For Torlarp Larpjaroensook, objects aren’t inanimate, they’re repositories of emotion and can offer a kind of time travel, shuttling us between earthly and cosmic realms.
In 2014, after being away for many years, the renowned Thai artist returned to Ayutthaya, the ancient Siamese capital north of Bangkok, which is flanked by three rivers. The house he grew up in was waterlogged, but there he found incense holders and flower vases that belonged to his Thai–Chinese grandmother.
He remembers his grandmother praying to the moon during the mid-autumn festival. “I began to think about humans bringing a spacecraft to travel to the moon and on the other side, [my grandmother] looking at the same moon with devotion,” he tells me. “I was thinking about people like [her], who would never be able to travel to space, but they could pray and imagine the journey through objects. Since then, space in my work is not just scientific or physical space but has also become the space of memory and loneliness and imagination.”
His long hair pulled back, dressed in boots and workwear, Larpjaroensook exudes a childlike curiosity tempered with something quieter, deeper – a sense of reverence. The artist, who also goes by “Hern”, speaks to me in Thai and his sentences are written down and translated into English by his wife, Clair. The couple, who have two sons, seem to operate almost as one, and are thoughtful and deliberate.
We meet, clad in hard hats, on the ground floor of the new Powerhouse Museum in Parramatta. Through a labyrinth of darkened chambers, I pass a replica of the Avro 504K aircraft, Qantas’s first plane, dangling from the ceiling. It’s among the 850 objects on display as part of Task Eternal, which opens at the Powerhouse next month.
Among the world’s most ambitious aerospace exhibitions, it includes drawings of flying machines by Leonardo da Vinci and an immersive installation from the Ganzfeld series by James Turrell. It features a kinetic sculpture by Larpjaroensook titled Vehasayan: A Virtual Vessel Transcending Time into the Astral Space of Memories. I stand awed in front of the delicate, fan-like structure.
Larpjaroensook says it references the Voyager 1 interstellar space probe that NASA sent into space in 1977, which is now travelling beyond the heliosphere. “The Voyager has a special meaning to me because it launched from Earth in 1977, the same year I was born,” he says. “And I like to imagine that it was the beginning of my journey. My journey and the Voyager’s are one journey.”
His work has long blurred the boundaries between the personal and the collective. It draws attention to how our private trajectories can take on mythic – even intergalactic – dimensions. Vintage timber cabinets, sets of drawers and other everyday objects synonymous with Thai households became the basis of Spiritual Spaceship, which showed in 2018, at the Bangkok Art Biennale.
“Normally when we think about a journey, we imagine moving from one point to another. But things don’t move in straight lines. We also circle back to where we began.”
To make Voyager (Prototype) (2022), presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Bangkok, Larpjaroensook strung together rice cookers and tableware collected over a decade to evoke the spacecraft’s shape and form. Vehasayan incorporates found materials from his grandmother’s house: her kettle, an urn. At the top of the sculpture, near a pair of antennae, I spot what looks like a wrought-iron grille, its surfaces rusting and peeling.
Artists have long used discarded items to draw attention to the forgotten or overlooked. In the 1960s, Lucio Fontana and Carol Rama made art out of twigs and wax, soil and rags, as part of the Arte Povera movement. But for Larpjaroensook, objects are imbued with ritual power. They possess a spiritual life and bring the past into focus.
Vehasayan, he tells me, means both “sky” and “vehicle” in Sanskrit, and the sculpture incorporates vast panoramas – hybrid creatures, a half-fish, half-elephant – sailing on seas and skies, rendered with the intricate brushwork associated with Thai mural painting, a tradition that flourished in the temples of 14th century Ayutthaya. The scenes conjure the Sīdantara Ocean, a mythical ocean in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, that encircles Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the world’s centre.
“We keep returning to the question of where we come from and what we carry,” he says. “An orbit is also an image of time – the past and present and future are not completely separate. Even though we are always travelling forward, they keep coming back and meeting each other.”
Larpjaroensook was born in Ayutthaya in 1977. Part of his childhood was spent living on a houseboat on the Khlong Chao Chet, a canal that flows into the Chao Praya River, which is prone to flooding during rainy season. “I remember the movement of the water, the lights of the boats passing by.”
His father was a carpenter. He grew up surrounded by pieces of wood. He camped. He constructed his own toys. Making was synonymous with living. “I learnt very early that an object could be taken apart and put back together to become something else,” he says. “Those ways of working stayed with me, without being aware of it.”
As a child, Larpjaroensook loved to draw. “As I grew older, I became fascinated with comics and illustrations and science fiction books, especially the journey to space, the image of the city in the future, the worlds that didn’t exist but appeared in the stories.” He pauses. “These things invited me to imagine and begin creating worlds of my own.”
Larpjaroensook moved to Bangkok at the age of 16 to study at the College of Fine Arts and later graduated with a major in painting from Chiang Mai University. In Chiang Mai, the mountainous Thai region where artisans have worked for centuries, Larpjaroensook started experimenting. His early work contained in miniature the playfulness and the spirit of roving freedom that characterises his practice.
To make Moving Architecture (2009), he transformed a small truck into an art space, driving the vehicle to different locations. “Contemporary art was still in its early stages in Chiang Mai and it was difficult to get people into galleries to see exhibitions,” he says. “I asked, ‘Why do people have to travel to galleries? Why can’t galleries go to people?’ So I modified the car and turned it into a mobile exhibition space and asked an artist friend to show the work together. Looking back, I can see what I hadn’t been aware of at the time – that since the beginning, the idea of the journey has been present.”
Larpjaroensook’s journey is inextricably intertwined with Gallery Seescape, an art gallery he founded on Chiang Mai’s bustling Nimmanahaeminda Road that has helped to shape the city’s contemporary art scene. Meeting Larpjaroensook, I suddenly remember stumbling upon it, entranced by a space filled with assemblages, a light-filled cafe. I was struck by its unassuming hospitality, so rare in the art world: a sense of life and art as essential, as open to everyone.
“It has been running for 50 per cent of my life, 17 years and 130 exhibitions,” Larpjaroensook interjects in English, his smile incandescent. “I was looking forward not just to the exhibition itself, but the friendship, the collaboration. The art community [in Chiang Mai] has always supported each other. I believe that art history doesn’t always begin with an artwork. It can begin with a small space where people come together to believe that something can happen.”
In 2014 he tipped over a gallery divider, turned it into a table and invited the community to nightly dinners cooked by a volunteer chef. It was part of an installation, No Dining Together, which asked questions about who exerts authority over encounters with art. The installation, he says, grapples with the legacy of “relational aesthetics” – the idea of art as a shared social experience pioneered by the legendary Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who famously transformed New York’s Paula Allen Gallery into a kitchen and served pad thai to gallery-goers.
“He has been an influential figure for the younger generation of artists,” Larpjaroensook says. “There were objects – spoons and utensils – that we displayed on the wall and [have become] part of the gallery. During the exhibition, people who didn’t know each other talked to each other and there were passers-by who hadn’t intended to come. The project brought people into the community, making art feel more accessible.”
Tiravanija, a supporter of Larpjaroensook who spends part of his time in Chiang Mai, has become part of art history in the West. Larpjaroensook’s work, however, is interested in something less effable: he wants to elevate the personal, the emotional. He treats memory itself as a kind of material.
He returns again and again to the same story: the image of his grandmother in Ayutthaya praying to the moon, a story that he says plays out against the backdrop of the Space Race. Send Mom to the Moon, a 2015 sculpture exhibited at Gallery Seescape, is a small spaceship made from a ceramic vase and flickering bulbs. In Spiritual Spaceship (2018), prayer lamps and an old teak cabinet speak to divergent notions of faith, the West’s story of progress, and private acts of devotion practised by his family. It also, he says, gestures towards how memory works.
“One of the main materials is an old teak cabinet that is used for storage and sometimes you find things inside that you completely forget,” he says. “Things can be away for a long time and suddenly return.” He wanted to show that science and technology aren’t in conflict with a spiritual way of seeing the world. “A monk was the first person who came to drive the spaceship,” he says, laughing. “They are different ways of understanding.”
The voyage of an American spacecraft, the journey beyond the heliosphere – these are narrative touchstones of the West, harbingers of innovation and progress. But Larpjaroensook’s art tells us that there are other epic journeys – his grandmother’s pursuit of the cosmos, of course, but also her earlier migration from a China besieged by war to Thailand, part of a larger story of human movement.
In his 2026 installation Cosmos of Nostalgia, shown at the NTU Museum in Singapore, intricate paintings cite the myth of Wan Hu, a Ming Dynasty official who attempted to reach the moon. “It’s large-scale sculpture that is almost like a house,” he says. “But inside there are memories, stories from the past, of culture, science, the universe.” Spiritual Spaceship Orbit (2026), which showed at the Palazzo Rocca at this year’s Venice Biennale, is a homage to his grandmother’s passage through the Strait of Malacca, evoking both a ’70s spacecraft adorned with ritual objects and a nexus of maritime trade routes.
“Normally when we think about a journey, we imagine moving from one point to another,” he says. “But things don’t move in straight lines. We also circle back to where we began, and for me, when we arrive somewhere new, memories and beliefs continue travelling with us and sometimes appear in the next generation.”
Vehasayan imagines the artist’s origin story as linked to Voyager 1’s orbit. “I wanted to ask, perhaps, if one day we really had to travel far away from Earth, what would we choose to carry with us?”
To make the work, he took cues from the shape of the Golden Record, the gold-plated disc that the Voyager carries through space. It’s encoded with sound and music, languages and greetings from Earth, and includes a Thai offer of goodwill that begins with the phrase for “hello”, Sawatdee kha, voiced by translator and scholar Ruchira C. Mendiones.
Vehasayan, he says, tries to bring that voice back to the present, to create a bridge between generations. In the work, Mendiones’s niece, Dr Pang Chinnapong, reads a story by Juntree Siriboonrod, a Thai novelist and a pioneer of science fiction who introduced readers to space exploration decades before Voyager. Real-time data from NASA calculating Voyager 1’s distance from Earth controls Vehasayan’s lighting and movement.
“So, it is as if they are having a conversation.” He smiles. “I want the audience to feel distance and time and loneliness but also a sense of connection.”