Harit Srikhao began his career young. In fact he was only a sixteen year old high school student when he attended Antoine D’Agata’s renowned (and infamous) workshop at the Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia. The experience was deeply foundational for the young artist, and in the decade that has followed, Harit’s work has evolved to be genre-defying in almost every sense of the word. But the visual world had always been a deep resource for Harit, even before he began a more intentional practice as an artist. Looking through his prolific journey, it becomes clear that the seeds of the questions that have occupied him were planted early. But it also becomes clear that the act of making – whether they were photographs of his friends and classmates as a young adolescent, or the complex, multilayered imagery from his more recent work – has been of critical value to Harit as an individual, underneath his work as an artist.

High School Diary, Red Dream and A Boy who was Kidnapped by Time appear as a trilogy of Harit’s early work. High School Diary is ostensibly Harit’s first ‘proper’ body of work, but it could also be seen as a project inhabiting a cusp. Deeply influenced by Nan Goldin, it was made as Harit gradually became more seriously involved with the world of photography. While its images exhibit a carefree and unencumbered visual language, an adolescent vulnerability pulses within it. This vulnerability takes a distinctly darker turn in Red Dream, a series based on Harit’s own experience as a student during the Thai military’s brutal crackdown of the 2010 political protests. Having had to walk for hours amidst the violence on the streets to take refuge in a friend’s home one evening, the harrowing experience left an indelible mark in the young artist’s mind. Two years later, Harit retraced his steps along the route he had taken on that fateful day, this time with his camera. The images, drenched in the red-orange of street lights, are intentionally quiet, but they still seem to make your ears ring – the dogs bark, is the building on fire, you wonder; you almost hear your own shaky breath.

The act of returning in order to understand and process the events shaping one’s life has been a throughline through much of Harit’s early work. A Boy who was Kidnapped by Time is an homage to a friend who died tragically at only 17, while it also acts as a space for Harit to reckon with his own feelings and the impact the passing of his friend had on him. But what happens when you return with clear hindsight to an aspect of life that had been designed to be unquestionable? In Whitewash, Harit looks back at growing up within the constructed ideals of nationhood, choreographed participation within the public sphere, and the linear imagination of citizenship propagated by the Thai state. Here, Harit plays not only within the photographic medium, but also with materiality, using collage, cut outs, layering as well as digital interventions to render the foundations of the photographed image unstable, and its message untenable.

Whitewash and the work that followed, titled Mt. Meru, brought Harit wider recognition as an emerging artist, but the attention also brought forth scrutiny. A 2017 exhibition of Whitewash in a Bangkok gallery was stormed by Thai soldiers, with the work being forcibly taken down. Harit did not wish to be labelled as a political artist, but with the work that followed, he only delved further into examining and then unravelling questions of iconicity. Mt Meru, takes its title after the sacred five peak mountain of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology said to be at the centre of all universes. But in Harit’s photographs, this centre is embodied as a hollow skin. Harit uses Thai ‘Royal portrait photographs’ – photographs of the monarch that are considered to be talismans imbued with divine magic – as a plank to jump into a wider exploration into questions of worship, belief, propaganda and soft power.

When considering Harit’s practice within a chronology, it becomes clear that events happening socially and politically in Thailand were important for him to work through as an artist. One such event was the tragic but suspicious death in 2017 of a young cadet, Pakapong Tanyakan, which took place inside his military academy. Pakapong’s death was largely invisibilized amidst the elaborate pomp and show of funeral preparations for the recently deceased Thai monarch, King Rama IX. For Harit, the dual events came to embody a critical intertwining between symbolism and reverence on the one hand, and the fracturing and tearing apart of the lives of Thai people on the other. Over a period of two years from 2018 - 2020 came three bodies of work, Scintilla, Anima and Incubus, each returning, re-examining, and re-rendering the questions of life and death; the seeming immortality yet empty divinity of one, juxtaposed against the tender yet defiant remembrance of the other.

While Scintilla and Incubus both hold ephemeral imagery rendered almost talismanic in Harit’s starlit gaze, Anima is starkly different in the cold, clinical documentation of remains of statuary of King Rama IX that linger on in warehouses and workshops in the outskirts of Bangkok. Harit’s precise use of the visual medium in this trilogy not only puts into sharp focus the contrast between lived lives and icons, but also plays with photography’s ability to memorialise. It asks us, the audience, to think of what we imagine to be a ‘subjective’ versus an ‘objective’ gaze, urging us to think deeper.

In 2022, Harit was the recipient of the Arttaca Grant for Photography, leading to a new body of work with a working title Study of Characters Design Project 2023. A decidedly interdisciplinary artist, Harit does not like to be bound by traditional notions of photography or visual art, and this is clearly evident not only in the forms his projects have taken, but also in the innovative and engaging modes of display and interaction he employs when exhibiting his work. For this latest project, Harit is working around the form of the graphic novel, creating a set of characters, blending imagery of people he’s encountered with short stories he’s written, and collaborating with a fashion designer and a 3D artist studio in Bangkok to bring them to life.

For Harit, Arttaca’s support to artists in presenting their work as NFTs has also allowed him to consider sharing his process in the form of sketchbooks and working character drawings with a wider audience, not just of collectors but also other artists, and those interested in his nuanced, multilayered and complex practice.

Harit Srikhao’s ongoing project Study of Characters Design Project 2023 is currently showing at RDX Offsite, Bangkok, as part of the Arttaca Group Exhibition, from October 1st to the 31st, 2022