The Intruders Exhibition; Performance & Installation Art Resurrecting Talad Noi’s Chinese Diaspora

We are a group of passionate art students organizing an art installation piece for 2021 Bangkok Design Week. Our piece talks about the Chinese diaspora in Talad Noi that has been over the years been intruded upon by capitalism and Thai nationalism. We want to use our work to talk about tolerance and diversity - creating a space where the audience gets to be comfortable with the uncomfortable.

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The definition of public space is rooted in the themes of inclusivity. One would like to believe that public space is made for the public, accessible to all demographics. In this way, public space goes beyond an architectural structure and becomes a social entity.

However, reflecting on Thailand’s current political climate—with its many divides between generations and political beliefs—we believe that true inclusivity is not a harmonious coexistence but rather embraces the uncomfortable work of navigating between often dissenting perspectives. We want to reimagine the spirit of public space that provides a counterculture to the shallow, complacent version of inclusivity where the needs of minorities are often ignored and are pressured towards conformity in the name of the majority’s comfort. With our piece, we argue that true inclusivity is uncomfortable. That it is messy. But it is also needed.

Our site is an old Chinese house situated in the heart of Talad Noi neighborhood. Inspired by how the Chinese diaspora shaped this area and their double identity as intruders and inhabitants, we use this as a backdrop to create a simulation that encourages the audience to coexist with their discomfort. Originally, the Chinese immigrants that settled by the riverside once felt like intruders to a foreign space. However, with the passage of time and the ritual making of everyday life, they moved from being intruders to being inhabitants—their culture and way of life eventually forming the essence of Talad Noi as we know it today. Despite being a key inhabitant of Talad Noi, their Thainess were called into question due to the wave of Thai nationalism after World War II. This resulted in more pressure to assimilate, leading to the erasure of their subculture such as the rebranding of Chinese schools local in that area.

Inspired by this cultural suppression of the Chinese diaspora, we propose an installation as a counterculture against the shallow definition of inclusivity. We want to offer one that resists the marginalization of the other for the sake of public harmony. To do so, we aim to create an uncomfortable experience wherein the audience gets to expand within their discomfort, explore and be curious about things that seem alien and disorienting to them rather than shying away from it. We hope to reframe the idea of ingroup/outgroup in a space by undermining the thin ambiguous line that differentiates an intruder from that of an inhabitant, showing how one might be both.

Our installation creates this space by resurrecting the traces of the Chinese diaspora in a way that induces disorientation within the viewer. The piece brings together three intruders/inhabitants into the house. First, there is the motif of plant life, which can be seen as the original inhabitant of space until it is displaced by development, transforming into intruders when situated inside the manmade structure. Secondly, there are the performers enacting the role of a Chinese immigrant couple living their traditional lives in the old house. And finally, the audience becomes modern-day intruders witnessing their intimate routines. Our space is meant to be disorienting to the audience, where their understanding of private versus public is raised to question, and they are challenged to explore their discomfort. We hope that this unsettling experience could provide a practice space for tolerance and a vision of coexistence that embraces difference.