In the course of immigrating, there is more to acquiring a new language than meets the eye, and this proves certainly true for the Chicago-studied Thai artist Udomsak Krisanamis. His collage practice, in which he applies scraps of found objects onto his canvas, exemplifies the process of cultural assimilation. “Planet Caravan” at Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong, is Krisanamis’s first major solo exhibition in the greater China region, featuring key works that span the past decade of his career.

Never Forget (2007) is a prime example of Krisanamis’s collage work. It is clear that the artist approaches the surface area of his material from all angles. A cotton blanket is covered in black, white and blue acrylic paint, and streaks of glossy orange appear to be falling upwards on the canvas, apparently having dried off while the painting was placed upside-down. Upon closer inspection, one sees that a separate yet strangely similar texture is created with noodles, which are affixed horizontally across the work. Most prominently, numerous cutouts of the numbers “8” and “0” are glued atop the painted surface in all directions. Subtly placed stacks of the two numbers come together to form a current—a cascade of teeming energy—that seemingly portrays a multitude of connotations, from “the void” (zero) to “infinity” (eight) to a sign of good fortune à la traditional Chinese culture. As such, Never Forget piques the viewer’s curiosity through its visual, material and iconographic dimensions.

Krisanamis is marked by his proclivity for using everyday objects: cutouts of numbers, noodles and mesh tape on top of cotton blankets. The artist does not insist on an underlying narrative behind his choice of items; rather, the impression is that his works integrates objects that are found in his studio, or in his quotidian settings. In a similar vein, Krisanamis incorporates music that he listens to into his art. Not only does the artist name his artworks with well-known song titles—such as “Freddie Freeloader” by Miles Davis and “Knock Three Times” by Tony Orlando and Dawn—he sees his spontaneous method of art production as being parallel to musical improvisation. Krisanamis gives seemingly incongruous elements—most conspicuously mesh tapes and noodles—a sense of rhythm and texture that blends into the artwork.