H Gallery Bangkok is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Sopheap Pich, his second solo at the gallery since 2007 and further to inclusion in Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2009), Here/Not Here at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2011), Singapore Biennale (2011), and dOCUMENTA (13) in Germany (2012), amongst other noted shows. In Spite of Order is a selection of Sopheap’s current wall-bound grid structures, made from a signature use of bamboo, rattan, burlap and earth pigments. Works-on-paper are also included and retrieve interest in the artist’s initial training as a painter while providing insights into his working methods.

The title of this exhibition brings attention to Sopheap’s on-going exploration of relationships between the innate qualities and encoded significance of the materials and processes he employs. These explorations have typically suggested a subtle weaving of the visceral, vernacular, autobiographical and art-historical. In Spite of Order frames the repetitive qualities of the current artworks, inviting recognition of their strict formal language but also offering deliberation on what it means to try and impose order on divergent or unruly concerns.

Sopheap’s use of the grid most immediately appears as a great departure from an earlier use of iconic references to his native Cambodia, references informed by childhood memories and experiences of displacement and profound change. However, In Spite of Order builds on an essential interest in how materiality or the inert can be animated by a sense of the intangible. Sopheap’s current works now explicitly engage ideas of being inside and outside certain traditions, confronting the facticity of formalism without belying psychological impact or idiosyncratic cultural inflections.