Art-goers are invited to the historic temple of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara for an art exhibition that will ignite their souls. From October 24th, 2024 to February 25th, 2025, Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 (BAB2024) is showcasing the arched gateways of The Engineers (2024), a pyrographic site installation by Brooklyn-based artist Cole Lu.
The scorched art of pyrography
Lu, whose works have been exhibited at art galleries in New York, London, Munich, and Madrid, was hosted as an artist-in-residence by Bangkok Kunsthalle in partnership with Nova Contemporary in October 2024.
Bangkok Kunsthalle (or “art house” in German) opened in early 2024 and is based in the Thai Wattana Panich building, a historical brutalist-style printing house that was left abandoned due to a fire in 2001. It’s fitting then that Lu was brought in to reignite the space with his pyrography — the craft of writing with fire.
Like Prometheus of Greek mythology, Lu shares with humans — us viewers — the sacredness, divinity, and beauty of fire, and by extension the arts and sciences that encompass the mere flame.
In his own words, pyrography requires “laborious repetition,” but from his labors, we find a unique combination of the historical, literary, and personal. The Engineers (2024), which represents the culmination of his residency at Bangkok Kunsthalle, consists of freestanding arched gateways made of burnt berm and linen. The art installation provokes viewers to think of how we, both individually and collectively, move through time, “engineering” history.
Source: Nova Contemporary, and Bangkok Kunsthalle. Image by Kanrapee Chokpaiboon.
Perhaps Lu’s arched gateways are equally a chasm and a portal, depending partly on your spirituality and, most importantly, your perspective on life and existence. Like a Japanese death poem in conversation with a Grecian eulogy, the burn marks are like the dog-eared books one returns to in their formative years. Art-goers may encounter the piece and be reminded of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, or Chun Yang Hee’s “To You Who Eat a Lot of Rice.” Lu himself was inspired by the literature of Anne Carson.
The Engineers by Cole Lu is a feast for the eyes and mind as the intimacy and grandeur of the installation can both tug at your heartstrings and leave you astoundingly bewildered. The wood engravings, created in collaboration between Lu and local Thai artisans, make for a very endearing touch to the otherwise large-scale, ineffable installation.
The legacy of Wat Bowon
The themes of moving through time and history are accentuated by the venue for the installation. Wat Bowonniwet Vihara (known simply as “Wat Bowon”) is 200 years old and has historically served as a meeting place between American missionary Samuel R. House and King Mongkut where observations on science, religion, and astronomy took place. The venue carries influences of Khmer, Thai, Chinese, and European architecture.
Wat Bowon also houses the work of one of the first Thai artists to adopt a Western realist painting technique, Khrua In Khong. As a venerable monk and Thai Buddhist temple mural painter of the 1850s – 1860s, Khrua In Khong, painted current events and Buddhist allegories, enabling the temple to exist as a place of worship and a place for religious and social commentary.
Paul Rujopakarn 
Teerin Julsawad