Jacky Tsai: Reincarnation, MOCA BANGKOK
Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok

22nd Jun 2023

Reincarnation marked Jacky Tsai’s first solo museum exhibition in Southeast Asia, bringing more than thirty works to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA BANGKOK). Across painting, sculpture, printmaking, textiles and digital art, the exhibition offered an expansive view of a practice that connects Chinese artistic traditions with the imagery and energy of Western pop culture.

The exhibition unfolded through a sequence of pink and pale-blue galleries, circular openings and long sightlines. These architectural frames brought individual works into dialogue across the rooms, while the museum’s generous height and open floors allowed monumental paintings and sculptural installations to be experienced at their full scale.

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Installation view: sculpture and works on the red feature wall.
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Monumental sculpture in dialogue with a panoramic painting.

At the heart of Reincarnation was the possibility of renewal. Tsai’s floral skulls transform a symbol of mortality into an image of growth, with flowers and foliage suggesting that an ending can also contain the beginnings of new life.

Elsewhere, densely populated paintings and surreal encounters between Eastern and Western characters reflected on the uncertainty, isolation and collective experience of the pandemic and its aftermath. Colour, humour and visual abundance opened a space for hope within these unsettled narratives.

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Circular openings connect the pink and pale-blue galleries.
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Layered sightlines frame works across adjoining exhibition spaces.

Material and making were equally central to the exhibition. Sculptural forms, intricate surfaces and richly layered images invited visitors to move between the scale of the room and the detail of an individual work.

Questions of identity also ran through the display. In The Lonely Knitter, a Tibetan carpet depicting the artist at work, Tsai presented himself as both maker and made image: a figure weaving within a surface that was itself woven. Across these shifts in medium and perspective, Reincarnation explored how an artistic language can continually remake itself.

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Paintings and sculptural architecture along the gallery route.
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Reincarnation extends into the museum’s entrance atrium.

Behind the Exhibition

From positioning a panoramic painting to suspending the central sculpture, these installation photographs reveal the practical work behind the finished galleries and the scale of the works within the museum.

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Installing a panoramic painting: the team provides a sense of scale.
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Installing the suspended sculpture in the main gallery.

Exhibition Films

Two films offer a further view of Reincarnation, documenting the exhibition and the work behind its presentation at MOCA BANGKOK.

Bangkok Skull

Bangkok Skull (2023), a monumental lacquer carving on wood panel measuring 350 × 350 cm, was subsequently brought to MOCA BANGKOK. Photographed with the artist in the museum’s entrance hall, the work reveals both its intricate carved surface and its commanding scale within the architecture.

The short film below offers a closer view of the work.