SHO SHIBUYA

Each day since April 2020, Sho Shibuya has painted the sunrise from his window on the cover of the daily newspaper. Sho Shibuya’s commission for Dib Bangkok’s grand opening exhibition brings this series titled “Sunrise from a Small Window” to a monumental scale. Visible from the nearby highway, the installation invites reflection on how we mark each day in our personal and collective memories.

Shibuya’s systematic practice—his daily ritual of capturing the dawn—draws inspiration from other serial art practices such as On Kawara and Tehching Hsieh. But whereas Kawara’s character-based Date Paintings are devoid of figural specificity, Shibuya’s colorful sunrises are embedded with the changeability of the skies above. Shibuya also paints the found object of that day’s newspaper—a record of our attempts to document and make meaning from our present moment.

Shibuya’s choice of the newspaper as his canvas connects to the collections of Thai artists Udomsak Krisanamis and Rirkrit Tiravanija, who write over these records. Krisanamis’s blacked out newspaper collages preserving only the empty space forming an “O” offer portraits of meaning in the negative. Tiravanija applies gold leaf to political news, obscuring the immediate narrative to comment on propaganda and the nature of truth. Preserving only the masthead and the occasional headline, Shibuya's abstract paintings create a dialogue between the fleeting issues of our historical moment and the eternal promise of a new day. The rectangle of color obscuring the news foregrounds the insufficiency of such papers as containers for our personal and universal experiences, which often transcend cultural narratives and geographies.

The exhibition also includes a rare example of Shibuya’s sculpture, an interactive punch-card machine developed from the artist’s longstanding exploration of how we mark time. Titled Present, the artwork offers visitors a gift to take home, a “present” to frame personal memories of the present moment into the future.