Gongkan

Bangkok, advertising, New York

Kantapon Metheekul, who works under the name Gongkan, was born in Bangkok in 1989 and grew up there. He graduated from the School of Arts at Silpakorn University and went straight into a successful career in advertising and graphic design. That training is visible in everything he has made since: flat colour, confident outlines, compositions built to be read instantly and from a distance.

The turn came when he moved to New York City for three years to study fine art with a focus on painting. In his spare time he made street art across the city and became familiar with the community working there. It was in New York that he found his subject. Watching people striving for a better life, and the daily negotiations around gender equality and ordinary respect, gave the work its content, and the city's underground scene gave it its first audience.

Teleport Art

What he developed there he calls Teleport Art. The device is simple and immediately legible: a flat black circle, a hole cut in the picture plane, out of which figures emerge and into which they disappear, as though travelling through multiple dimensions. Arms reach out of one hole and into another. A figure steps through a portal in a wall and arrives somewhere else entirely.

The holes do a great deal of work. They are an escape route, a passage between identities, and a way of showing two states at once without narrative. Around them he sets symbols drawn from nature, sky, cloud and water, chosen because they are fluid and mutable and stand for freedom of expression and spirit. Other recurring shapes read as black holes, bodies of water or doorways into other realms. The result sits between pop surrealism and graphic design, and it reads as cheerful until you notice how much of it is about wanting to be somewhere or someone else.

He is widely described as a leading figure in the emerging Young Thai Art movement, and he works across painting, sculpture, street art and video installation.

Los Angeles, Bangkok, Beijing and Seoul

His United States debut came with The Tip of the Iceberg at Over the Influence in Los Angeles in 2021, a body of new work made specially for the show and driven by social and environmental concerns. In the same year Tang Contemporary Art gave him a solo exhibition, Introspection, in Bangkok. Tang followed it with Inner Place in Beijing in 2022 and a third solo, Public but Private, in Seoul in 2023.

Over the Influence brought him back to Los Angeles for a second solo, Monsters in You, in 2023. There he traded the black portals for mirrors, so that the viewer's reflection returns transposed into the image of a monster: creatures ranging from eerie little oddlings to ethereal beings to fuzzy beasts closer to pets. He deliberately refuses to make them either wholly angelic or wholly demonic, leaving the viewer to decide whether what lives inside them is friend or foe. It is a continuation of the same themes, transformation, freedom and self discovery, worked through a different device.

The editions

Gongkan's paintings and sculptures are held largely in Asian private collections, and outside Asia most collectors meet the work first through the prints. Transcendence, the print of 2023 catalogued here, belongs to this recent stretch of the practice, when the portals had begun to give way to mirrors and reflections and the mood of the work had darkened somewhat from the bright teleporting figures that first made his name in New York.