PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT's work is included in the Bangkok Art Biennale. Her installation 'Knowledge in Your Hands, Eyes and Minds' consists of a soundscape, herbal aroma and a hanging mirror, as well as murals and paper cutouts of Thai folklore characters.
The Bangkok Art Biennale continues until 3 February, 2019.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Knowledge in Your Hands, Eyes and Minds, Installation View, Bangkok Biennale, 2018.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, sketches for work Knowledge in your Hands, Eyes and Mind for Bangkok Art Biennale, 2018.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT has been invited to participate in the Inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale happening between 19 October 2018 - 2 February 2019.
The theme of the Biennale is Beyond Bliss. It is an open-ended question that invites everyone to contemplate their own notion of happiness and the way they find happiness, posing inquiry as to what the ultimate happiness is.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Studio, 2018
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT was one of seven artists selected for the 2017/2018 studio awarded residency at The Clothing Store, North Eveleigh, located within the Carriageworks multi-arts precinct.
The Clothing Studio Carriageworks is celebrating its one year anniversary on 6th June with friends and patrons.
A big congratulations to PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT who has been awarded a twelve month residency at Carriageworks Clothing Store Artists Studios.
The seven selected artists represent an extraordinary group of Sydney artists working at the forefront of contemporary practice across a range of disciplines.
Read the media release here.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT is one of three prominent South-East Asian artists included in the inaugural exhibition for Thienny Lee Gallery, Sydney. Beauty and Myth of South East Asia opens Thursday, 2 March 2017 from 6–8pm.
The exhibition continues until 28 March 2017.
Find out more here.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Reincarnation of the Butterflies 2, 2016, acrylic, silver foil and ink on board, 30 x 40cm.
Photo credit: Tanja Bruckner, 2016.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT chats to National Association for the Visual Arts about living between two cultures and how she responds to, and connects to this in her work. You can watch the video here.
This coming month PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT will be included in two prominent group exhibitions in Sydney.
In the still of an ordinary day is showing at Janet Clayton Gallery, this exhibition will run from 27 January - 20 February 2016.
Twenty Twenty opens 6 February to 20 February at the Old Rum Store, Chippendale. Curated by Chippendale Creative Precinct and Claudia Chan Shaw the exhibition features twenty world-renowned Asian artists displaying works that embody moments of clarity inspired by the precision of 20:20 vision.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bhava 4, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 95cm.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt
Thailand-born, Sydney-based contemporary artist PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT chatted to NAVA in a recent interview. She spoke about living between two cultures and how she responds to, communicates and connects to this in her work.
To view the video, click here.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, studio image of work in progress for Broken the Spell component of the exhibition Retold-untold Stories.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT is having a solo exhibition at Chiang Mai University Art Centre, titled Retold-untold Stories. Part of her Asialink Arts Residency Program in Thailand, the exhibition explores personal experiences and the Lanna culture and dialect. Particularly, the work connects with Suwannakudt’s mother who was born in Chiang Mai and became a nun after giving birth to her last child, the same age as Phaptawan when she gave birth to her first.
There are three components to the exhibition including Let me tell you, Child which consists of a floor installation poem in Lanna dialect, There, there is a mask Suwannakudt made from locally sourced fabric that forms the bust sculpted of her mother in an earlier work completed in Sydney. The sculpture made prior to her Thailand residency, was made from memory of the artists’ mother. In addition, the Lanna dialect is connected with this component of the exhibition, where Suwannakudt’s mother lost her memory and spoke in Lanna dialect. The third group of work, titled Broken the Spell references tattooing and magic spells in which only men of the Lanna community would take part. Phaptawan created a piece where she performed a rhythmic piercing routine onto piece of paper with Lanna poems, written from spilt tea and coffee.
The exhibition is on from 9 – 28 December 2014.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT currently has a solo exhibition at 100 Tonson Gallery in Bangkok. Titled Days of (endless) Meaninglessness, the show explores the underlying layers of content in a set of photographs she took during her return to her hometown of Bangkok, amidst the country’s political turmoil of late 2013 to early 2014. The exhibition consists of 5 sets of acrylic on canvas triptychs, and will be on view from 16 October 2014 – 4 January 2015.
For more information, click here.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Not For Sure, 2012, drafting paper, paper with vegetal fibres, ink, bitumen, gold leaf, dye and pigment, dimensions variable. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photograph: Ben Symons.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT is featured in the current issue of Eyeline magazine. In the introduction to Uncertainty is Certain: The work of Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Adam Geczy writes of individuals being the passive observers on the faith of others, an inviting aspect in Suwannakudt’s art. While her work is faithful to the Buddhist notion, it seeks to introduce and incorporate the viewer despite their cultural or religious positions. The title from her 2012 installation Not for Sure, is derived from the yogic statement that ‘uncertainty is certain’, a reminder that our conceptions of the world are fleeting, relative, and fragmented.
To view the article click here.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt in the studio working on a bust of her mother. (Image from belmoreitch.com)
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT talks about her experience in Chiang Mai after winning an Asialink residency. During this residency she took part in making ceramics, a process that she was not previously familiar with, allowing her to form and develop new skills in ceramic art.
To read more about Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s residency experience click here
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Where There is No One, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 100x120cm.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT has published an essay Catching the moment, one step at a time in a book titled Asia Though Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Boarders. Suwannakudt's essay expands on the artist’s experience during her residency at the Womanifesto International in Thailand in 2008.
The book is edited by Fuyubi Nakumara, Morgan Perkins and Olivier Krishner, and published by Bloomsbury Academic.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT has been awarded a 2014 Asialink Arts Residency at Ne'-Na Contemporary Art Space, in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. This artist-run residency program promotes meaningful and enduring cross-cultural relationships between individuals and organisations in Australia and Asia. During her residency in Chiang Mai, Suwannakudt will realise the exhibition Retold-untold stories. The project will investigate local historical materials and the theme of natural disaster from women’s perspectives.
More information on Asialink Arts and the 2014 residents click here.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bhava 11, acrylic and vegetation fiber collage on canvas, 120 x 100cm, 2013.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT is a finalist in the Albany Art Prize, presented by The City of Albany. The exhibition showcases a selection of contemporary Australian painting, and the breadth and depth of the enduring medium. The major acquisitive prize includes a four week studio residency along with $2,500 for associated expenses.
The exhibition runs from 29 September until 27 October 2013.
For more information click here.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT’s Buddha lives, a six panel acrylic on canvas work, has been included in the permanent collection at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
Suwannakudt's new Bhava series is on view at ARC ONE until 11 May 2013.
Additionally, Suwannakudt is also currently in a show at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York and is also included in the group show ORIENTing: With or Without you, currently on view at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 4 May-13 July 2013, U.W.A., Western Australia.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s exhibition, Bhava Series, presents the subjective state of one’s existence within in-between spaces. Full of a richness of colour, a density of voices and intonations of place, this is Suwannakudt’s fourth solo exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery, 9 April - 11 May 2013.
In Thai, the complexity of the word 'bhava' encompasses ‘existence,’ or ‘the status of being’, which originated from a Pāli word meaning ‘to become’ or ‘a subjective becoming,’ in the sense of living, feeling and ascending within one’s continuous and cyclical worldly existence. In her devotion to her sense of self and discovery, Suwannakudt continues to create works that are contemplative, aesthetic tapestries - condensed communicative murals.
Phaptawan's recent sculptural and collaborative works further extend into the subjectivity of experience, participants writing their private thoughts on cloth made of vegetation fibre picked and woven in Thailand, the remnants of which have been incorporated into some of the works in 'Bhava Series'. Imbued with allegorical and everyday references - like one looking from a window over a landscape rendered both familiar and foreign - these works tell stories of personal memories, dreams and experiences of perpetual movement towards understanding and belonging.
- Annabel Holt, April 2013
In Bhava Series, Suwannakudt's paint and cloth weave together with the density of a multimedia tapestry, in direct reference to over twenty years of foundational training as a muralist in Bhuddist temples under the master tutorship of her father, Paiboon Suwannakudt. Phaptawan Suwannakudt migrated from Thailand to Australia in 1996, her entry into Australian culture being a disorientating experience.
For all enquiries, please contact Annabel Holt at mail@arc1gallery.com
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Budda's Lives and his Enlightenment (1997-98).
Phaptawan Suwannakudt: Budda's Lives and his Enlightenment on loan to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt monumental work Budda's Lives and his Enligtenment (1997-98)
will be on display in the Asian Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 31 January 2013 for three months. This is work was produced during 1997-8 and was exhibited in Australia and overseas at Museum of Contemporary Art of Castello, (D'art Contemporani De Castello) Valencia, Spain, (2000) and Cambelltown Arts Centre (2011).
Born in Thailand, Phaptawan Suwannakudt has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for over twenty years. Her style developed from bearing witness to her late father’spractice, the renowned Thai traditional mural painter Paiboon Suwannakudt.
Click here for further information.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT will be presenting her work, Three Worlds 1 to the Prime Minister of Thailand, Yingluck Shinawatra on the 28th May to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the bilateral relationship between Australia and Thailand.
MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO and PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT have been selected to participate in the 18th Biennale of Sydney, 27 June until 16 September, 2012.
Titled All our relations, the 18th Biennale of Sydney will present works by more than 100 artists hailing from Australia, New Zealand, Asia Pacific, the Americas, Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. Nearly half the artists in the 18th Biennale of Sydney will present works created specifically for this exhibition, including many substantial collaborative installations.
MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO will be also be participating in the exhibition, South of the Border, at the Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane, 31 March - 29 April.