The Letter R (01) (02) by Xuân Hạ unfolds across two sites: Vista Rama Cinema and Ramasun Station. The project originates from personal oral-leads and collective memory, transmitted through two witnesses who were directly connected to these spaces. The artist selects material remnants: wooden doors, splintered fragments, film posters, old magazines - preserved in their found condition as if frozen at the moment of discovery or donation, to activate processes of remembrance.

 

In the 1960s–70s, the presence of 1,200 U.S. military personnel and NSA staff at Ramasun Station transformed Udon Thani into a “24-hour party town”, where entertainment infrastructures serving American GIs flourished. Vista Cinema emerged in this context, bound to both leisure needs and cross-cultural encounters. The pairing of Ramasun and Vista as coordinates of the project highlights not only their temporal, functional, and contextual interconnections, but also their layered entanglements of military history, popular culture, and community memory.

 

At Vista Cinema, The Letter R (01) situates the work in a hidden corner, evoking the late-night screenings of erotic or R-rated films in the 1980s–90s. The film posters were selected from the personal archive of Pi Khaek, who worked at Vista from the age of thirteen until its closure in 1998, serve as anchors for recalling an intimate yet bounded memory. By exclusively selecting R-rated films from this archive, the artist activates a peripheral memory space where sexuality and freedom surfaced within the narrow cracks of a Thai society tightly bound by censorship. In Thai film history, the R-rated (หนังอาร์) or erotic genre occupied a liminal zone: neither fully integrated into mainstream cinema, nor reducible to pornography. Often banned, these films nonetheless found resonance within community life, sometimes screened at temple fairs or Buddhist ceremonies at midnight, once children had gone to sleep. This ambivalent status illustrates how cultural memory operates: simultaneously public and hidden, familiar yet estranged, personal yet communally embedded.

 

At Ramasun, The Letter R (02) presents artifacts entrusted to the artist by Danny - a former investigator and interpreter at the base during the artist’s field trip: a Buddha statue and a fossilized dinosaur tooth. Viewed through a small aperture within these objects, audiences encounter the image of a woman interlaced with the map of the military complex known as “the elephant cage”. This juxtaposition of sacred relics and erotic imagery within a solemn military space generates a charged atmosphere, at once reverent and unsettling, where perception is deflected and time becomes distorted.

 

Here, “The Letter R” gestures not only toward Restriction but also toward disappearance. The wartime American appellation “UDORN” gradually yielded to the present-day “UDON” - a shift whose exact moment is uncertain, as if it silently slipped from collective memory, much like the vanishing of the letter “R” itself to align with Thai pronunciation. Personal and collective memories, like the name of a city, can shift and fade in ways scarcely perceptible, leaving behind voids and fissures that demand to be looked through.

 

With The Letter R (01) (02), the artist invites viewers to carefully attend to seemingly minor objects and memories, to perceive within each crack and gap the faint emergence of an image, echoing the very nature of memory: fragmented, flickering, yet leaving enduring traces across space and human experience.