The Hugo Boss Prize and Silapathorn Award winner and an associate professor at Columbia University spends his time in New York, Berlin, Bangkok and Chiang Mai, creating and teaching conceptual art.

When I was a young artist, I saw some films about different artists, and they helped formulate how I think about art and being an artist.

Right now I’m filming 12 artists for my documentary film. Most of them are Europeans from my generation who are fairly well-known in the West. I was hoping that what they do, how they think about art and how they live could be inspiring for art-lovers as well as people in general.

I think film is an easier medium to disseminate, to send out as information. It’s more accessible than a lot of other arts. It’s important, especially in the world we are in now, to think about media. Many artists now also do videos or get involved with other forms of art that can be dispersed in different ways.

I don’t think of art for art’s sake; art is for life’s sake.

I think art is a space that people can use. It’s a space where you can be freer than a lot of other spaces.

There are quite a lot of art spaces I like in Bangkok. I like the express boat that goes up the river from here to Nonthaburi. I like the khao tom kitchen on Charoen Nakorn Road. Even something like MBK is a good art space, because if you look carefully, you can see a lot of art in it.

Art is an experience and the experience can be good or bad.

People who don’t understand art don’t get that art is a space for them to use, for them to be free. I know it’s not easy to be free.

I often like to tell my students not to make art. I say, “Don’t work very hard to be an artist.” Art is not just made out of information, it is made from experiences.

Experiences come from the world, but you have to live “in” the world to understand that. If you spend all your time in school, you will never know.

I deconstruct what I’m looking at. I just saw War of the Worlds by Steven Spielberg. But the original was first made in the 50s.

I just read a book, and I recommend it to everyone who reads BK. It’s called From Easy Riders to Raging Bull. It’s a brief history of Hollywood and young film directors who tried to fight against the old system. I like the fact that they invented something new. The changes happened during a short period of time, before Hollywood went back to making blockbuster films.

It’s interesting because you are introduced to different directors and see how they are all friends. Steven Spielberg is very commerical, but he’s a good friend of Martin Scorsese, who is more alternative.

This is the nature of the alternative and the mainstream: they fight and feed off each other. The alternative makes new ideas for the mainstream and the mainstream makes money from the alternative. It’s like a cycle of life.

I hope I’m just in-between. I’m not alternative, nor am I mainstream. The middle should always be moving, though; it shouldn’t stay still. 

My goal is to stop looking. In a way, human nature dooms you to always be looking. But how to use or not use what you see is what keeps you ahead.

I started the project The Land with many friends. We all wanted to find a place where we could meet and think or just be alone with our thoughts.

It’s styled by a group of artists, but the space is quite open to different people and ideas. At the moment, The Land is starting its second program called The One Year Project #2, for young thinking people who want to go and live on this piece of land and try to survive on what they have and to make art, write or do the things they want, away from what they are used to.

I get nothing from The Land, profit-wise. But we hope you get to know yourself better, get to understand what you want to do with your life and come away with more ideas than when you walked in.

The arm? Oh, I fell off a horse.