The purpose of this exhibition is to identify the spirituality behind certain informal assets in Bangkok, filtering them through selected design practices. This happen through the appropriation of one of the most powerful procedures belonging to Thai subculture: the Sak Yant, the sacred protecting tattoos. We dissect their aesthetics, we construe their symbolic meaning - displaced into nowadays cosmopolitan culture and filtered through the logics of architectural representation.

“Yantra” is a sanskrit word derived from “yam”, which means control or restrain, and “tra” which means freedom or liberation. The majority of people in Thailand are Buddhist but the Thai people have preserved a religious flexibility that forbids easy categorising and the concept of a single religious truth. In Thailand Sak Yant are as much a manifestation of these open mindsets as they are tools of social control. Perhaps the Sak Yant tell us that life is full of contradiction not meant to be resolved.

Indeed, we see architecture as a relentless interplay between precision - the construction of hierarchies - and expression - the representation of symbolic mechanisms. We see the act of drawing as a combination of figurative instances and geometrical abstraction, as well as a medium to address the spirituality embedded into people’s interactions.

Lemonot and Reminisce Tattoo collaborate to deconstruct architectural drawings and Sak Yant, hybridising layers and elements, to highlight methodological parallelisms and to trigger a creative exchange between these two disciplines.

The event took place at Cho Why, set in a beautiful shophouse in Chinatown. Through different crafted experiences, staged across the three floors of the gallery, visitors discovered and engaged with the nature of contemporary spiritual lines.