About
portrait by geoff robertson
Kengchakaj (Gheng/chAH /kad)
Kengchakaj is a Bangkok-born, Lenapehoking (Brooklyn)-based Thai diaspora sound practitioner and improviser. He makes sound rooted in his lineage as a site of repair, reconciliation, and transformation, holding space for unlearning and relearning, and shining light on the marginalized. These sounds arrive charged with political complexity and contested memory that permeate both personal experience and collective memory.
Kengchakaj's medium of expression spans electro-acoustic piano, Southeast Asian tuned analog synthesizer, spatial audio, instrument making, and live coding, utilizing technologies to produce multisensory live performance. Through synthesis and soundscape textures drawn from Southeast Asian sound cultures, the performance becomes a space where contradictions don't cancel each other out; they coexist. The political bleeds into the personal. Frustration mirrors healing. Anger disguises itself as its opposite. Ancestral soundscapes meet contemporary technologies. Traditional modes of collaboration and expression encounter improvisation and electronics. The work refuses resolution, instead offering a sonic terrain where contested histories resonate alongside moments of beauty, where erasure and presence might occupy the same frequency, where what has been inherited transforms into something both familiar and irreducibly new.
Kengchakaj is a Manhattan School of Music (MM) graduate, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Gold Award Lumen Prize winner. He is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. He was a Lincoln Center Collider Fellow(2024-2025), Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow(2024), Processing Foundation Fellow(2025), and a Y10 & Y11 NEW INC member(2023-2025). His projects have received development funds and support from the Jerome Foundation, the Lincoln Center, NEW INC, Queens Council on the Arts, City Artist Corps, Rhizome, Processing Foundation, CultureHub, Babycastles, Eyebeam, and Institute for Electronic Arts. He is one-half of elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ, a collaborative duo with interdisciplinary media artist, Nitcha Tothong.
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