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

Richard Koh Fine Art is pleased to present A MIDSUMMER NIGHT DREAM / THE ARTIFICIAL LUNATIC’S DIARY, a solo exhibition by Natee Utarit, on view from 3 October to 7 November 2026 at the gallery’s Gillman Barracks space in Singapore. The exhibition shares its title with the artist’s presentation at Richard Koh Fine Art, Bangkok, the two forming separate chapters of a single ongoing series, each organised around a different set of subjects.

The series began in 2025 and continues to develop. It originates in a notebook Utarit keeps to record his dreams, and expands into groups of paintings organised by subject: gloves and metaphor, horses and jockeys, dreams of his mother, sexuality. Each group is intended to be shown separately in time. Nothing in the paintings announces that they function as a diary. The sequence, the connections between one canvas and the next, and the references buried inside them remain the artist’s own, and he is content for them to stay that way. Ambiguity, as he puts it, holds a beauty equal to that of clarity.

Formally, the painting borrows the composure of English sporting portraiture, the tradition of the standing racehorse presented in profile against open country. Utarit then interferes with it. In The superior and Dilettante, a white glove takes the place of a jockey. In The twin superior, a beach ball intrudes on the field. The title diptych stages the two halves of the sentence as painted banners held up beside a black horse, one figure clothed, the other not. Elsewhere the register shifts: One morning, When an art collector woke from troubled dreams, He found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin borrows Kafka’s opening line and turns it on the collector, while Coloniality and Divine knowledge return to the questions of hierarchy and authority that have long run through the artist’ practice.

At the centre of the presentation is Art is for everyone…Art is not for stoopid people, a diptych that takes its title from a sentence the artist encountered in Singapore in early 2020. It was printed on a tote bag and a pen given out as souvenirs at a private dinner held in honour of a visiting Western artist, in a room filled with collectors, curators, auction specialists and artists, most of whom already knew one another. Utarit brought both objects home to Bangkok, where the bag has hung in his storage room ever since. He has never used it. In the paintings, the two halves of the sentence appear as banners held up beside a black horse, one figure clothed and the other not.

The work sits alongside a doubt the artist has described plainly. Over the past several years he has become less certain of where the line falls between what he genuinely recognises as art and what the art system instructs him to recognise as such. He traces the feeling to an afternoon in Berlin, standing before a Wolfgang Laib floor installation in a converted warehouse, where he found himself walking over broken plywood that turned out to be another exhibit. What troubles him is not the possibility of failing to understand a work. It is the growing sense that the wall text has become more persuasive than the object, and that the visitor is the one being assessed.

Running alongside this is the artist’s account of dreaming itself. He observes that the boundary between dream and waking life, once divided neatly between night and day, has collapsed. Algorithms and social media now perform the work the unconscious used to do, learning our preferences and fears within fractions of a second and returning only the version of reality that satisfies them. Whether what happens in a dream counts is no longer, for him, an open question.

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.