The themes of life and death are persistently found in artworks across varied cultures and times — an unsurprising observation which speaks to the universality of finitude embedded within the fabric of human experience. Just as commonplace throughout artworks both old and new are themes of immortality, that entanglement of earthly death and eternal life. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsookʼs conceptual film series Two Planets (2008) reproduces these themes; in it, anonymous villagers represent finite human lifespans, contrasting with the endless temporalities of the painted image, immortal in their immutability. The work conjures the meeting of two worlds so disparate yet informing one another, where the tensions and overlaps between finitude and immortality undulate along the current of culture. In this moving image work, we find ourselves onlookers from a perspective that seats us amongst an audience of villagers, before ornately gold-framed Western masterpieces in unconventional outdoor settings across rural Thailand.

A bamboo forest makes the backdrop for Édouard Manetʼs Le Déjeuner sur lʼHerbe (1862) in one scene, and Pierre-Auguste Renoirʼs Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) in another. Jean-François Milletʼs Des glaneuses (1857) is situated on a riverbank next to tall grass, while Vincent Van Goghʼs La méridienne dit aussi La sieste, dʼaprès Millet (1890) is erected in front of a crop field. The villagers chat amongst themselves about the artworks, jovial and light-hearted, unfazed by the strange scene before them. One person comments on how the grass of The Gleaners is all dead in the field. Another responds that itʼs wheat. A person remarks on the apparent laziness of Van Goghʼs painted subject. The group laughs.

The binaries entrenched in this work are many, but it is the originary pairing of life and death that weighs in significance. Other analyses of Two Planets have noted the distinctions between Eastern and Western aesthetics and values, of class division, between high culture and the everyday ... the list could go on. These binaries are accurate and might convey the paired celestial bodies of the workʼs namesake. But throughout each of these couplings, the universality of immortality and its impossibility reverberates resolutely.

“Two Planets: Millet’s ‘Des glaneuses’
and the Thai Villagers”
2008

In other works, Araya has taken on the role of a teacher or a spirit guide for the recently deceased, presented through video works where she addresses a room of six corpses covered in cloth (The Class and The Class II (2005). She speaks to the concealed bodies in her soft, feathery voice about death and beyond, performing a wry humour that is weighed down by the gravity of the topic. The themes of death, and conversely, immortality, surreptitiously emerges again in Two Planets, more subtle than The Class, but no less consequential. Her signature humorous cadence cuts through the density of the subjects at hand, where both death and immortality confront the villagers in the frame. In reference to the work, during her 2014 lecture for the series Subjective Histories of Sculpture at Sculpture Centre, New York, Araya talks about how she had moved to the countryside in Thailand and was struck by the villagersʼ cavalier attitude towards death. An uncle of the village had gotten bitten by a dog, she says, and two days later, he passed away. Their stories illustrate an ordinariness that places death as a usual occurrence, part of the everyday. It is demonstrated in one villagerʼs question in response to Renoirʼs Bal du moulin de la Galette, of whether it was a funeral.

The antithesis of finitude is the eternity promised by the work of art — preserved and unchanging — immortal in its ability to outlive its author. Araya says of this binary, “I reflected upon my life, which is surrounded by two opposite things. One is art which I take care of as if itʼs immortal. The other was present when I moved into the countryside, the natural and simple cycle of life and death clearly evident through the lives of the villagers.” This line of thinking echoes art theorist Boris Groysʼ account of artworks in museum spaces that occupy a paradigm of immortality: “The traditional exhibition treats its space as anonymous and neutral. Only the exhibited artworks are important. Thus, artworks are perceived and treated as potentially immortal, even eternal, and the space they inhabit as contingent, accidental — merely a station where the immortal, self-identical artworks take a temporary rest from their wanderings through the material world.” By contrast, the surroundings for the framed paintings in Two Planets are without walls; it therefore does not seek to contain the eternal but rather coaxes its dwellers along the passage of time.

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinasʼ notion of finitude — which he refers to as the there is — is an alterity that parallels that of other minds: “the other that is announced does not possess this existing as the subject possesses it; its hold over my existing is mysterious. It is not unknown but unknowable, refractory to all light.” Groys says something of similar nature, with reference to museum objects: “ in analysing my own thinking process, I can never find any evidence of its finitude. To discover the limitations of my existence in space and time, I need the gaze of the Other.”

“Two Planets: Van Gogh’s ‘La méridienne’
and the Thai Villagers”
2008

The two planets in tango, representing death and immortality, might then be redefined as subject and other — a billowing border between self and else, untethered from predetermined scales of time. In relation to the scenes where Thai villagers sit before immortal artworks of the Western art history canon, the Other, this alterity of death, reminds us of the opposition between East and West, ostensibly irreconcilable cultures that find in one another a wrestling of subjectivities. In the same lecture series taking place at Sculpture Centre, Araya recalls reading a line in a newspaper while sitting at a hotel restaurant in Helsinki, where a Chinese scholar claims that Asia will be developed once it reaches sharp criticism from outside; that is, the West. In the course of cultural development, who gets to be the Other that gazes or is gazed upon, which of the two can negotiate their immortality? In front of Van Goghʼs La méridienne, the villagers noticed the lack of birds and mosquitoes and recalled how Westerners visiting Thailand had said there were no mosquitoes back home. The banal observation again underlines this opposition: a West without mosquitoes, an emblem of poverty, uncleanliness and disease, and an East teeming with life beyond the human subject.

For Levinas, the only way to overcome the inevitability of the there is, the suffering and sorrow that is the commencement of death, is fecundity. Interpreting Levinasʼ words, philosopher Catherine Chalier says, “the otherʼs exteriority remains mysterious and eminently desirable — despite all the irretrievable time lost in approaching it — because he or she promises a future different from that of the ʼself.ʼ” I think of my parents and my own relation to their subjectivities, with their particular Chinese heritage and formation in bustling cityscapes in moments of drastic transition. Their understanding of death is shrouded in superstition and unease, passed down through stories that carry no memory of their origins.

Once, back in art college, I found old negatives of my parentsʼ portraits. I took them to the photography lab at school, where I was experimenting with analogue photo equipment as a part of a project I was trying to work through. I enlarged the negatives, cut the resulting photos into small pieces, reassembled them to create one monstrosity of a portrait with features from both parents and multiple negatives, and with the magic of my Canon AE-1, turned the Frankensteinian creation back into a negative. I was trying to find myself through this, observing how the identities and DNA of these two humans intermingled to create the ego that types what you read now. The results didnʼt make for very good art, and I ended up scrapping it. Years later, after I moved out and left behind boxes of old art school relics, I received an email from my mother who had just found an envelope of her and my fatherʼs cut-up portraits in one of those many boxes. “Cutting someoneʼs picture is a very bad thing — it means you want someone to die,” said the email. “Do you really hate us that much? Do you really wanted us to die at some point when you were angry with us?”

“Two Planets: Renoir’s ‘Bal du moulin’
and the Thai Villagers”
2008

Damaged photos can represent a desire for death, even if their intent was to determine how fecundity informs the self, an absolution from the weight of finitude by Levinasʼ words. This silly misunderstanding lays bare the strange paradox Levinas espouses, between the semblance of immortality that is produced through the extension of genetic code and the movement towards lifeʼs end. A child born of the subject becomes both the way out of finitude and a singular Other, representing death. Understood in relation to the Two Planets, a new tension between binaries unfolds, where the villagersʼ gaze undermines the immortality of the paintings. If a painting hangs in a bamboo forest, but everyone who once saw it has died, does the painting still exist? As the villagers say of Milletʼs haystacks and illusion, “they look like trees, but it is a painting anyway.”

I had read my motherʼs words with a mix of exasperation and mirth, uncertain how Iʼd explain the bag of cut-up portraits and assure her that it wasnʼt a death wish. Death to her was the ultimate insult. But as Araya shows time and again in her works, the two planets that life and death occupy are not in opposition, but in orbital dance, informing one another on the plane of existence that connects all and every subjectivity.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook — Two Planets