In her current solo exhibition "Days Of (Endless) Meaninglessness" at 100 Tonson Gallery, Phaptawan Suwannakudt draws on the emotions she experienced during a visit home last December to create five triptychs and a video. She looks at Thailand, her home, with nostalgia as an emigrant and unease as a citizen. Here, she is at once an insider and an outsider.
Now based in Australia, Phaptawan navigates and circumvents the qualifiers "female" or "migrant" or "Thai-born" that tend to come before the word "artist". She lives on the margins, as suggested in the names of some of her previous exhibitions: "Edge Of Elsewhere", "ORIENTing", and "With Or Without You".
"I was getting interviewed for a radio programme for a solo exhibition with 4A, which stands for Australian Asian Artists Association," Phaptawan recalls. "I was late. It was pouring and I got lost. After the interview, I asked for the name of the programme and they told me, 'Something Else'. What does that say?"
The triptychs featured in her Bangkok exhibition are reproduced from photographs she took while walking through the neighbourhood in Thonburi where she grew up, on a day when protesters, with flags in their hair, whistles in their mouths and phones in their hands poised to take selfies, were flooding the streets on the other side of Chao Praya River.
Back in Sydney, Phaptawan cut several photographs down the middle and inserted another with a matching palette in the middle: a stairwell wedged between a fence, a boat ride in between grey walls. She thaws the frozen, absolute moments trapped in photographs, unsettling the quiet composition.
This is the first time that Phaptawan has worked from photographs. She had drawn inspiration for her past works from narratives, having begun her painting career as a muralist, stepping in for her father, Paiboon Suwannakudt (aka Tan Kudt), on a project at the Four Seasons Hotel after he had passed away.
She lived in Buddhist temples during many of his projects, between the age of eight and 12, and watched her father paint. She watched her brothers go out and collect alms with the monks. At meals, she ate last, after her younger brothers. Monks and laypeople are different. Men and women are different and she was the only girl.
Being one of the very few female artists who did mural paintings in temples put Phaptawan at the forefront of female painters in Thailand. She became involved with "Womenifesto", a female artists initiative, before moving to Australia in 1996.
In 1994, she participated in the all-female exhibition "Tra(di) Section" at Concrete House, which was to be the first time her works were showcased outside the realms of mural painting.
"My work was an installation of sarongs, hung high up above the head," she remembered. "It related to an instance where my sister was stopped from painting at a temple. She was standing on scaffolding. Someone went to the abbot and said he wouldn't walk under the scaffolding with her on it. My sister had just graduated from art school. Before we left, I said, 'Just before we leave, can I ask a question? Can this person who stopped her from painting paint?'. What is your reasoning behind your decisions?"
Phaptawan's works have always been entangled with personal experiences. The triptychs, devoid of living figures, evoke an emptiness — her singular reactions to a familiar environment seen in a new light. She had felt depressed, witnessing the protest right after a trip with scholars to Maha Sarakham where she met with youths marginalised because of their circumstances of birth. She was troubled by the disparity between the city and upcountry.
The painting recaptures the emotions she felt as she took the photographs that day.
"My work process has evolved naturally with time," she says. "Say you had read a book when you were 10 and you read the same book when you were 30; the same book becomes two different books. Moving from mural painting into another style has been influenced by the experiences I've been through, how I look at the world, how I connect and relate to society. You can't look at the same thing the same way forever."
The mesmerising video, May 2014, playing on loop, captures mysterious shadows of a veiled curtain cast on a wall, dancing as a plane flies overhead. The camera pans, captures Phaptawan's eyes, follows her gaze and her silent contemplation. It was filmed a few days before the coup.
"Life is curious," she muses.
"I was very close to my dad. I once questioned him, 'Dad, why do you paint waves as lines? I don't see water as lines.' He told me to go out and look at water. I went out to look at the pond and the wind was making waves. I came back in. I was around 14 at the time. I said I didn't see. He told me to go out again and close my eyes this time. I came back and said, I saw darkness, not lines. He said, 'Stay here, close your eyes. Can you see your mum?' I missed my mum terribly. We were at the temple and my mum was home. She had stayed home to be with my little siblings.
"I said, yes, of course I saw my mum. He said, What is she doing? She's cooking. Can you smell it? Yes. Can you see lines in my water now? Yes. Yes. He made me see the lines in that water."
"Days Of (Endless) Meaninglessness" is on exhibition at 100 Tonson Gallery until Jan 4, 2015. www.100tonsongallery.com
