Tintin Cooper

In BANANA GHOST artist TINTIN COOPER explores how Thailand and the wider Southeast Asian region are imagined through foreign eyes, and how locals in turn navigate the constant tide of visitors to their tourism-saturated beaches, cities, and provinces. At the same time, it considers the preconceived notions locals hold toward visitors, whether they are tourists or migrant workers. These pervasive fantasies are deeply informed by the artist’s lived experience as a person of Thai and English background.

The language of tropical fantasy is manifest across BANANA GHOST. This vernacular is stretched and distorted through repetition, much like the viral nature of memes themselves. Here, we encounter “passport bros” weeping in paradise, subjects caught beneath the wrath of a tropical landscape, awash in the lush colors and “ethnic” patterns of the region, and populated with nods to Thai wildlife: tigers, the famed pygmy hippo MooDeng, and sinuous snakes. 

Elsewhere, the extraterrestrial puppet Alf clutches a cat sandwich, a sly nod to Western meme culture where cuteness collides with absurdity. Across the surface, this absurdity meets the charged words of Donald Trump: “The aliens, they’re eating cats, they’re eating the dogs.” What begins as a throwaway jibe revives a familiar stereotype about immigrant communities and the consumption of pets. Around this time, headlines appeared throughout Thai news accusing visitors to Thailand of the same heinous activity. Creating the twisted mirror of how both the East and West manifest suspicions around unfamiliar cultures and the subhuman actions we assign to them through the process of othering.

Full exhibition text English / Thai (pdf)

Tintin Cooper (born Bangkok, Thailand) is a mixed Thai–British artist whose practice spans painting, installation, and digital media. Working in series and moving fluidly between materials, including painting on acetate, household blinds, polycarbonate, making ceramics or animated gifs, her works vacilitate between humour and critique. 

While earlier works deconstructed heroic archetypes (especially in the football world), her current work deepens toward the contemporary gaze on the “exotic” or “other,” tracing the cultural currents between West and East, and between Thailand and its migrant workers. Drawing from global memes of cute animals and online subcultures such as Passport Bros and Crypto Bros, Cooper is curious about how desire and power are projected into the online images we consume daily and how these fantasies are shaped by algorithms and tech culture. Her paintings and videos resist definitive readings, instead offering layered, often ambiguous images that invite viewers to confront their own ways of looking, an impulse shaped by her own lived experience of growing up in borderlands across more than 17 countries.

Cooper has exhibited and screened works internationally, including at Bangkok Art & Culture Center, Transmediale Festival, Sydney Biennial, Walker Art Center, and Carnegie Museum, with works held in permanent collections such as the Staedel Museum Frankfurt, DIB Bangkok Museum and Soho House London & Bangkok. 

In 2024 she was awarded Creative Australia’s Debra Porch Award, leading her to Melbourne to research the visual culture of AFL (Australian Rules Football) as part of her ongoing exploration of racism and masculinity in sport. 

Recent collaborations include fashion brands Grounds (Tokyo) and Repleat (Bangkok).