venues primarily museums in England and Italy.

The exhibition at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE presents four of Suzuki's new wooden images. The apparently random, far-flung placement of these small sculptures in the gallery's expansive space creates an installation that, conversely, emphasizes the human presence.

The models for these sculptures include a young girl who spoke of her conviction that she would achieve her dream of become a famous musician, an Italian youth who sells clothes on the street, and a young African who adapts a western business suit in his own distinctive manner. Like Suzuki’s earlier works, these images of young people all appeal to their audience through their flamboyant external appearance.

And yet, these gaudy forms of self-assertion also seem to encompass each model's internal ponderings, such as whether they will really attain their dreams, or whether or not they can find their own place in a foreign country, and even their fears for the future. Each is currently living life to the fullest in the urban environment, but they are all just ordinary people who will probably go on living their lives just as they are now. The artist turns a positive gaze on the lifestyles of his models, and in the process of creating art works from their images, also depicts the situation of contemporary society.

Tomoaki Suzuki's wood sculptures are individual figures with deep expressive power that display not only the people themselves, but also their surrounding environments and their diverse backgrounds. Each silent figure conveys a strong impression to its viewers.

→[ Artist Info： Tomoaki Suzuki ]

In one of his best-known works, The White House (2005-2006), a person is seen entering the White House on the American twenty dollar bill. A short while later, the person starts painting out the building's windows and doors, eventually rendering it entirely window- and door-less, and thus creating an image of the White House as being closed and insulated from the outside world. The video ends with the painter, ladder in hand, walking off the screen. This combination of humorous actions (the painter in the dollar bill) and incisive political critique (the White House out of touch with the world) is typical of Jeon's work, and it has won him many fans at large international art exhibitions, including the inaugural Singapore Biennale.

Born in Busan, Jeon worked in various professions before relocating to London to study at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. As a result of his British education, Jeon's works possess a typically English appeal to logic and cynical humor. They also possess the traits of the young generation of South Koreans who directly experienced the "Seoul Spring" and the related democratic movement that swept through their nation in the early 1980s: the resistance to the powerful, the craving for a better future, and the continued critical stance towards society even after that dream was lost.

The exhibition "Hyper Realism," which was shown in different forms at New York's Perry Rubenstein Gallery in 2007 and South Korea's Arario Gallery in 2008, was a large show that brought together a great number of Jeon's works to date. Jeon initially became famous for his video works, but in fact he is first and foremost a sculptor. In "Hyper Realism," his video pieces were shown at the same time as numerous large sculptures: A portrait of a faceless General Douglas MacArthur, endlessly repeating, "I shall return"; an animation showing people climbing over a fence attempting to escape from North Korea into China; a video work about the famous sculpture, Statue of Brothers at the War Memorial of Korea, in Seoul; a statue of Kim Il-sung made entirely from ground Alupram tranquilizer tablets). The majority of the works involve political and historical elements, but Jeon is not using them to make direct interventions into large historical narratives. Rather, as the artist explains, he is interested in how it is the "individual memories and intentions" that exist in each of our hearts that eventually create the great whirlpool that is history. His work hints that power and myth lie latent in each of our hearts, in every age, and because of them there is a risk that mere personal psychological circumstances could lead to even the most terrible of nightmares becoming a reality.

In this exhibition, the keyword replacing "Hyper Realism" is "Magical Realism" and it influences the entire show. "I want to express the reality of our age through art—and not by some formulaic method," the artist says. "That perspective on reality will be mixed with fantasy and dreams and become transformed into dream-like poetry." Art is always concerned with things that can be seen by the eye and things that cannot; and it is always concerned with the application of delicate metaphors in the places that can be seen to suggest those that cannot. The art that succeeds in connecting with its viewers' hearts and minds is surely the art that speaks a language anyone can understand, that uses elegantly humorous metaphors, tempting viewers with projections of themselves to catch a glimpse of its grand narrative. In the midst of unhappy times, when we might become distracted by power or ambition, the innocent hope and willingness to believe in a dream has the potential to make happier parallel worlds a reality. The title "Bless You" might be a message from Jeon to those contemporaries of his and ours who still have not learned to see that alternate realities really do exist.

→[ Artist Info： Jeon Joonho ]