Narong Tintamusik

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CV + Exhibition History

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Recent Exhibition:

October 19 - November 23, 2024.

limina, lumina,,

Lindsey Harald-Wong, Narong Tintamusik, Catherine Menard, Daniel Schubert, October Anderson, Mayolo Figueroa, Kento Saisho

Location: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (4478 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, 90016).

Type: Group Exhibition.

Documentation:

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Release:

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Bio

Narong Tintamusik (ณรงค์ ตินติ ตมุสิมุ กสิ) is an artist and curator based in Dallas, TX. His work is autobiographical, mining elements from his second-generation Thai-American upbringing, Queer identity, Buddhist spirituality, and previous career in the biological sciences. Working within the painting and its iterations, he uses his Thai heritage to imagine an ancestral future to survive against society's current biopolitics. His works ask us to reconsider and revise the infrastructure surrounding contemporary modes of living, such as the overconsumption of ultra-processed food, waste colonialism, and cultural assimilation.

Born in Dallas, TX, he lived in Bangkok, Thailand, for ten years. His parents firmly persuaded him not to major in art in college, so he obtained his undergraduate biology degree from the University of Texas at Dallas with a minor in visual arts in 2014. After working in the environmental science industry for seven years, he decided to follow his dreams to study art thoroughly. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Texas. He is grateful to have studied and worked in a different field like science since it encouraged him to find new variables to enter his work continually.

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My research envisions a dystopian future shaped by human-induced environmental collapse, where survival depends on a return to cultural traditions. Through paintings, sculptures, and wearable art, I critique systems like overconsumption of ultra-processed foods, waste colonialism, and cultural assimilation. I am focusing on Thai food and the sustenance it provides to us physically and spiritually, while reflecting on my experience as a second-generation Thai-American.

In an imagined world where fresh ingredients are scarce, people have to rely on preserved foods passed down from ancestors and become largely nomadic. My interdisciplinary art explores the movement of food through bodies and landscapes, using materials like Thai ingredients, wastewater, plastic, wood, acrylics. By envisioning a desolate future using Thai food as a medium, my artworks serve as a warning and encourage us to rethink what future generations will inherit. They also inspire new ideas to revise our collective future for the better.

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A note Tapes IV (November 2024\ limina, lumina,, )

A loose kernel of this group exhibition is an uncertainty of insides and outsides—or limits and hollows—when following a passage through or between, rather than beginning with fixed positions and established borders that teach inherited structures of bodily orders built on projective planes. Handed these Vitruvian proportions, any difference between inside and outside is measured along distances between visibles and invisibles. Limina are placed outside,, lumina are too internal to tell.

You’ll see it if you’re looking: a limen is often referenced as a kind Heideggerian threshold, while lumina are less-often remembered as part of this structure: a lumen is a kind of tunnel, and a necessary consequence of any limits or boundaries—of any skin, shell, or husk. But this cut between a surface and whatever it seals or conceals is often misplaced and only a threshold is addressed as if I approach it from one side, even though it could never be the starting-point of anything if it weren’t also an end, a horizon. (After all, a limen is only a threshold in the sense of something beginning to be sensed as a disturbance or intensification—or as a recognition or cognizance of a change of state: but its gone as soon as it takes place… it’s already on to the next one. So it’s so much a matter of internal or external space, but of the timing of a passing or a flux.)

A lot of these fixations of bodies and places are results of assuming that looking and becoming are the same activity—that what I see is what I get, and how I’m seen is what I am. But looking begins with a hole: I see myself as extremities along a luminous puncture (with no way to see my face or find my whole, my gestalt, without reflection or imagination). “I” am internalized.

Narong’s work complicates this ‘picture,’ following the esophageal flows of materials as unavoidable processes of a body’s need for consumption. With Digestate 6, I am literally brought into the process of digestion, with the hollow of a stomach shown filled with plastics, rice, and Thai food ingredients. An unseen interstice is shown as substance, sustenance. And with Underneath the Skin of My Mother’s Clothing 9, I am brought through every layer of a body simultaneously, from the belly and guts to the intricate patterns of skin or fabric, without ever ending-up either inside or outside.

Eating, looping.

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: