Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at McGill University. Previously, he was Curator at Singapore Art Museum and Visiting Lecturer at National University of Singapore. His work revolves around conditions of artistic production and reception for the global majority: the precedence of religious forces in modernity, chronic illiberalism and underdevelopment, and non-temperate climactic ecologies. His essay “David Medalla: Dreams of Sculpture” (2020) was awarded the Oxford Art Journal Prize for Early Career Researchers. His current book project, Believing in Abstract Art: Metaphysical Idioms for Multiple Modernisms, argues for a renewed dialogue between art history, religious anthropology, and aesthetic philosophy by way of examining how Philippine and Thai artists sought grounding for shared conviction in the work of art. A second project brings together histories of climate control, art conservation, and conceptual art in the tropics to ask questions about ontologies of art in an age of environmental crisis.  

Related to CO-OP, Kenji recently taught a graduate seminar on Art and Climate Infrastructure, which interrogated the ways that climate control—as a foundational infrastructure for museological care—co-constituted the colonial apparatus around the management of art and continues to haunt debates around restitution today. He is keen to consider what is made possible in unsettling international standards and best practices with concepts formed in the crucible of the region.