Overview

Cold War: The Mysterious
Sep 27, 2025–Dec 7, 2025

Thasnai Sethaseree (born 1968 in Bangkok) creates large-scale collages out of a range of materials that include Buddhist monk robes, printed books and newspapers, colored paper traditionally used in Thai paper-cutting, camouflage fabric, and dried rice paddy to address the modern history and politics of Thailand and Southeast Asia.

This exhibition presents works from Sethaseree’s series Cold War: The Mysterious (2019–22) that focus on specific authoritarian actors, freedom-fighters, political uprisings, and violent crackdowns of the 1960s and ’70s, but also imagery that draws more generally from the press and popular culture to convey the complications and chaos of this period. The immersive nature of the installation invites visitors to consider the perspective of everyday people experiencing an overload of foreign and local propaganda, of being caught up in a competition between the world’s dominant nations that brings war and unrest to their region, and of living under authoritarian governments perpetrating unspeakable horrors on their own citizens. Through multiple layers (sometimes as many as thirty or forty) of materials and images, the artist both reveals and obfuscates to express the collective memory and forgetting of history.

— Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art