Image size: 141.1 x 169.8 cm
Featured in the Second ASEAN Travelling Exhibition of Painting Photography and Children’s Art, Memory of the Universe by Ayutthaya-born and Silpakorn University-trained artist Den Warnjing (b. 1967), is an illustration of the post-1960s search for creative regeneration via Thailand’s cultural roots, looking back to themes and subjects from the pre-modern era as alternatives to the vaunted aesthetic autonomy of modernism. Like many of his other paintings that draw inspiration from Thai traditional folklore and Buddhist iconography, Memory of the Universe refers to larger cosmological, transcendental phenomena and the state of enlightenment as indicated by the symbolic and spiritual significance of the Bodhi tree and the sacred elephant.
