Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook studied printmaking at Silpakorn University in Thailand, before obtaining a master’s degree from Braunschweig University of Art in Germany. For the thirty years since, she had taught at Chiang Mai University. Rasdjarmrearnsook’s work deals with topics deeply rooted in Thai culture while also exploring the universal themes of the link between the human and nonhuman, life and death, and spirituality. In the early 2000s, she gained critical attention for her video works featuring Thai villagers freely discussing Western painting masterpieces and a Thai Buddhist monk attempting to draw moral lessons from the work of Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman. In addition to major international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale (2005) and documenta (Kassel, 2012), her work was previously seen at Mori Art Museum in SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2017).

The Class is a video work in which the artist lectures corpses about death in what seems to be a kind of classroom. It was filmed in an actual hospital morgue in Chiang Mai, with unclaimed dead bodies playing the role of the six “students” in the class. The work is a performance in which the artist tries to understand death by lecturing the dead about death, with the lecture offering various definitions of death from different perspectives. Rasdjarmrearnsook at times talks directly to the cadavers, encouraging them to share their own views and experiences, and communicating with them in the same way she would with living people. This attitude demonstrates her attempt to confront something that society has overlooked as well as social taboos and cultural discrimination, and the religious and cultural values that involve death. Rasdjarmrearnsook’s other works have dealt with such subjects as stray dogs and an ostracized mentally disabled woman, and this highly affectionate gaze that endeavors to shine light on the neglected sides of contemporary society is an essential and signature aspect of her oeuvre.