Ames Yavuz is proud to present Heavenly Pink, multi-disciplinary artist Manit Sriwanichpoom’s first solo exhibition in Australia and his second with the gallery. One of the most prominent artists of his generation in Southeast Asia, Sriwanichpoom is best-known internationally for his startling photographic series featuring the ‘Pink Man’, a portly man in a flashy pink silk tuxedo who pushes a perennially empty shopping cart. Embodied by Thai poet and performance artist Sompong Thawee, the Pink Man was conceived by Sriwanichpoom to provoke, ridicule and warn our consumerist societies of its perils. His new installation, Stay Pink, depicts the Pink Man’s shopping trolley hooked up to a mass of IV drips, representing an emblem of capitalism on the brink of collapse and in need of numerous lifelines to satiate its unquenchable desires. Heavenly Pink is also the title of Sriwanichpoom’s first animated video work, which imagines the spiritual afterlife of this devoted consumer character. As the artist explains, “although the Pink Man’s life on earth has ended, having found death in New York, 2018, his spirit found freedom to travel across dimensions to different spaces as he wishes.” In Heavenly Pink, the Pink Man appears on the horizon of a historic Buddhist mural that was painted in the 1800s by Thai master Khrua In Khong in opposition to tides of colonialism. Sriwanichpoom also presents Afterlife So Pink #3, comprised of a suspended wooden boat carrying the Pink Man trapped inside an eternal ice cube. Echoing the barque of Dante, the boat is a universal symbol of the human journey into the afterlife. In his new Ayudhaya series combining photography and painting for the first time, Sriwanichpoom draws from the broken and reassembled stone Buddha statues in the storied city of Ayudhaya (today, Ayutthaya). Looted and mismatched, these statues express Thai society’s fragmented relationship to spirituality. Ames Yavuz will host a preview for Sriwanichpoom’s exhibition from 5–8 March to coincide with the Biennale of Sydney’s VIP opening week, followed by a public reception on Saturday, 9 March.