Tanat Teeradakorn
Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance

9 November 2026–31 March 2027

Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance presents Bangkok-based artist Tanat Teeradakorn’s (b. 1991) first institutional solo exhibition in China, following a two-month residency at CHERUBY in Shanghai. Transforming CHERUBY’s 1939 building into an immersive, multi-layered installation, the exhibition takes its title from the commissioned film. Trained in design and shaped by music production, Teeradakorn works across moving image, sound, performance and installation. His practice examines historical memory and the political tensions that emerge when binary oppositions harden into paralysis, approaching the body, sound and merchandise as mediums through which cultural meanings are produced and transformed.

During his Shanghai residency, Teeradakorn conducted archival research and visited the Pathé Records (former EMI) Villa, underground music venues, historic-site museums, temples and souvenir markets. These encounters informed his investigation into how historical narratives are preserved, presented, and experienced by contemporary audiences. Attentive to the role of entertainment in shaping public understandings of a place and its past, he positions music and performance as both cultural forms and political forces. Teeradakorn asks: “How do entertainment, sound and the body become entangled within political structures?”

Teeradakorn has long been interested in entertainment, from opera to tourism, as a vehicle for propaganda. In nineteenth-century Europe, grand opera houses occupied prominent positions in urban life, participating in the projection of national identity and colonial power. Today, tourism and entertainment remain instruments of soft power, transmitting cultural values through consumerist experiences. In the UK, Teeradakorn encountered tourist kiosks selling merchandise printed with the royal family, a monarchy and a national history flattened into souvenirs. In Shanghai, he examined historic sites once associated with political and intellectual gatherings that have since become tourist destinations. Across these locations, the past is staged for education and contemporary consumption, becoming something to be visited and then taken home as a souvenir.

Merchandise design is a point of departure for the project. Drawing on data analysis and song lyrics, Teeradakorn develops graphics, emblems and objects that translate cultural information into forms associated with tourism and fashion. Garments, flags, patches, pins, scarves, keychains and dog tags are organised into three series, each corresponding to one chapter of the film. Rather than serving as ancillary products, these objects establish a visual and material vocabulary through which the project’s wider concerns take shape, bringing together systems of information, musical structure and the circulation of cultural symbols. These works are co-commissioned by CHERUBY and the 2026 Busan Biennale.

Designed in collaboration with Scenography Department Bangkok, the installation responds to the history of CHERUBY’s own building, staging it as a speculative site to be visited by the tourist. Moving between the dimness of an archive and the glare of a stage, it draws on the visual language of souvenir shops and pop concerts, bringing the light and atmosphere of Thai streets and temples into a 1939 Shanghai building. Garments, tactile objects and scenographic elements bring graphic scores, archival fragments and sonic references into a shared spatial experience.

At the centre of the exhibition is the premiere of Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance. Filmed on a pop concert stage in Shanghai, the work is what Teeradakorn calls a virtual performance: a staged performance made for the camera. Audiences have long encountered representations of history through ballet, theatre and opera. Today, historical events are also apprehended through moving images, much as many people know a satellite launch took place only because they have seen the footage. The film asks what we actually come to know when we encounter history through such mediated forms.

The film brings together diverse performative and operatic traditions to stage an era shaped by collective authorship. Through disciplined choreography and musical precision, the performers embody the energies through which collective identities and possible futures take shape. Their costumes combine elements from different traditions, subcultures and assemblages. The screen also acts as a threshold between the film and the gallery. A stage in the gallery mirrors the one in the film, so that the audience is carried into the performance.

The film’s three chapters are each anchored by a historic or popular song that has travelled across contexts and languages. Reworked within the soundscape, these songs become a means of examining what survives through repetition and what changes as music acquires new meanings across time and place. Their shifting resonance reflects a world in which cultural narratives are continually absorbed, reinterpreted and repackaged.

Across merchandise, sound, costume, film and scenography, Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance approaches memory not as a fixed inheritance to be preserved, but as a process continually reshaped through reproduction and movement. By bringing the languages of the archive, the concert stage and the souvenir into relation, the exhibition examines how cultural histories are made tangible and transformed through their encounters with contemporary audiences.

Tanat Teeradakorn, Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance is commissioned and produced by CHERUBY; with support from the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee and BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY.

About Tanat Teeradakorn

Tanat Teeradakorn is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, DJ and graphic designer. He works across sound, music, performance, text, printmaking, merchandise design and installation, and often creates situations in which the audience becomes part of the work or participates in it. Combining fragments of biography, memory and data with historical narratives, he lets multiple fragments of story and information collide, juxtapose and transform into new bodies of work. His work interrogates how cultural narratives are constructed, circulated and replicated across media, cultures and spatial contexts.

Recent exhibitions and performance include: Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance, Busan Biennial (2026); National Opera Complex, solo exhibition at Gasworks, London (2025); CHAOS MANDALA: NATIONAL COLORATION COMPLEX, Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand; Transmediale: Out of Scale, silent green Kulturquartier, Berlin, Germany (both 2023); CTM Festival: Hacklab, Studio 1–Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; NATIONAL COLORATION COMPLEX: MEMORY PARASITE, Artist in Residency presentation, A LESTE, Porto, Portugal; Soy&Synth: South by South Sonic Serenade Series, Uferstudios, Berlin, Germany; Unthaitled: Forgetting Thailand, Nation, Narration, Narcosis, Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum, Berlin, Germany (all 2022); Dance Non-Stop Mix, Cartel Artspace, Bangkok, Thailand (2017); Life/Distraction, Performance Lecture at BACC (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre), Thailand (2013).