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 at the gallery’s Bangkok space from 26 September to 17 October 2026.

The exhibition brings together thirteen small paintings drawn from an ongoing body of work the artist began in 2025 and continues to develop. Conceived as a series divided into several groups, each organised around a subject the artist wishes to explore, the larger project encompasses gloves and metaphor, horses and jockeys, dreams of the artist’s mother, sexuality, and other themes, with each group intended for eventual presentation as a separate exhibition. The works gathered here mark the earliest appearance of ideas that have since been developed into larger bodies of work shown elsewhere.

The paintings take their origin from a notebook in which the artist records his dreams, kept less as a discipline than as a way of checking, from one week to the next, whether his state of mind has held reasonably steady. What emerges on canvas is something closer to a diary written in images, assembled from incidents of daily life, passing thoughts, and the accumulated quotations the artist has collected over the years. Nothing in the paintings announces itself as an autobiography. The arrangement of the stories, and the quiet connections running between one canvas and the next, remain known only to the artist, who holds that ambiguity possesses a beauty equal to that of clarity.

Running through the series is a sustained enquiry into the boundary between dreaming and waking, and whether that boundary still holds. Where night once belonged to dreams and day to reason, the artist observes that the dream state has extended well beyond sleep, sustained through algorithms and social media that learn our preferences and fears within fractions of a second and return to us only the realities that satisfy our emotions. What remains is a simulated reality, continuously responsive and offering no point at which one might wake from the trance.

The title borrowed from Shakespeare’s comic fantasy of 1595 to 1596 is offered as inspiration rather than subject. The play’s concern with the uncertain ground between reality and illusion, desire and reason, sits behind the work rather than within it. For the artist, inspiration has always been the more interesting proposition.

Recurring across the thirteen canvases are gloves, jockeys, swans, classical fragments and figures pierced by arrows, rendered with the precision of European academic painting and set adrift from anty stable narrative. Works such as Under the magician’s white gloves, there is always something hidden, Everyman carries his own wounds, A jockey is riding a swan and Zugzwang hold their images at a deliberate remove from explanation, each one a fragment of a story whose ending is withheld.

A Midsummer Night Dream / The Artificial Lunatic’s Diary is supported by TQPR Thailand.

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.