Sunday Open House - Art Exhibition, Tea Ceremony and Dance

Spend a relaxing Sunday afternoon in the gallery with "Drawing the dances" exhibition by the artist, Ong Nitipat Pholchai. Ong will share with you about his work over tea and there will be some drawing games. We will have professional tea masters Ying Yang, providing free Chinese and Taiwanese tea ceremony 🍃 For everyone who already loves high quality tea and the feelings it creates. If you are new to it, here’s a great opportunity to taste it and maybe start a new graceful and healthy hobby. 🥰 We welcome you to come, share tea, stories & quali-tea time Together. Location "Our House Chaloklum": https://goo.gl/maps/e6NScVWEcsue35GX9 Program: 12.30 - Doors open 13.00 - 14.00 Artist Talk 14.00 - 16.00 *** Tea Ceremony *** 14.00 - 17.00 Drawing games / Dancing Artwork also available for sale. ****************************************** Drawing the Dances (2021-2022) Artist Statement: During the period of sharing contact improvisation to diverse audiences in Bangkok in 2018-2019, I became increasingly fascinated by the process of people’s documentation of their personal dance experience. Perhaps it’s also my desire and curiosity to uncover/recover the lost art of dance and embodiment among city people. In Thailand, dance and art are commonly seen as cultural heritage, usually formally-codified by the nationalization agenda, meant to be preserved or commercialized into a tourist commodity. However, I was basically hoping that documenting dance together may help with writing dance histories in our own terms together and perhaps transmitting our experience of common people dancing together. During a 6-month dance project called “WE” (2019) that I collected a comprehensive documentation produced by participants, the process has opened up in me psychological and semantic dimensions of dance–multiple layers underneath and beyond the visual form. This prior observation about dance documentation has reflected back at me a question (as artist/choreographer), how do I now see/unsee dance for myself? And then how should I express it now in my drawing/documenting as an artist? What if I were to include the aspects of dancing beyond the visuals, semantics or narratives inside a documentation in a way that may keep and reflect its aliveness. What if I draw as if I am dancing? How can I sustain the potentialities of movement in the drawing the same way I dance contact improvisation? The key principle I investigated in this work is then about re-considering drawing not as image-making but about becoming aware of the traces and gestures as we move in space, while at the same time recognizing the form-forming process–an emergence and becoming of figures. The drawings on display in this exhibit were performed during CI jams of Koh Phangan CI community, beginning during Thailand CI conference 2021 up until early 2022. The approach I used to record varies from relational mark-making, capturing moments/events of energetic interactions, witnessing atmosphere, decomposing anatomical figures and relinquishing my attachment to faces, forms and emotional projections. Recently, I have started to involve technology of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help me re-imagine dancing bodies. - Ong Nitipat Pholchai/Spine Party Movement is a dance artist/physicist/ educator.