Korakrit Arunanondchai

Korakrit Arunanondchai was born in 1986 in Bangkok, Thailand. He earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2012, and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He lives and works between New York and Bangkok.

His best known body of work is a series of paintings made from burnt and bleached denim, often combined with inkjet printing, which he began developing while a student and has continued to expand. Alongside the paintings, he produces multi-channel video installations, frequently gathered under the ongoing series title Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names, which weave together footage of his grandfather, Buddhist monks, Thai mythology, nightlife, and technology to explore memory, globalization, and belief systems. His first solo museum exhibition in the United States was held at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2014, followed by a solo show at Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2015. Subsequent solo exhibitions have appeared at the Secession in Vienna (2019), Kasseler Kunstverein (2018), Serralves Museum in Porto (2020), Kunsthall Trondheim (2021), the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (2022), and Museum MACAN in Jakarta (2024 to 2025). He participated in the main exhibition of the 2019 Venice Biennale, shown across the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale, and in the Whitney Biennial in 2024.

Arunanondchai's critical standing rests largely on institutional recognition rather than a long auction track record. He was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2019, received the Ammodo Tiger Short Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018, and was named an honoree for the NOWNESS Award for breakthrough cultural excellence in film and video art the same year. Curatorial writing on his work consistently frames his practice around history, globalization, and animism, read through a hybrid visual language of denim painting and multi-channel video. His inclusion in the main exhibition of the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2024 Whitney Biennial situates him within the current generation of artists whose work is treated as central to conversations about technology, spirituality, and postcolonial identity.

Public documentation of Arunanondchai's auction history is limited and inconsistent. Phillips' own artist page for Korakrit Arunanondchai lists several realized prices, including Untitled (History painting), which sold for GBP 62,500, and Untitled (Painting with history), which sold for USD 60,960. Phillips does not publish exact sale dates or locations for these lots, and the two results are in different currencies, so no single all-time auction record can be confirmed from public sources. By contrast, his primary market runs higher: a mixed-media work reportedly sold for around USD 100,000 through CLEARING gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, a gallery sale rather than an auction result. The overall picture is an artist whose institutional profile, museum collections, and gallery pricing outpace a thin and inconsistently documented secondary market.

There is no catalogue raisonne for this artist, and authentication runs through his representing galleries and studio rather than a published scholarly catalogue. Collectors should treat any single auction result with caution: public sale records are sparse, do not consistently disclose sale dates, and appear below the prices his work commands through primary market gallery sales. Given the limited number of public transactions, provenance and direct confirmation through Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Carlos/Ishikawa, Kukje Gallery, or CLEARING are the most reliable ways to verify a specific work.