Civilised Yourself
Sirawit Chatu, Audrey Lukban
4 March - 28 March 2026
Sirawit Chatu and Audrey Lukban examine how colonial image systems persist beyond the formal end of empire. Their works focus on structure: how ideology operates through aesthetics, display, and repetition.
Chatu reworks scenes from The King and I, the Hollywood musical that staged a fictional Siam for Western audiences. His paintings return to the Orientalist construction identified by Edward Said in Orientalism: the East rendered as spectacle, the West positioned as civilising authority. Executed in acrylic — a synthetic, industrial medium — the works underscore the manufactured quality of stereotype and its capacity for mass circulation. By translating film stills into slow, manual paintings, Chatu isolates moments that once functioned as seamless cinematic narrative.The ideological script becomes visible: a clear division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with authority performed as the civilised and the ‘other’ rendered as lacking.
Cinema operates as what Louis Althusser describes as an ideological apparatus — a system that produces subjects through interpellation, where identification with the narrative feels natural and convincing. In The King and I, Western rationality is affirmed through narrative pleasure. Through repetition and painterly delay, Chatu exposes how these positions are constructed and maintained at the level of the image.
