‘A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage)’

A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage), on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney from August 14, 2025, to February 15, 2026, represents a culmination of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s decade-long exploration of memory, perception, and the ephemeral nature of experience. The installation, created in collaboration with Bangkok-based collective DuckUnit (Rueangrith Suntisuk and Pornpan Arayaveerasid), transforms the MCA’s Macgregor Gallery into a contemplative environment where a single piece of white fabric, suspended before a projector, rises and falls with glacial slowness. The project originated from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s interrogation of existence without personal memories, drawing on self-documented footage collected over several years—his chosen means of recording life since embarking on filmmaking. The original 2022 presentation at Bangkok CityCity Gallery included a fascinating technological dimension: conversations between the artist and AI-generated cognitive specters of figures like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Salvador Dalí, and the Sun itself, developed with MIT researcher Pat Pataranutaporn using GPT-3. These exchanges, sparked by the artist’s contemplations during long walks in nature, pushed the AI to generate increasingly coherent conversations that manifest new fictions (“Exhibition,” 2022).

The projected imagery consists of these personal video diaries—captured through a low-resolution pocket camera—interwoven with footage of Indonesian caves. The fabric element, a recurring motif in Weerasethakul’s work appearing previously in Fever Room (2015), Blue (2018), and Constellations (2018), has been mechanized by DuckUnit to move with deliberate slowness. As it rises and falls, the fabric alternately catches and releases the projected light, creating an ever-shifting interplay between clarity and obscuration, presence and absence, memory and immediate perception.

What follows is a conversation between two viewers of the video installation, Thai Australian artist Phaptawan Suwannakudt and art historian Yvonne Low, who encountered the work at different stages of its journey—one having experienced both the Bangkok and Sydney iterations, the other encountering it for the first time at the MCA.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt (PS): I always try to enter Apichatpong’s work without preconceived ideas.

Yvonne Low (YL): How do you mean?

PS: There’s something essential about embracing what in Buddhist philosophy we call the undetermined bhava—that state of being completely open to whatever might arise. When I walked into the MCA’s darkened gallery, I let myself be fully present to whatever the moment offered. It’s like entering a space defined by uncertainty and the unknown, much like the unpredictable yet familiar nature of sunlight itself. Apichatpong himself wrote about this—how filming is not to keep or remember but to have a dialogue with the present.

YL: The Macgregor Gallery has been transformed into something remarkable. What struck me immediately was the deceptive simplicity—just cloth, light, and motion. Yet from these minimal elements emerge such conceptual richness. It felt like entering a contemporary meditation hall where ancient practice meets new media art. 

PS: Yes . . . I spent two hours there, but it collapsed into a single continuous moment. Time seemed to operate differently in that space. I’d actually seen this work before at Bangkok CityCity Gallery in 2022, and even though I expected the interplay of light and movement to be somewhat predictable, each encounter brings something distinct. During the opening night in Bangkok three years ago, I entered this darkened room where the curtain was moving, interacting with lights and shadows, one screen playing within another on a larger frame. Uncertain of the surroundings, not knowing where to go next, I found a quiet corner to settle into. I made sure not to obstruct the moving curtain or interrupt other viewers. Even though the crowd had filled nearly half the space, I felt I had a completely private moment to contemplate—able to isolate my thoughts and focus solely on the gentle movement. The pace was so slow it invited one to slip into a trance.

YL: The glacial pace is crucial, isn’t it? The fabric moves so slowly you must watch for several minutes before being certain it’s moved at all. It completely frustrates our typical gallery-viewing impulse to see everything quickly and move on. Instead, viewers find themselves settling into the space—some sitting on the floor, others standing in fixed contemplation, allowing the work’s temporal rhythm to displace their ordinary sense of duration. This isn’t cinema as traditionally understood but something closer to what contemplative traditions recognize as the streamlike nature of consciousness.

PS: That shifting curtain kept making me think about the kilesas. By that I mean mental obscuration—it’s a Buddhist concept about the veils that alternately conceal and distort our perception of reality. When the museum attendant told me visitors could move freely through the space, just not step on the curtain, I carefully paced around the room. With each footstep, I felt I was attending to past, present, and future all at once.

YL: I found that the curtain functions as more than an aesthetic device—it becomes a meditation on the conditions of visibility itself. When the fabric hangs low, the projected images appear with clarity against the white surface. As it rises, the same footage becomes ghostly, translucent, the light passing through the weave to scatter across the gallery walls. At times obscuring, at times revealing. The cloth doesn’t possess an inherent nature as either revealer or concealer—its function depends entirely on conditions: its position, the light’s angle, the viewer’s location.

PS: That’s sunyata—which means emptiness. The circular elements within the work reinforce this continuity, with each moment enhancing the collective whole, each dot contributing to something larger. What strikes me is how these circular motions feel deeply personal—as if Apichatpong himself might have drawn them. There’s something about the way he’s drawn to circular shapes, how he’d naturally sketch circles when given a pen or pencil. These black ink doodles feel like direct extensions of his hand, his consciousness. The circle as zero, as sunyata, has no beginning and no end—like samsara itself, the endless cycle of existence. Strange thing, though—I felt oddly familiar with the film, as if there was an unknowingly unrecognizable version of myself in those fleeting shadows.   

YL: Apichatpong’s video diaries are fascinating in their technical approach. He’s been capturing these moments for a decade through what he calls his “particular eyes”—that low-resolution pocket camera whose limitations become surprisingly revelatory when projected at massive scale. Enlarged to fill the five-by-sixteen-meter screen, the camera’s sensitivity to light transforms ordinary perception. I remember his shots of fleeting close-ups of hovering houseflies, random walks through gardens and plantation fields; they are all frequently overexposed into near-whiteness with the sharp edges of quotidian reality softening into something more like memory itself.

PS: Memory doesn’t come in high definition.

YL: No, it does not. The overexposure and graininess, what initially appears as technical deficiency, begins to feel like a truer representation of how memory actually functions. We don’t recall our lives with perfect clarity and accurate color balance. Memory is precisely this—certain details [appear] startlingly vivid, [while] others dissolve into light, the whole suffused with a quality that is more felt than seen. Perhaps the camera’s ‘limitations’ become a kind of honesty about recollection?

PS: During that opening night in Bangkok, as I was preparing to leave, I decided to walk around the room to observe my own reactions to the shifting curtain and changing light. That’s when I noticed Apichatpong himself.

YL: He was there?

PS: Holding a handheld video camera, recording the movements of his own work. He seemed to be in quiet conversation with the piece itself, deeply attuned to its rhythm and flow. It brought up my own experience of living through constant changes—reminded me of my own work from 2010, A Conversation Room, where two audience members would enter from separate entrances to engage silently across a table. I chose not to interrupt him, but he noticed me. We exchanged hugs, but it wasn’t the time for a conversation.

YL: The collaboration with DuckUnit brings something essential to this iteration. Rueangrith Suntisuk’s expertise in creating responsive environments and Pornpan Arayaveerasid’s sophisticated understanding of how light moves through space and time—together they’ve animated and mechanized the fabric in a way that makes it simultaneously corporeal and apparitional. The material’s employment alludes to its multifarious functions in both cinema and theater—establishing context as a backdrop, shielding content as a curtain.

PS: The fabric has appeared in his work before. . . . In Fever Room, Blue,  Constellations. . . .

YL: Yes, it’s become his established motif. But here I find its movements parallel a performance, a reminder of the fantastical memories that the material embodies. For example, those Indonesian caves in the footage introduce a completely different temporal scale. These stone chambers have existed for millennia, and will exist for millennia more. It makes the human life span recorded in the video diaries feel simultaneously precious and fleeting. This is where the engagement with impermanence becomes most poignant—not through explicit teaching but through the quiet juxtaposition of human duration against geological duration, both contained within the still-briefer moment of our encounter.

PS: It reminds me of the Kalama Sutta—the Buddhist teaching about not accepting ideas solely based on tradition, hearsay, logic, or even the credibility of the speaker. The Buddha specifically warns against believing something just because it fits with reasoning or logic, just because it agrees with preconceived opinions, or even just because the teacher says so. Instead, [the sutta offers to] remain present and thoughtfully consider the consequences of each moment. We’re constantly shaped by both internal and external influences. While we cannot control outcomes or direct others to act as we wish, we can cultivate awareness.

YL: The title “Afterimage” resonates particularly here.

PS: In Buddhist practice, one learns to observe the mind’s tendency to cling to experiences even after they’ve passed—the way perception leaves traces that color subsequent moments. The translucent projections scattered across the gallery walls when the fabric rises are literal afterimages, echoes of what appeared moments before on the screen. They suggest how memory and perception are never pure or direct but always filtered, refracted, existing in relationship to the conditions that make seeing possible.

YL: I can see how the sun becomes a metaphor for the self—engaging not just in conversations with others but in an ongoing dialogue with oneself. Apichatpong seems to recognize the projector’s light as the filmmaker’s sun. Just as the sun illuminates, the projector casts those memories that have been captured.

PS: He wrote something profound about this—that when images are combined to create an illusion of reality, as in cinema, they cease to be themselves. They form what he calls “a propaganda of shadows.” He questions how to sculpt a dimension in which memory cannot operate, comparing it to dreaming while being empty.

YL: Apichatpong’s practice generates this distinctive tension—a sense of plenitude alongside deliberate incompleteness. His narratives carry the weight of what preceded and what follows, gesturing toward larger patterns of meaning without coalescing into any puzzle demanding a solution. Instead, the work opens itself as territory to dwell within and move through freely.

One leaves carrying not answers but a quality of attention—a reminder that the ordinary moments of our lives, observed with patience and care, reveal depths that hurried perception misses.

PS: When I finally left the gallery, I felt like I’d traveled to different places through moments of unending continuity. Driven by curiosity about the range of responses one might experience, I asked the attendant about the guidelines. “Move freely,” she had replied, “just don’t step on the curtain.” So I carefully paced around again, fully interacting with the moving curtain.

YL: What did you find?

PS: That each viewing is unique, shaped by its own conditions and possibilities. The exhibition explores the truth of things as they exist, highlighting how perception itself shapes presence. Though absolute control remains unattainable, there’s something liberating in this surrender. I recall his artist statement, stating that the “device shelters us within its frame, protecting us from our own thinking and allowing us to simply look.” Perhaps this is the paradox—that by consistently attending to unfolding events, we develop not control but awareness, learning to anticipate without grasping, to see without imposing our narratives onto what unfolds before us.

YL: One leaves carrying not answers but a quality of attention—a reminder that the ordinary moments of our lives, observed with patience and care, reveal depths that hurried perception misses. The work doesn’t offer instruction in how to see but creates an environment where different seeing becomes possible, where the conditions for contemplative awareness are gently, patiently established.

PS: Yes.

YL: It suggests that contemplative seeing isn’t a specialized skill reserved for meditation halls.

PS: It’s a capacity available in any moment when we allow ourselves to simply rest with what is present. Watching that installation for two hours felt like being woven into the fabric of the work itself, becoming part of its contemplative nature, part of its ongoing conversation between light and shadow, presence and memory, the eternal and the fleeting.

YL: The work gestures toward something larger without demanding we solve it.

PS: Perhaps that’s the real conversation happening here—not just with the sun but with the conditions of our own perception, our memories, our presence. In the end, we’re all having conversations with ourselves through the medium of art, aren’t we? As Apichatpong says, when a man and a camera become one, they have a direct conversation with the sun. You temporarily cease to exist via the lens—you are the clouds as well as the trees.

YL: And maybe, for cinema to return images and their viewers to their pure forms, we must eliminate time itself. Then a genuine conversation between objects may take place without the need for art.