Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986)

‘About two years ago, denim became very popular in Thailand. I started noticing that a lot of people in Thailand would wear denim in a very specific way, being very particular about the way it is hemmed, the different fades, etc. I like the idea of denim being used in fashion as something that people wear to say they are individual, whereas in fact everyone looks the same. There’s something democratic about it as a material. […] As I began to work with it as a material, it also became part of my own personal style, so in that way the denim paintings are a direct expression of myself’
(K. Arunanondchai, quoted in A. Shulan, ‘Burning Denim at MoMA PS1: Korakrit Arunanondchai’, in Art in America, 26 March 2014).