Biography
Tuck Muntarbhorn (they/them), who began their practice in 2016 alongside a new wave of contemporary artists experimenting with light, spirituality, and corporeal forms, has steadily built a reputation for art that blurs the boundaries between the material world and spiritual exploration. Rooted in an intersectional approach, Muntarbhorn's work engages deeply with themes of queer identity, the impermanence of human experience, and the profound connections between body, mind, and spirit. Emerging with meticulously composed abstract photographs that use light as both a subject and a medium, Muntarbhorn has since expanded their practice to include painting, sculpture, and performance. Their first debut guerrilla performance at The Tanks in Tate Modern, London in 2018 marked a bold entry into the global art scene, activating public space with an experience that questioned the limits of the physical and the transcendental.
Muntarbhorn’s oeuvre seamlessly intertwines the legacies of Abstract Expressionism with their own lineage of pioneering surgeons and fashion designers. Echoing the precision of their forebears - most notably a grandfather who was Thailand's first open-heart surgeon and a father who innovatively applied endoscopic techniques to brain surgery - Muntarbhorn "performs surgery" on their photographs, using inherited surgical tools to apply oil paint and 24-carat gold leaf. Their cadmium red incisions echo the spiritual intensity of Barnett Newman's zips, while blue lapis lazuli paint nods to the healing aura of Piero della Francesca’s 'Madonna del Parto' (c. 1457), inviting the viewer into a transcendent space where wounds are both opened and healed.
While grounded in the corporeal, Muntarbhorn's practice draws from a wide range of spiritual and artistic influences, from Zen Buddhist concepts of the void to the cosmic slashes of Lucio Fontana, the deep dive in Mark Rothko’s regions of colour and the meditative geometry of Agnes Martin. Their site-responsive photographs, often captured at ancient and sacred locations around the world, invite viewers to reflect on existence beyond the physical, suggesting portals to other dimensions where time and space collapse into pure light. Muntarbhorn’s large-scale, performance-based creations and sculpture installations, such as ‘Tuck Thinker’ - a reinterpretation of Auguste Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ crafted from bio-materials - further underscore their commitment to the intersections of art, ritual, and metaphysical inquiry.
“I seek to capture the essence of spirit in matter,” says Muntarbhorn. “Through precise acts of creation, incision, and illumination, I explore what it means to transform the body into a vessel of the infinite.” Their work remains a compelling dialogue between the traditions of art and medicine, pushing the boundaries of how we experience healing, transformation, and the unseen realms of “infinite consciousness”.
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In 2022, Muntarbhorn acquired and designed a converted chapel in Merthyr Vale, Wales - an embodiment of their multifaceted artistic vision, seamlessly blending art, fashion, and music into a cohesive living and exhibition space. Muntarbhorn is also a musician, who performs under the stage name ‘Tuck FM’.
Muntarbhorn lives and works in Merthyr Vale, Wales, London, UK and Bangkok, Thailand. Their works can be found in private collections in Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, the UK and USA.
The above artist portrait was photographed by Horst A. Friedrichs at the Tuck London Studio in 2022. Muntarbhorn wears their signature aerodynamic Issey Miyake hat, red velvet glove, Comme des Garçons jumpsuit, Junya Watanabe and traditional Thai jewellery and Raf Simons x Adidas trainers.
Practice
Text: Andrew Spira
Nothing about Tuck Muntarbhorn is conventional. From the word ‘go’, they invite engagement. They don't want to hide behind the mask of ordinariness; they want something to happen. Their artistic practise is a pretext for communication, a stage for indeterminate encounters. But while Muntarbhorn is thoroughly committed to projecting their vision into the world, each of their works creates a perfumed space that is impossible to control or capture; it is there till it dissipates and is made again. Taken together as a series, their photographs constitute a continuous meditation on the luminous transience of forms, guided not by preconceived ideas about outcomes but by the very process and materials of making. Thus while each image is minutely prepared, the long exposures that each one involves create an empty or surrendered space, such that the process itself is ultimately left to ‘grace’.
Muntarbhorn is transparent about the fact that their work is an expression of his feeling for the spiritual nature of the world. Originating at sacred sites from across the globe (in Thailand, Myanmar, India, Israel, Finland, Britain and elsewhere), the forms they photograph become abstract to the point at which they dissolve into transparent bodies of light; they relinquish their otherness. Simulating the experience of meditation, they move in and out of the field of perception, in front of which the mind is invited to forget itself. At once contemplative and highly attentive to the micro-details of production, they find the point at which the possible becomes necessary.
While Muntarbhorn’s work is primarily intuitive and experimental, it chimes across time, and pays homage to Monet's late works and the masters of the ‘northern Romantic tradition’ - from Friedrich and Turner to Whistler and Rothko. The common ground is nature. The force that causes volcanoes to erupt is the same force that enables the stars to be duplicated to perfection in the eternal stillness of a mountain pool.
Muntarbhorn is a young artist. They are riding a rising wave. They are not ashamed to be excited like a child by the infinite possibilities that the experience of life offers; they are not in doubt about the amount of expressive freedom they are entitled to imagine. Although they clearly feel the currents of creativity in themselves, they are not from them; it is to the world that they belong and through their work that they pass.
The Holy Land (2018):
Tuck Muntarbhorn’s most recent collection of photographic works, The Holy Land, represents a further stage in the artist’s quest to translate an ineffable perception of the Sacred into a series of contemplative spaces, accessed through visual experience. Although the works seem to be abstract or non-objective, they are in fact photographs of sacred sites that Muntarbhorn took during a trip to Israel and the West Bank in 2017. Concentrated in and around Jerusalem, the sites in question are sacred to the three major monotheistic religions of the world - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They include one of the oldest synagogues in the world - at Capernaum, where Christ is said to have preached; the Sea of Galilee; the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the Western ‘Wailing’ Wall and the Dome of the Rock which is especially sacred to both Jews and Muslims. Although these sites are highly charged with religious and political implications - now more than ever - they are abstracted here to the point at which their distinctive features cease to be recognisable. It is as if the images offer non-objective contemplation as a means through which to transcend religious differences, and the conflict and misery to which they lead.
At a purely visual level, The Holy Land invites comparison with the Rothko Chapel paintings of 1964-67 and, closer to home, Rothko’s Seagram murals (1958-9) at Tate Modern. Their solemn colours, their large scale - in some cases six foot square - and the subtlety of the relationships that they capture between tones and colours are all reminiscent of Rothko’s attempt to attract the attention of viewers to the numinous, indeterminate space of depth that hovers beyond the limiting surfaces of the seen world. However, whilst every brush stroke of a Rothko painting is consciously applied by the artist, Muntarbhorn capitalises on the ability of photography to displace the activity of creativity away from the ‘artist’ towards the autonomous processes of nature, and thereby to encompass aspects of the world that are not determined by the artist’s capacity to see and represent them. Moreover, they capitalise on the luminosity of light - in contrast to the opacity of paint - that is innate in the medium of photography. Speaking of their own working process, Muntarbhorn has said: “as I stand in front of an object, I ask for nature’s light to use me and the camera to reveal her sacred Beauty and, in this very case, unity – I don’t desire my conditioning to dull her Truth – that’s not my job. Hence, I am more comfortable in defining my works as nature’s ‘light’ than ‘my photographs’.”
Although the associations of Muntarbhorn’s work with the great monotheistic religions infuses them with an aura of both sanctity and antiquity, they ignore - or ‘are ig-norant of’ - any fundamental ground for religious difference. On the contrary, they aspire to capture something of the dignity and mystery that characterises the austere religiosity of each of these ancient civilisations. One such association is the colour purple which, throughout antiquity, was invested with literally ‘awe-some’ characteristics. Largely due to the immense cost of the dye that was used to create this deep hue, the colour was reserved for the ruling classes. Indeed in Byzantium, it was associated exclusively with the imperial family. Mosaics from the sixth century show the emperor and empress draped in its magnificence. In some exceptional cases, the same honour was extended to sacred texts, especially gospel books. In several manuscripts from the same period, pages of parchment were stained ‘royal purple’ and their texts were written in gold, and sometimes silver, as if the words were directly transcribed from a transcendental source without ever being uttered in the world.
The Holy Land resonates with these elusive qualities, evoking a depth in time and majesty, just as it evokes a depth in space. It is a feeling for these depths that Muntarbhorn seeks to address in his viewers. But while the works are solemn, they are not grave. Rothko’s descent into darkness was paralleled by his descent into depression and eventual suicide, but Muntarbhorn’s work never signifies a metaphorical loss of light. On the contrary it is made of light, and constitutes a free meditation on graded zones of luminosity: indeed, by working on the same image in both positive and negative form, it explores the iconic effects of darkness and light equally - contemplating the act of seeing itself. Having said that, in some ways their images also resemble what one sees when one’s eyes are closed - a faint suggestion of light filtered through the blood of one’s eyes. As such, they also belong to an innately interior and living world; or, given that they sometimes resemble nebulae - an infinite number of stars and suns, both rising and eclipsed - perhaps an inner ‘universe’ might be more apt? Rich in imaginative associations, but also in the immediacy of sensation, Muntarbhorn’s work suggests that when sacred space expands, distant times and places can become included in the monumental moment of presence. Everywhere becomes The Holy Land.