Image: Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is presenting 'Nasher Public: Narong Tintamusik', a public installation featuring an exhibition score by Saun Santipreecha, on view through September 20, 2026. The project centers on 'Residue', a sonic and sculptural environment in the Nasher’s Public Gallery that imagines a dystopian future in which a resourceful group of Thai nomads builds a ritual oasis after ecological and infrastructural collapse.
According to the institution’s exhibition page, Dallas-based artist Narong Tintamusik uses copper and brass mesh left over from industrial filtration and construction to create a setting that is meant to evoke protection and purification. The installation draws on Thai weaving and textile-dyeing techniques, basketry, and enameling traditions Tintamusik learned at craft schools in Tennessee and Colorado. The hanging form recalls the layered trunk of a banana tree in the backyard of the artist’s parents’ home in Bangkok, while pillows and mats on the ground reference reed mats associated with domestic and devotional spaces.
The surface of the metal has also been treated in an unusual way: it was patinated with acid from Thai food ingredients including coconut milk, lime juice, fish sauce and shrimp paste, then left exposed to light and weather over several months in Tintamusik’s backyard. The page says this process was developed through a combination of culinary knowledge passed on by his mother, who is a chef, and knowledge he gained in his first career as a biologist. The result is presented as a work that connects material process to ideas of nourishment, memory and survival.
Sound is a central part of the installation. The work incorporates sounds from the artist’s process into a layered composition created with composer Saun Santipreecha, with audio emerging from speakers embedded in the floors around the perimeter of the gallery. The resulting EP, titled 'residues_remnants_rituals', blends environmental recordings with fragments and samples ranging from electronic beats and woodwinds to traditional Thai instruments and vocals. The Nasher describes the combination of visual and sonic elements as forming an intricate topology linking distant places, speculative futures and ecological realities.
Tintamusik, a Thai-American artist and material researcher based in Dallas, works across painting, sculpture, wearables and installation. The exhibition page says his interdisciplinary practice engages personal and collective survival through a craft-centered approach and draws on Thai heritage, queer identity, Buddhist-animist cosmology and a former career in biological sciences. In the artist statement included on the Nasher site, Tintamusik says, “Even though I’m envisioning this dystopian future, I want my artwork to help us imagine solutions for the kind of world we want to live in.”
The exhibition opened May 30, 2026, and runs through September 20, 2026. The exhibition page also notes that Santipreecha is an award-winning composer based in Los Angeles whose work spans film, media and installation art. At the Nasher, the installation is presented as part of the museum’s 'Nasher Public' program, which hosts site-specific projects in the Public Gallery at 2001 Flora Street in Dallas.
