Tang Contemporary Art is excited to present the solo exhibition Asynchronous Affinities by renowned Thai artist Gongkan at the Wong Chuk Hang space in Hong Kong from March 22 to May 14, 2025.

Asynchronous Affinities marks a new phase in Gongkan’s creative practice, exploring displacement to challenge social norms, cultural codifications, and moral values while nurturing transcultural interconnections and individual development. The exhibition invites viewers to explore the poetics of in-between frontiers, gaps, and links across cultures and generations, as well as the interstices of sexual and gender diversities.

The initial impulse of this solo show relates to the concept of “Right Person / Wrong Time”, reflecting misaligned affinities. As a Thai artist with Chinese cultural roots facing global discrimination and social changes, Gongkan aims to engage audiences in introspection about personal and collective emotions, expanding possibilities for individual and social relations.

Gongkan’s creations combine ambiguous social situations—celebrating, crying, polluting, dining—generating narratives rich with contradictions and paradoxes. For example, a majestic golden Thai temple prang tops a silver unidentified object in black cosmic space, and a birthday cake transforms into a smoke-polluting factory. His art offers visitors various ways to experience struggles related to oppression and isolation while fostering altruistic relationships.

Gongkan has developed a unique oeuvre depicting a boy as a representation of himself alongside multi-gendered and multiracial figures passing through teleportation holes, creating interconnections between dreamlike cosmic spaces, cross-cultural contexts, and natural elements. His “teleport art” has gained international recognition, featuring striking minimal patterns, simplified figures, and a subtle color palette. Spherical shapes—like planetary rings, rainbows, and balloons—serve as contact zones and fields of energy, expressing resistance, sadness, eroticism, and criticality.

Gongkan’s painting technique layers deep, transitioning colors and pushing painting to its limits. This approach makes tangible the paradoxical experience of a deep virtual imaginary that feels real and profound while also transforming daily life into an extraordinary journey.

In dialogue with his paintings, Gongkan created a trans-mutating assemblage of human and non-human components, such as a Buddha hand with a robotic arm holding a rose. These elements are linked through teleportation holes, presenting a whole transitioning entity rather than mere anatomy.

Expanding his artistic exploration of social and cultural critique, Gongkan has conceived a new installation featuring a Chinese table with a motorized center tray and culinary utensils for presenting “dishes” made of artifacts that reflect our consumption society: fast fashion clothes knotted like a bun, noodles made from magazine strips, and stacked CDs resembling Peking duck wraps. Through this unexpected installation, Gongkan raises profound questions about Asynchronous Affinities that affect individuals and profoundly impact people’s lives amid cultural and economic growth, gaps, clashes, overlaps, and interrelations. Like many Thai people, Gongkan has deep Chinese roots from the Teo Chew community. Such transcultural links are vital for understanding the complexity of cultural diversities and the paths for young Asian generations to navigate their lives while addressing family and cultural gaps, gender differences, and rapid economic and digital growth in pan-Asian and global contexts.

The touching video Confinements to Expectation (2020) will also be shown, depicting the artist cutting ropes that tie him to his father, evoking complex emotional responses of bond, trust, and separation.

In Gongkan’s art, shapes and colors serve as transformative components, allowing practices of passage and transition. They refer to suspended planets, crying eyes, or fluffy cakes, acting as “contact zones” traversed by intimate emotions and power dynamics.

Gongkan, rather than promoting fixed identities and stereotypes about who “I am” or “who I have to be”, is creating and sharing a daring and generous “art of becoming”.

WITH… you ~ people ~ bonds ~ heart ~ cultures ~ sex ~ nature ~ infinity ~ love…
OUT… of limits / frontiers / space / codes / time / identity / walls / exclusion…

Opening Reception
Saturday, March 22, 2025 | 3 – 6 PM

Address
Unit 2003-08, 20/F, Landmark South, 39 Yip Kan Street, Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM

Artist
Gongkan

Curator
Larys Frogier

Exhibition Dates
March 22 – May 14, 2025

Website
https://www.tangcontemporary.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/tangcontemporaryart/

Contact
info@tangcontemporary.com.hk 

About Artist

GONGKAN
b. 1989, Thailand

Graduating from Kasetsart University Laboratory School in 2007 and from Silpakorn University, Faculty of Decorative Arts, in 2011, Kantapon Metheekul, better known as Gongkan, currently works and resides in Bangkok, Thailand. After graduating from Silpakorn University, the artist moved to New York City, where he spent 3 years working in the creative departments of advertising agencies. In his spare time, he created street art and illustrations centered on the idea of him being transported through time and space to his homeland. Gongkan’s work, which he named “Teleport Art”, gained notoriety in the New York street art scene and later in Bangkok. The element of time is a predominant concept in Gongkan’s paintings: a surrealistic realm populated with peculiar portals and human figures in groups or isolation, realized with graphic flatness. Despite the serenity fostered by the soft color palette and smooth application, the atmosphere is occasionally disrupted by the sharp incision of black on the canvas. Through presenting different visions of the present times or rewriting the past, the artist creates alternate realities in the process.

His selected and recent solo exhibitions include “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, X Museum Beijing, (China, 2024); “No Heart Here”, Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen, (China, 2024); “No Heart Here”, MOCA Bangkok, Bangkok, (Thailand, 2024); “Monsters in You”, Over the Influence, Los Angeles (US, 2023); “Public but Private”, Tang Contemporary Art, Seoul (Korea, 2023); “Inner Place” Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (China, 2022); “Gongkan: For Someone Who Hates the Rainbow”, Over the Influence, Paris (France, 2022); “Introspection”, Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok (Thailand, 2021); “Tip of the Iceberg”, Over the Influence, Los Angeles (US, 2021); “Yestertedaytomorrow”, River City Bangkok, Bangkok (Thailand, 2019), etc. Selected group exhibitions include: “Post-me Generation: How to write about young artists”, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (China, 2022); “Group show: Falling”, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (China, 2022); “Art Macao: Macao International Art Biennale 2021”, Macao Museum of Art (Macao, 2021); “Retrospective Utopia”, Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok (Thailand, 2020); “Pollution”, River City Bangkok, Bangkok (Thailand, 2020), etc.

About Tang Contemporary Art

Tang Contemporary Art was established in 1997 in Bangkok, later establishing galleries in Beijing, Hong Kong, and most recently in South Korea and Singapore. The gallery is fully committed to producing critical projects and exhibitions to promote contemporary art regionally and worldwide, also encouraging a dynamic exchange between artists and those abroad. Acting as one of the most progressive and critically driven exhibition spaces in Asia, the gallery strives to initiate dialogue between artists, curators, collectors, and institutions working both locally and internationally. A roster of groundbreaking exhibitions has earned them international recognition, establishing their status as a pioneer of the contemporary art scene in Asia.

Acting as one of the most progressive and leading galleries in Asia, Tang Contemporary Art represents numerous internationally renowned artists, including Ai Weiwei, Huang Yongping, Adel Abdessemed, Joana Vasconcelos, Julio Le Parc, Chun Kwangyoung, Sakarin Krue-on, Heri Dono, and etc. The gallery also cooperates with numerous established artists of diverse nationalities and prominence like Nam June Paik, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Niki de Saint Phalle, and AES+F and strives to promote emerging artists including Zhao Zhao, Jonas Burgert, Jigger Cruz, and more.

Tang Contemporary Art has also attended numerous art fairs each year to promote its represented artists globally, including Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze New York, Expo Chicago, The Armory Show, Art Geneve, KIAF, Taipei Dangdai, Shanghai Westbund, and more to encourage a dynamic exchange between Chinese artists and those abroad.

(Text and images courtesy of Tang Contemporary Art)