Natee Utarit – A Midsummer Night’s Dream / The Artificial Lunatic’s Diary

Richard Koh Fine Art is pleased to present the third and final chapter of Natee Utarit’s A Midsummer Night Dream / The Artificial Lunatic’s Diary, opening at the gallery’s Kuala Lumpur space at A Place Where (APW), Bangsar, from 23 October to 14 November 2026.

The exhibition follows two earlier presentations under the same title, shown in Bangkok and Singapore, each built around its own distinct body of work. For this closing instalment in Kuala Lumpur, Utarit presents an entirely new set of paintings centred on the horse, a subject he returns to with a set of nine small paintings alongside a series of larger works, plus a single work titled Wild Horse.

Drawing on the visual conventions of English sporting art and eighteenth-century equestrian portraiture, the paintings place horses, jockeys and riders within calm, pastoral fields rendered with the stillness and precision of old engravings. Into these scenes Utarit introduces objects that do not belong: a raised glove, a beach ball, an ordinary chair, a slab of vivid red form standing where a hedge or a horizon might be. The disruption is quiet rather than theatrical, and it unsettles the genre from within rather than against it.

The body of work grows out of a long-standing preoccupation in Utarit’s practice with hierarchy, taste and who holds the authority to decide what counts as normal. The racehorse, bred, dressed and displayed for a public that reads pedigree and status into its every gesture, becomes a way of asking a broader question about the systems, cultural and otherwise, that quietly determine what is elevated and what is left standing outside.

The paintings also continue Utarit’s long-running practice of keeping a visual diary, translating fragments of dreams, private thoughts and everyday irritations into images that need not explain themselves to the viewer. Ambiguity, for Utarit, carries as much weight as clarity, and the works in this exhibition are best approached without the expectation of a single fixed reading.

NATEE UTARIT (b. 1970, Bangkok) is a leading Southeast Asian contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice centres on painting, exploring image-making through photography, classical Western art and Southeast Asian visual traditions. His metaphorical compositions examine Thailand’s social and political landscapes, identity, colonialism and East–West cultural encounters. His works are held in major international collections.