Biography
Tuck Muntarbhorn (b. 1994, British-Thai, they/them) is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist working across photography, painting, sculpture, performance and architectural design. Raised between Thailand and England, Muntarbhorn’s practice is deeply informed by their lineage of pioneering surgeons and fashion designers, which shaped their exploration of the intersections between the material and the spiritual. Their work cross-examines themes of spirituality and the profound connections between body, mind, and spirit.
Muntarbhorn began their practice in 2016, focusing initially on analogue photography. Their early works document sacred sites around the world, including Ayutthaya in Thailand, Jerusalem, the temples of India, and the pyramids of Egypt. These images, which blend naturalistic detail with a contemplative sensibility, capture light as both a tangible and metaphysical force, reflecting on humanity’s quest for connection to the infinite. This period established Muntarbhorn’s signature exploration of light and sacredness in spaces imbued with cultural and spiritual significance.
In 2018, Muntarbhorn’s Conduit series debuted with a guerrilla performance at Tate Modern, marking a pivotal shift toward abstract and performance art. The Conduit photographic works transform the silhouette of sacred architecture into shadowy, transcendent forms, exploring light as a passageway between realms. This exploration culminated in The Light That Powers Existence (2017–2020), a photographic and performance-based series inspired by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. This body of work was later realized as a 6-meter-tall site-specific projection accompanied by a performance in a London chapel, creating a space for spiritual reflection and connection.
In 2024, Muntarbhorn introduced "performing surgery" as a transformative element in their practice, combining inherited surgical tools with oil paint, lapis lazuli, and gold leaf to alter black-and-white photographs. Their Surgery Paintings series reimagines photography as a medium for incision, healing, and transcendence, merging material precision with metaphysical inquiry. In the same year, their golden self-portrait sculpture, I Am Tuck, surrounded by meteorites, symbolised the artist’s ongoing exploration of the cosmos and the infinite.
Muntarbhorn’s trajectory parallels artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose multidisciplinary practice transcends photography to incorporate architectural and sculptural forms. By creating works such as Tuck Chapel, Also an Airbnb (2022-present day), a converted chapel in Merthyr Vale, Wales, and the Tuck Bangkok art space inspired by the architecture of Thai temples, Muntarbhorn has established themselves as a creator of immersive cultural environments that blur the boundaries between art, architecture, and lived experience.
Currently based in Merthyr Vale, Wales, London, UK and Bangkok, Thailand, Muntarbhorn’s works are present in international private collections in Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, the UK and USA. Their practice invites audiences to explore healing, transformation, and the unseen realms of infinite consciousness.
“I seek to capture the essence of spirit in matter,” says Muntarbhorn.
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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.