Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul on his Hong Kong art show, how making movies is a ‘silly attachment’, and why ‘nature is the ultimate art’

In ‘A Planet of Silence’, Apichatpong Weerasethakul uses images of the Mekong River and South America to show the world in a new way, he says

The Palme d’Or winner says his work isn’t political, but rather philosophical musings, free from a sense of time and space, that promote the idea of connection

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Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new Hong Kong exhibition, ‘A Planet of Silence’, promotes a ‘connection and an awareness of oneness’.

Published: 12:45pm, 15 Dec 2022

Palme d’Or-winning Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is known for his haunting films which blur the boundaries between the physical and spiritual, the living and the dead, the mythical and the real.

For an exhibition in Hong Kong of his art, “A Planet of Silence”, Apichatpong has conjured a similar dreamlike atmosphere at the new Kiang Malingue gallery in the Wan Chai neighbourhood.

He has filled the four-storey building with evocative, cinematic photographs and videos, including unused footage from his award-winning 2021 film Memoria, starring British actress Tilda Swinton.

Taken together, the images, shot in Peru, Colombia and northeast Thailand, explore new ways of looking at the world, the filmmaker says. “The distance between different places doesn’t matter. There is this idea of connection and an awareness of oneness.”

Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Photo: Kiang Malingue

The exhibition begins with photographs from his series “A Minor History”, taken during a 2021 road trip through the Isaan region in northeast Thailand, where Apichatpong grew up.