Jakkai Siributr creates unique forms. His assemblages of fabrics, tchotchkes, beads, and personal memorabilia immediately prompt questions about the reasons for a play with both the experiential and iconic. The artist grew up on what have been described as the ‘spirit-filled’ streets of Bangkok. There is an everyday animism to be found in the Thai capital: all the spirit-houses and shrines, the devotional offerings of coke bottles as well as ornate garlands, the glittering temples, and saffron-robed trees. A superstitious use of magical talismans, from amulets to tattoos, is widespread in his home country. This is one context with which to consider Siributr’s exceptional methods within contemporary art. Such an environment allows for a range of materials and forms to be understood as touched by the otherworldly. A resource for an artist, if you will.

Siributr’s first exhibition with Silverlens Torrents of Rain is an exhibition about how loss and grief never truly fade. Memories persist, and carry a discomforting sense of the uncanny, personal and political. Animism has been described as not a belief but a boundary-making, or boundary-defense, practice. This can be understood in many ways: between an insistence on the real against the fictional, the rational versus irrational, the definitive self and Other, and more. Siributr, like many of his lauded contemporaries such Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Sakarin Krue-On, or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, meld boundaries between. Their works are not merely observed but whelming. The otherworldly breaks through.

Works included build on the artist’s increasing excavation of his aristocratic family’s history. An earlier installation titled 18/28: the Singhaseni Tapestries (2017-18), named after the family street address, emerged from the experience of Siributr’s mother passing in 2015 and included her clothes in large tapestries. But studying her extensive diaries, he gained a portrait not only of an individual but many other past lives in the family. And how those lives intersected with the troubled past of the country’s road to modernity. Military coup d’etats and deadly civilian protests are mentioned. One of the family’s relatives haunts the secret political histories of Thailand, judicially executed in the 1950s for purported involvement with the death of King Rama VIII, the proceedings that secured his accusation have nevertheless been described as a kangaroo court.

Even Rain Becomes Cloud (2026) depicts the artist’s ancestors and other beloveds in the form of amulets, Golden (2026) and 8:00AM (2026) are portraits of Siributr’s parents, while 1951 (2026) references the year his home was built and is based on a photograph of an inaugural family gathering. The tapestries provide dignity and integrity to those who lived with the stigma that came with above chapter of Thai history, insistent and demanding in their presence. Clothes of the artist’s parents continue to be used and the constructed images of both celebrate their interests and achievements: his father’s graduation from a US university and their mutual love of tennis. The figures are out-sized and powerful because the fabrics evoke the haptic; tactility as well as faint scents that bring the past to now.

Joan Didion’s famed memoir The Year of Magical Thinking explored how the experience of loss is one where we build defenses against finality, we “irrationally” imagine about the return of the past, and, prosaically, don’t know what to yet do with our beloved’s belongings. To think magically is to wish the inevitable and factual away. Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings, close to the artist, argue how death is not the end. Another writer on grief, about the deceased, elaborated how she couldn’t bear to ‘let stuff go’ but also felt suffocated by it - and even panicky about it. Torrents of Rain materializes this, and the very definition of the uncanny as pernicious but also, oddly, comforting. In these respects, Siributr’s artworks are not merely autobiographical but contribute to the terms by which we can memorialize. Didion wrote of ‘the vortex effect,’ the disorienting impact by which loss can be triggered by the allegedly mundane or happenstance experience of what we shared with who we lost. For example, when friend’s mother died, my friend stripped the room of its wallpaper. Is this an act of boundary-making or boundary-defense? But divisions are fragile. What goes away? What haunts?

Deterioration, illness, and loss belong to bigger contexts. Other contexts are always there to remind us of the socialized quality of death or passing. Siributr’s Yellow Fever (2021) and Black Death (2021) conjure the greater contemplation of loss because of the artist’s emphasis on physical racial features in regard to the recent calamity of Covid-19 and longer, racialized, histories of virus and disease. We can recognize the understandings that certain types of bodies are subject to and others aren’t. But, following queer theorist Kadji Amin, rather than “divining” the meaning of a given form, form can be created to do things: disrupt social patterns, change conventional historical progression and allow a more performative process of interpretation.

Sirbutr’s works demand a critical context that can account for his breaching of the traditional norms of art and craft practices: a refusal of regional specificity – as if he and compatriots were only symptomatic of cultural context – or a questioning of easy categorization that is not reducible to nativist or folksy interest. He allows, or encourages, us to look anew at art that claims a distinction within the processes of making and in terms of meaning. This is a matter of overcoming conditioned responses and, following Amin, categories can take a back seat to affect, feel and style. All the more compelling when the experience of personal loss is at stake.

Words by Brian Curtin

Jakkai Siributr (b. 1969, Bangkok, Thailand; lives and works in Bangkok and Chiang Mai) is one of Southeast Asia’s leading contemporary artists, working primarily with textiles. Through intricately handmade tapestries, quilts, and installations, he responds to contemporary and historical social issues in Thailand and beyond.

Siributr studied Textile and Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, and Printed Textile Design at Philadelphia University, USA. His exhibitions include Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2012); Exploring the Cosmos: The Stupa as a Buddhist Symbol, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore (2013); Displaced: The Politics of Ethnicity and Religion in the Art of Jakkai Siributr, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2017); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy (2018); Spectrosynthesis II, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2019); Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2022); Matrilineal, 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok (2023–2024); and Everybody Wanna Be Happy, CHAT, Hong Kong (2023–2024). In 2024, he participated in the 15th Gwangju Biennale in the Thailand Pavilion.

Siributr’s long-term collaborative project There’s no Place was featured in The Spirits of Maritime Crossing, an official collateral event of the 2024 Venice Biennale presented by the Bangkok Art Biennale. In November 2024, the project was presented at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, where it surveyed his practice and transformed one of the museum’s core collection galleries into its latest iteration. In 2026, the exhibition traveled to Canal Projects, New York.

In 2025, Siributr participated in All Directions: Art That Moves You, the inaugural exhibition of FENIX museum, the Netherlands; the London Design Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Setouchi Triennale, Japan. He also presented the solo exhibition Jakkai Siributr: Cultura (im)materiale at Murate Art District, Florence. That year, he was an honouree at the Hirshhorn and Smithsonian Artist x Artist Gala in New York.

His works are held in public collections including FENIX museum, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, USA; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, USA; the Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey; and the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, among others.