video single channel, 2005 / Color / PAL / 6.48 min. with Audio
CITY: A trip between Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand.
Single-channel video installation, 2010 (the video itself was produced in 2005)
The video is screened on a reflective sticker polka dot pattern.
Screen dimensions: 400×300 cm.
I took a train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai just because I wanted to enjoy the scenery. But I couldn’t enjoy the scenery through the railway window because of the advertising sticker outside. So, I turned the feeling of being annoyed by the advertising dot on the railway’s window into the pretended feeling of enjoying the scenery through dizzy patterns.
My trip this time has given me a question of whether this is a limitation of enjoyment or an opportunity for new enjoyment in Thailand’s capitalist era.
Can advertisements buy or change our locals’ enjoyable scenery? Can I somehow enjoy the doted advertised scenery?
Reviews:
The answer to my question explains my feeling about the gradually changed interior from cityscape to landscape: the scenery has been interpreted into a whistle voice in a deep forest.“The video ‘Dotscape’ refers to a train journey made by the artist from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Her anticipation of the enjoyment of the landscape was marred as she saw that all the windows in the train were covered with the matrix dots of advertising stickers. Will our future enjoyment persist in regarding everything through the grid of advertising?”
Dr. Axel Feuss
From Return Ticket: Thai-Germany’s Catalog
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“This work poses the question: Can advertising and capitalism buy our view of landscapes and change the environment? When the journey begins in Bangkok, you see how advertising changes the cityscape in general. And then when you focus in on the specific advertising matrix, it also changes your view out the window and the whole experience of the train ride. So how should we view this? Where is the critical shift in consciousness?
Then when the train pulls out of Bangkok, it leads you through forest areas, the countryside, and small villages — all the while still through the view of this obstructed window. The soundscape of the work is from a French artist who captured sounds from the forests of Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand and Malaysia. It doesn’t parallel the real sounds outside the train, but it makes sense to me in that it reflects how I dreamt about the forest while going on this journey.
This work has been shown as both a video and an installation piece. I would say that it is much better as an installation because the viewer has a more all-encompassing experience of the space. When you walk around, you experience the patterns and scenery in that moment in time from different angles depending on where you stand. When you are close to the screen, you only see the dots and not the overall image and it’s dizzying. When you step back, you can see the whole landscape more clearly and have a sense of groundedness in the image – each image is in order of what you would view on the train trip from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. However, in a sense, your perceptions and feelings continue shifting as you tag along on this journey of dynamically moving patterns through the landscape.”
Excerpt Sutthirat Supaparinya’s interview from New York Foundation for the Art Newsletter
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Head or Tail from http://www.experimentalconversations.com/reviews/169/head-or-tail/
Review Posted: 08 Oct 08
“In Dotscape, Sutthirat Supaparinya transfigures the diary format: a mechanical buzz accompanies a non-linear series of softly pixilated tableaux. Gerhard Richter’s photo-referenced paintings come to mind. Shapes morph, pulsing with potential; patterns abstract the landscape with the subtlety of chain-link fencing; dots leap or fly. Was that a bird? But there is nothing luminous or even naturalistic about this world; modernity has altered ‘normal’ vision, the visual field reduced to graphic effects. “
written by Phillina Sun
“Annoyed by the interrupted view from the train window
caused by advertising posters, Supapaprinya shows a sequence of blurred landscape images traveling from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, unravelling the threat to the natural landscape and daily life by commercial develop- ment in Thailand.”24HR Art, Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art, Australia, 2009
“While Jung over-sharpened and opened the image, Sutthirat Supaparinya’s Dotscape (2010) obscured vision to call our attention to what and how we see. In this clever video shot on a train in Thailand, where the windows are covered with dot-printed advertising, looking is mediated by the visual noise of marketing, which creates its own pointillist landscape.”
Excerpt from FRIEZE magazine
Issue 147 May 2012
How Physical at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
By Michael Famighetti
“Dotscape” has been shown at
Pallas Studio, Dublin, Ireland; NBK, Berlin, Germany, META, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Episode5, Singapore; C A M E R A / O B S C U R A, Sydney, Australia, Walker Art Center, Minnesota, USA, RADCAT– Roy and Edna Disney/ CalArts Theater, Los Angeles, USA, Lifeboat #2551 at Gallery 4A, Sydney Biennale Parallel Exhibitions; Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Japan (July 09), 24HR Art, Australia (June 09).
– 2010, Return Ticket Thailand-Germany, BACC- Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Bangkok (Curated by Dr. Axel Feuss and organized by Goethe Institute Bangkok on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Goethe Institute in Bangkok) *catalog
– 2011, Disc is Dead, Disco is Alive! (แผ่นดิสก์ตายเเล้ว เเต่ดิสโก้ยังอยู่!), WTF Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand
–2012, Yebisu International Festival for Arts and Alternative Visions, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan*catalog
– 2020, ASEAN Street Foods: Hororok Chopchop Omulomul, Special Exhibition Gallery, ASEAN Culture House 1F, Busan South Korea [15 December 2020 to 11 April 2021] Hosted by ASEAN Culture House, The Korea Foundation. Curated by LIUSHEN
– 2025, 19th Busan International Video Art Festival (BIVAF), Space Heem, Busan, South Korea [September 2–26, 2025]
