I’ve just met Mit Jai Inn and am sitting in a bar next to the river trying to digest the rich and curious contents this equal parts peculiar and wise artist from Chang Mai is transmitting. Mit is someone who can be truly inspiring if you pay attention to what’s behind his artwork.
Words are stones, and describing his art – which is more about vibrations, movement and in-between sensations – can prove challenging. Curator Erin Gleeson knows this all too well: his artworks cannot be labelled ‘paintings’ or ‘sculptures’. You simply have to see them, in all their glorious dancing shapes.
But let’s try to get inside Mit’s world, a utopia crafted from bright colours, juxtaposition of endless layers of oil, positivity, spirituality, freakiness and freedom. “His studio is a positive place where there is no suffering, a place where the actual painting is meditation,” says Gleeson, overseeing his exhibition Postpositive: Freaky You Are Always at Sa Sa Bassac until May 11.
Meditation has been part of Mit’s daily routine since he was 15. It’s a practice that’s “all about how to be free… free from problems; from our brains; from information; free from tomorrow,” says the artist. “While painting, I get rid of the negativity of life to be in a state of positivity and balance.”
With my feet bare and eyes tightly closed, I try to follow the artist’s instructions: “Forget about time, just be here now.” The rational Western side of me initially resists, but then I begin to be aware of my whole body as one entity and that’s precisely the way to approach Mit’s work. “See not only with your eyes, but with your whole body,” he encourages.
Despite Mit’s thick, tactile brush strokes and the remarkable weight of his work, his creations have an inner lightness, the levitating essence of poesy and spirituality; the movement of a dance, sometimes strong and vivid like rock ‘n’ roll and other times soft like the silent flap of a butterfly’s wings. “My utopia is here in these layers of light, dancing and vibrating on my canvas.”
Mit is a playful and poetic intellectual, but must not be mistaken for an artist who lives in an artificial bubble made purely of colours and light. As cofounder of Chang Mai Social Installation, Thailand’s first public art programme based on the exchange of disciplines and debates, he’s a man with a deep socio-political conscience. “In Thailand, the propaganda and the suppression operated by the monarchy is very strong, even now. In the ‘90s, some people of my young generation used to meet at the so-called midnight university. We met at night to talk about important issues; it was a form of resistance.”
WHO: Mit Jai Inn
WHAT: Postpositive: Freaky You Are Always art exhibition
WHERE: Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, #18 (second floor) Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: Until May 11
WHY: “The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most” – John Ruskin