Abstract

This public lecture features Dr Gridthiya Gaweewong, Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, whose practice is widely regarded as among the most influential curatorial voices working from Southeast Asia today. Moving fluently between local contexts and international platforms, Dr Gaweewong’s work navigates the tensions and possibilities of the old and the new, the international and the local, and the shifting conditions of contemporary cultural production. As a founder of Project 304, an experimental art space in Thailand, and now a leading curatorial figure within an institution, her practice extends beyond the gallery into sustained conversations, research, and networks of care—productively blurring the boundaries between independent and institutional curating.

A key focus of the lecture is her engagement with multimedia and experimental practices: from installation and expanded moving image to sound, performance, and hybrid formats that sit between contemporary art, cinema, and new media. Rather than treating “media” as a technical category, Dr Gaweewong approaches it as a curatorial method: an opportunity to rethink exhibition temporality, audience attention, and the politics of visibility, circulation, and access. Drawing on projects realised in Thailand and internationally, including biennale, exhibitions and film-festival contexts across Asia, Europe, and the Global South; she will discuss how experimental forms can create new publics, expand modes of storytelling, and translate Southeast Asian contexts to the world without flattening their complexity.

This public lecture is convened by the course ‘Curatorial Studies: A Critical and Practical Approach’, offered by the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity, HKUST.

Biography

Gridthiya Gaweewong (b. 1964, Chiang Rai; raised in Chiang Mai) holds an MA in Art Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a DFA in Fine and Applied Arts from Chulalongkorn University.

She co-founded Project 304, an alternative art space in Bangkok (1996–2002), and has curated numerous exhibitions addressing social transformation in the post–Cold War era. Notable projects include Under Construction (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, 2002) and Politics of Fun (HKW, Berlin, 2005), developed in collaboration with regional curators. She curated Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s touring exhibition The Serenity of Madness (2016–2019), initiated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and organised Kader Attia’s The Urgency of Existence (2024) at the Jim Thompson Art Center. She also served on the curatorial team of the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018), and in 2023 co-directed Open World for the 3rd Thailand Biennale.

Recent projects include The Shattered Worlds: Micro Narratives from the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Great Steppe (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and Jim Thompson Art Center), Almagul Menlibayeva’s retrospective I Understand Everything (Almaty Museum of Art), and Living in Elastic Time (Thailand Pavilion, Cheongju Craft Biennale, 2025). A 2018 fellow at MoMA’s Center for Curatorial Leadership, she has served on the Singapore Art Museum’s acquisitions committee since 2020. She received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2023) and the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence (2025), and is currently Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok.