DuckUnit is a design and production studio in Bangkok that has spent twenty-one years building things that move, glow and hang above people’s heads. It was founded in 2005 by Wit Pimkanchanapong and is now led by Rueangrith Suntisuk and Pornpan Arayaveerasid.
The name came from the shape of the work. As Suntisuk puts it: “We started as a design collective working across many fields, from concerts and theatre to art. We combine the different disciplines we’ve learned and understood to make our work. The name DuckUnit comes from our curiosity in many directions, and from constantly trying to do things we don’t yet know how to do.”
Speaking to designboom in the middle of a project in Paris, Suntisuk said something about audiences that is worth taking out of the interview and putting on a wall.
The 100 and the 0
“In a concert, audience satisfaction usually starts at 100, and people hope for even more.”
“In art, the audience’s attention and focus sometimes start at 0. Understanding these different states of the audience has strongly shaped our newer work, and moving between these different demands shapes how we make our work.”
This is the most practically useful framing of a difference that usually gets discussed in terms of taste or seriousness. A concert crowd arrives already converted. They bought a ticket for a band they love; the stage has to not squander goodwill it already has. Spectacle is a legitimate tool because the audience is pre-committed to being impressed.
A gallery visitor arrives neutral at best, in a room they wandered into, with no investment in the outcome. Nothing is owed to the work. If it does not earn attention in the first thirty seconds it will not get a second chance, and the technique that worked on the concert crowd — overwhelming them — reads as noise.
Most people who build installations learn this by failing at it. Having it stated as two numbers is better.
What changes in the build
DuckUnit’s own account of how this reshapes the work is specific about point of view.
On concerts and film: “we usually try to make the audience take in the same story from the same point of view.” One narrative, one vantage, everyone aligned. Their show FLURE LIFE for the Thai alt-rock band of the same name does exactly that — giant watercolour illustrations of eyeballs, slithering snakes and sleeping faces rise and fall over the stage to tell a fable behind the music. The audience faces forward and receives it.
On the art side: “In our recent art works, we try to think the opposite way. We open up space for variety among the audience and the work, so that the audience dissolves into the space and becomes part of the work itself. We’ve found that this opens up possibilities for both the audience and ourselves to understand the piece, with different kinds of beauty that we could never have predicted from the start.”
“Could never have predicted” is the operative phrase, and it is a design goal rather than a disclaimer. A concert stage that behaves unpredictably is broken. An installation that behaves predictably is finished the moment you understand it.
The work
A Flower of Forgetfulness (2026) was a large-scale installation at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels — a collaboration between DuckUnit, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and sound engineers and composers Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr and Koichi Shimizu. Inside an old chapel, projected video, sound, light and movement were put into dialogue. The studio spent the days before opening perfecting the mechanical elements and locking the timing to the rest of the piece, which is the unglamorous centre of this kind of work: a motor cue that drifts by half a second against a sound cue is the difference between a scene and a malfunction.
Embargo of Silence, conceived and curated by Yuen Chee Wai, is a silent disco — the audience gets the music through headphones rather than speakers. That is the 0-to-100 problem in its purest form. Remove the shared sound field and you remove the mechanism by which a room becomes one audience; what you get instead is a room of individuals who can see each other dancing to something you cannot hear.
For Love After Death by artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, remade for Bangkok CityCity Gallery, the studio suspended a semitransparent panel that caught a projection and bent light so that it oozed out into the space behind the screen. A projection surface that leaks is a surface that stops being a frame — the image is no longer a window you look through but a volume you are standing in, which is the “audience dissolves into the space” idea executed with one material choice.
Other listed work includes Two Who Remember the Sea, an outdoor installation made with Weerasethakul and Guo-Liang Tan; The Ring of Fire (2024) on Naoshima Island; and stage design for BODYSLAM Fest.
The materials, and letting go of them
Asked what the studio is currently working on technically, Suntisuk’s answer is a list and then a method:
“In many recent works we’ve used fabric, smoke, motors, projection, light, and objects we can’t fully control. The new things that happen usually come from trying to control these elements and then letting them go. They tend to appear at the moment when these elements meet. Right now we’re learning how they coexist and what effect they have on each other.”
Fabric and smoke are the two in that list that cannot be keyframed. A motor goes where you tell it; haze does what the HVAC and the body heat of 400 people decide it does. Building a show whose best moments depend on smoke means building a show that is slightly different every night, and treating that as the feature rather than the tolerance.
“Trying to control these elements and then letting them go” is a reasonable description of how most good kinetic installation work actually gets made — a long period of establishing authority over a material, followed by deliberately relinquishing some of it.
Sources
- Concert design, art spaces, and the mechanics of audience with DuckUnit — designboom
- Duck Unit — Holland Festival
- Duckunit on YouTube
- Kunstenfestivaldesarts
- FLURE LIFE stage timelapse — Duckunit