The exhibition “BANANA GHOST”, by the artist Tintin Cooper explores how Thailand and the wider Southeast Asian region are imagined through foreign eyes. It also looks at how locals navigate the constant tide of visitors to their tourism-saturated beaches, cities, and provinces. At the same time, it considers the preconceived notions locals hold towards visitors, whether they are tourists or migrant workers.

These pervasive fantasies are deeply informed by the artist’s lived experience as a person of Thai and English background. Her father’s work with refugees and his research for publications on the Hmong people meant she grew up in border towns with refugee histories, including Chiang Kham in Thailand’s Golden Triangle, Phuket, Vientiane, Malawi, the Philippines, Nepal, Indonesia, France, and more.

Moving between these places, she developed a heightened awareness of how cultures are viewed from both within and without, a perspective that threads through the sharp, layered observations of "BANANA GHOST".

The artworks in this exhibition are sourced from contemporary online culture and draw from a rich tapestry of animal memes, viral TikTok videos of tourists behaving badly, “passport bro” online forums, and Thai news headlines. She sees this eclecticism as a mirror of her upbringing, a life where adapting to new languages and adopting unfamiliar cultural gestures was not just second nature, but a means of survival.

The titles of the works directly quote and recontextualise their sources, ranging from the pragmatic political observation of I’m Ok, Not Ok (taken from a June 2025 Matichon headline on Thailand’s current political climate) to the playful Me. Unbothered. Moisturised. In my lane, flourishing / Busy right now — possessed by… roundness for a painting of internet sensation MooDeng, the Thai pygmy hippo.

Together, these titles illuminate how most viewers engage with and interpret current events, cultural phenomena, and the broader world, particularly the overtly exoticised portrayals of Southeast Asia.

The language of tropical fantasy is manifest across "BANANA GHOST". This vernacular is stretched and distorted through repetition, much like the viral nature of memes themselves. Here, we encounter “passport bros” weeping in paradise, subjects caught beneath the wrath of a tropical landscape, awash in the lush colours and “ethnic” patterns of the region, and populated with nods to Thai wildlife: tigers, the famed pygmy hippo MooDeng, and sinuous snakes.

Elsewhere, the extraterrestrial puppet Alf clutches a cat sandwich, a sly nod to Western meme culture where cuteness collides with absurdity. Across the surface, this absurdity meets the charged words of Donald Trump: “The aliens, they’re eating cats, they’re eating the dogs.”

What begins as a throwaway jibe revives a familiar stereotype about immigrant communities and the consumption of pets. Around this time, headlines appeared throughout Thai news accusing visitors to Thailand of the same heinous activity, creating a twisted mirror of how both the East and West manifest suspicions around unfamiliar cultures and the subhuman actions we assign to them through the process of othering.

At the same time, the exhibition is less about assigning blame than about dissecting the mechanics of projection from all sides: how desire latches onto an imagined ideal of place, and how power imbalances emerge, whether through the financial swagger of travelling “crypto bros” or the quiet leverage of favourable currency exchange rates.

Throughout the exhibition, bright, playful colours burst across the works, their allure distracting from the serious realities at stake for a region among the most vulnerable to economic crisis and climate change.

This vivid palette reflects the rose-tinted glasses through which many visitors see Southeast Asia, treating it as a personal Disneyland where one can snap the perfect Instagram shot before slipping away, never absorbing the region’s layered histories, present realities, and the complexities of its people.

In "BANANA GHOST", Cooper holds a mirror to the fantasies, contradictions, and frictions that arise where global desire meets local reality, revealing a Southeast Asia that is as self-aware and layered as it is endlessly reimagined.

“BANANA GHOST” will be on view from 13 September to 8 November 2025 on the 1st floor of SAC Gallery.

You are warmly invited to the opening reception on Saturday 13 September 2025, from 6–9 PM.

Admission is free, and visitors will have the opportunity to experience the works first-hand and meet the artist and fellow contemporary art enthusiasts.