The River of Many Names, Chapter 4, Mae Nam Khong (2025 - ongoing)

Throughout recorded history, rivers have been sites where land, livelihood, story, and belief intersect, shaping how human societies relate to water and landscape. The Mekong River, known by many names as it flows across different regions, carries multiple layers of cultural and ecological significance. Along its course, serpent-associated figures appear in local belief systems as guardians or ancestral presences, reflecting enduring relationships between water, landscape, and the ways it is imagined and remembered.

The River of Many Names, Chapter 4, Mae Nam Khong is part of a long-term research project on the Mekong River, unfolding across multiple sites and chapters that examine how landscapes are formed through acts of naming, belief, and repetition.

Focusing on Naga guardian sites along the Mekong River in Luang Prabang and Vientiane, the work traces locations where cultural memory, ecological presence, and spiritual narratives converge within the landscape. Each site functions as a point through which relationships between place, perception, and cultural inscription become visible.

Between Sacred Presence & Touristification (2026) explores how landscapes/spaces along the Mekong are inhabited by layers of belief, memory, and unseen presence, revealed through sustained attention and ethical engagement.

Focusing on Naga guardian spaces in Luang Prabang, it examines how these spaces of belief coexist with tourist-driven leisure. For many local Laotians, these conditions may feel ordinary. For foreign observers, such encounters can feel unfamiliar or out of place.

Developed through sustained field engagement, the work attends to how belief, spectacle, and everyday life coexist—not as oppositions, but as entangled and shifting realities shaped by contemporary conditions.

Fifteen photographs of Naga guardian sites across Luang Prabang are arranged in a grid according to their geographic locations. Facing them, a single-channel video of karaoke tourist boats introduces a continuous flow of movement and sound, setting dispersed sacred presence against the circulation of spectacle.