The Dated is a part of the show The Comet and The Nostalgic Souls, and it attempts to understand how forces of deep time, political history and digital culture entangle themselves in an intergalactic dance. The painting showcases the glowing core of a comet, its heart, which is also known as a coma. While usually coma refers to a deep state of unconsciousness, the comet’s heart expresses a glow so bright it creates an illusion of life and consciousness. This visual paradox is created through the ancient process of layering pigments with oil and turpentine on canvas, mimicking the glow of digital or LCD screens. Thus, the familiar radiance draws itself from human attachment to their digital devices in their everyday life.

Portraying a comet, the work intrinsically brings up questions on our understanding of time and space. Evidence to deep time, a concept representing the vast timescale of Earth’s history, where human existence is a tiny fraction of it, a comet connects both the past and the future. It acts as a time capsule, for it is made of material a billion of years old, making it a remnant of the early solar system; as well as an agent of change, for its collision with Earth could cause massive consequences affecting all life. As James Hutton, the founder of modern geology puts it, it makes one read time as having “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”. It is so vast it makes human life seem dauntingly brief. Thus, thinking and visualising deep time can be a meditative experience—marked with the awareness of one’s mortality.

Similarly, comets also symbolise anemoia—an emotionally charged feeling of missing something that was never felt in the first place. It is a deep longing to enter a glorious world of the past, a world of eros. Comets create a similar feeling of wonder and desire for the ancient past. In the political landscape of Thailand, anemoia plays a huge role. Being one of the few Southeast Asian countries that escaped direct colonisation, there is a tendency to romanticise the past as a period of unique national glory. Nationalist movements are, thus, driven by royalist narratives, wherein the past was seen as a period of stability and progress, constructing a more ‘authentic’ and ‘pure’ Thai culture. This idealised, heroism-based image of Thailand’s uncolonised status is reinforced through digital media, education and many political leader’s messianic beliefs as rightful protectors of Southeast Asian sovereignty. 

The Dated thus brings the past, present and future on one plane. While representing a comet that by nature is in perpetual motion, it allows us a chance to reflect on how we utilise our past as we go forward to an uncertain future.