Despite not having painted for over two decades, I find myself drawn back into the act of looking, contemplating what it means to make an image and to see painting today. I don’t claim authority over the technicalities of painting. I won’t dissect or analyse each work in detail. Instead, I am drawn to broader questions: How do image-making and memory intersect? In what ways does painting serve as a vessel for fragmented histories and collective emotions? And how can we read these visual traces without settling them? Honestly, I came for the answers to these questions and I stayed for the paintings.

First, I must mention that the exhibition takes place in a vacant building located in a commercial district, the land ultimately belongs to a prestigious university founded by a late king. This setting resonates with the notion of a memory complex, as the dusty empty walls and silent rooms evoke traces of the commoner’s space and forgotten stories. Just as memory is never present or complete, the building is a physical reminder of what remains unseen, untold, or suspended between disappearance and recollection. In a general sense, the venue becomes part of the exhibition’s architecture of memory, inviting visitors to reflect on spaces in a limbo state, alongside the paintings as its focal points.

It all began with the idea of ghostly beings and space —of occupying the unoccupied, creating a temporal existence for the exhibition as a way to engage with intangible, fragile subjects. A memory complex, perhaps, refers to a layered, multifaceted experience of memory —one that is not straightforward but tangled, overlapping, and often unresolved. It embodies how personal, political, and collective memories coexist, influence, and sometimes conflict with one another. Memory is not fixed or singular but fluid and fragmented, composed of sensations, emotions, and images that shape how we understand our past, ourselves, and the world. This concept invites us to experience memory not only intellectually but emotionally, to feel the tensions between clarity and obscurity, presence and absence, hope and disillusionment.

To paint is to engage with memory, to hold moments, feelings, and histories within the space of the canvas. It is a process of remembering that is never stable but always shifting, where personal and collective pasts become entangled. Painting becomes an act of excavation, revealing traces beneath the surface and inviting us to navigate a complex thread of memory.

Paphonsak La-or and Pare Patcharapa, the two artists in this exhibition, operate in distinct spheres. Paphonsak draws on the visual language of politics and art history, engaging with images that circulate in both local and global contexts. His paintings play with perception, challenging how we see, process, and interpret. They call for mental recalibration, asking us to reconcile what we think we recognise with what is actually there, and what it means.

For this project, Paphonsak begins with small, delicate yet naive drawings exchanged in letters between Thai political prisoners and their families, or in some cases, with the public. These images are layered with references to canonical artworks, from Goya to Van Gogh, creating a visual dialogue that spans time, places, and systems of power. He also incorporates his renditions of Thai political sites, threaded with the ambiguous image from Le Petit Prince: the boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant. This serves as a metaphor: a reminder of how easily we can lose the ability to truly see, to understand what lies beneath the surface or even what is plainly and sometimes evidently right before our eyes.

Pare’s work, by contrast, emerges from a deeply internal space. Her imagery is rooted in emotional and psychological landscapes shaped by personal struggle, vulnerability, and memory. The political and the personal mix into one another in quiet, poetic ways. Her work listens rather than declares, attuned to nuance, silence, and shifts in mood. She approaches painting as a process of transformation —of giving form to what is fleeting and intangible.

She describes her paintings as constantly shifting entities —works that either draw close or hold back, depending on the viewer’s experience. This current body of work began with what she describes as glances of hers as a visitor in unfamiliar places. Her emotional response to Thailand’s post-election atmosphere is one of silent disappointment. She speaks of a moment like phi-tak-pha-om (ผีตากผ้าอ้อม): a Thai expression for the eerie twilight. Her paintings dwell in this suspended time between light and shadow, figure and space, hope and disillusionment.

In Memory Complex, Paphonsak La-or and Pare Patcharapa offer two distinct yet intertwined visions of memory. Paphonsak channels political memory, layering delicate yet innocent prisoners’ drawings with canonical art and the rendition of political places to create a dialogue across time and power. Patcharapa’s paintings emerge from intimate emotional landscapes, where personal memories blend with the political, echoing with vulnerability and transformation. Together, their works invite us not to merely see, but to feel and remember, to confront memory’s ambiguity, fragility, and enduring presence.

the one who still looks at things,
Bangkok 6.2025