No Worries! / Mai Pen Rai

About the exhibition
No Worries!/Mai Pen Rai brought together six artists—three based in Melbourne and three based in Bangkok—who worked with themes of globalisation and communication from the perspective of cities located on the periphery of global power. The bilingual exhibition title is not a direct translation, rather, it highlights the significance of the vernacular and the specificity of the cultural context.

Curators Tessa Dwyer and Sarah Tutton emphasised that the selected artists were necessarily aware of international debates, but also ‘actively engaged in constructing a discourse that is particular to their own location and cultural tradition’.  In this context, the artists were seen to be teasing out the tensions between the local and global and the resulting experiences of compromise and hybridity that proliferated around the turn of the millennium.

Acknowledgements
This exhibition was presented in conjunction with Asialink.


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^{Image: Michael Shaowanasai, Portrait of a Man in Habits #1 2000 (detail), type C photograph, 177 x 127 cm. Courtesy of the artist}