From Loss to Light: Bhu Kongtaveelert (’25) on Memory, Climate, and New Futures

I first met with Bhu Kongtaveelert last December on a rainy Friday right before campus closed for break. He was holed up in the basement studio space beneath the Stanford Art Gallery, pulling out fragments of salvaged objects, fabric materials, and assorted works in different states of completion. The work was still coming together for his various projects, and there was a nervous energy present, but the array of materials and methods spoke confidently in the stillness.

Now graduating with dual degrees in Computer Science and Art Practice, Bhu leaves Stanford with a portfolio spanning installations, projection work, and interdisciplinary research on climate and memory archives. He was a Fellow—and later co-chair—at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), where he developed early projects that explored his Southeast Asian ancestry and the reverberations of climate disaster. This past winter, he also completed a coveted residency with Recology San Francisco, producing work entirely from materials gathered at the city’s public waste facility.

What seems to unify much of Bhu’s work is a sense of longing for the past while wrestling with tensions that remain. As a body of work, there’s a sensitivity and resistance to despair. In its place, Bhu offers the possibility that something new might emerge in the ruins.

What follows are excerpts from a conversation in the final days of his undergraduate term, with questions lightly edited for clarity and responses presented in Bhu’s own words.

Q: How do you choose what material or stories to work with?

Bhu: I’ve been doing a lot of mythologizing of myself, or like reflecting on my own practice recently. I think I’m really drawn to objects with history—materials with history. Zooming out a little, I think my interest in this kind of art is in the climate vulnerability of memory.

I’m really drawn to objects that are corrupted in some way by the elements, and thinking about what emerges in this kind of ruined object—what new property emerges when, say, a family photo is damaged, or a 35mm film is blotted with water, or if the hard drive corrupts and the memory in it becomes inaccessible… or the technology becomes obsolete and it takes so much effort to access the information that you know is there.

Q: Are there certain themes you find yourself returning to?
Bhu: I’m really interested in how materials interact with light. I’ve been drawn to objects with different degrees of opacity and reflectiveness. I work with projection partly because I think it gives form to memory.

There’s this idea from medieval optics called the phantasm, about how the images that you see—it’s all illusions that you construct. You never see the object, you only see its illusion. I find that helpful in thinking about how the memory—the form of a memory itself—is intangible, but really present.

Q: Is there a recent installation or artwork that felt like a breakthrough for you?
Bhu: My undergraduate honors thesis is called it strands us in a state of bewilderment as to whether our moment is mundane or exceptional (After Maggie Nelson). That project was a combination of all my learning in undergrad—projection mapping, working with family archives, found video imagery, camcorders, damaged photos, damaged films.

I was thinking a lot about having a better relationship with water. I’m really tired of only talking about flooding and my fear around it. I wanted to talk more about how—as things probably get worse—how I might continue to try to build a better relationship with water as it seeps into our lives more and more in the future.

Q: Was there a particular image that changed how you understood your family’s relationship to water, or your own?

Bhu: In 2024, I uncovered some flood-damaged family archives while cleaning out my late grandparents’ home. Tacked between my grandfather’s old desk and a protective glass cover, there were like 30-something photos that were lost in the flood.

I wondered if they were distant kin to Meghann Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes, because they were not formed by water, but undone through its slow subtraction. It’s a kind of reverse image-making, where presence emerges through loss.

One of the photos—I can barely make out my silhouette next to my grandfather’s. It’s very ghostly. The image is blurred out and weathered. But instead of seeing it as a failed archive, I try to think: what does it record now? Maybe not family memory, but the elements—the traces of black water, the sediments that settled on paper, the sun’s touch on fading ink.

Q: How do you see your art contributing to climate justice or Southeast Asian visibility?
Bhu: It’s definitely not a clear or direct contribution, right? I think what art is good at is bringing people to the conversation. I don’t think art in itself is the solution. I think it appeals to emotion—and if you’re lucky, maybe you can pass on some facts or political drive, too.

That’s what I liked about being at Stanford: I could do interdisciplinary work. I didn’t need art to do everything. Through Earth Systems and CS, I worked on projects around AI and funding for climate-resilient infrastructure. So my art didn’t need to carry the full burden—it could just help people feel something, or process what’s real.

Q: What do you hope people feel or understand after encountering your work?
Bhu: I hope they think more about water. But I’m not interested in romanticizing disaster. A lot of the video work is family archive stuff—me learning how to swim, or a beach trip, or other joyful memories.

There’s a reason people like living next to water. It’s beautiful. It’s scary—flooding, hurricanes, riverine collapse—but it’s still beautiful. I hope my work holds space for that ambivalence… that tension between fear and love, between collapse and joy.

Q: As you look ahead, what kind of work or communities are you most excited to be part of?
Bhu: I want to make public work, actually. When I was installing my thesis, I tried putting parts of it out on the lawn, and watching how the sunlight hit the reflectiveness and transparency of the sculptures—it really moved me. I want to try that more.

I’m also working with friends on a devised theater project called Dodo in a Landfill. We came up with the pitch in like an hour during finals week. It’s about a dodo bird discovering discarded memory in a coastal landfill. It’s still forming, but that’s the kind of space I want to be in—collaborative, experimental, rooted in climate and memory and story.