Level 13A : Catalogue | Hotel Art Fair Bangkok 2024 | A+ Works of Art

“It doesn’t matter where you are in the world if you’re anywhere near a Global hotel. You could be, literally anywhere”

(Ali Smith, 2001)

Characterised by transcience, the hotel is defined by what is not seen: vacationing families come-andgone, strands of hair on pillows, lovers’ quarrels in foreign languages that soak into patterned carpets before being vacuumed away for the next guest. It denies permanence in its structure; resident figures — managers, cleaners, chefs — are stowed in back rooms designed away from promotional material.

The hotel is a space of silences, with the expectation that rotating figures step into their newlypurified sanctuaries to inhabit that silence and speak for it, or them. Level 13A becomes a space for the discarded, an imaginary zone where rejected material can reside. It is that fourth floor in hotels across the Sinophone world that disappears from records, due to a linguistic fear of the abject (in Mandarin, four, 四 s., is phonetically equivalent to 死 sǐ, meaning death) and what it threatens of the hotel’s deliberate asepticism. And yet, level 13A persists; visitors continue to check into rooms 13A-15, 13A-16, 13A-17, and so forth. It is not the presence of the fourth floor so much as its naming which warrants its silence. Ironically, its deviation from the numerical order only draws attention to itself, amplifying its absence. Like the metonym, the role of art here could be to expose and dramatise these absences, or conversely to deepen the mystery. Crucially, this approach involves a reconsideration of how values are attached to some and not others; what is made invisible in the pursuit of notions of transcience and hospitality? 

Dealing with these questions also encourages a response to the hotel room as a space for thinking through the conditions of exclusionary terms like the “universal” and “global” so commonly found in hotel lingo, as was satirically employed by Ali Smith in the epigraph above. Or perhaps that mystery is something to preserve, just as the mislabelling of the fourth floor offers protection for the tetraphobe, or how the hotel as a microcosm of the non-existent provides a ripe setting for reflection.

 Curatorial concept by Denise Lai