About

Originally I am from Bangkok, Thailand but I grew up in the Netherlands. I studied ArtScience at the Royal Academy of art in The Hague because the curriculum offers a more technological approach in the process of creating art that I think fits more with our current technocratic society.

My research is based on the change in iconography of the sublime in Western art through technological and social changes in Occidental society. The embodiment of the sublime in western art has changed throughout history where religious architecture and the divinity of Gods and Saints made place for art that conveys the scale and grandeur of nature by artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Mallord William Turner.

In the 20th century we start to see that minimalistic abstract art starts evoking this sense of the sublime such as the chapel of Mark Rothko or Anish Kapoor with Descent into limbo. These works envelop the audience with their vast emptiness to trigger the divine experience of the sublime.

This shapeshifting nature of the sublime throughout western art history attracted me because it challenges me as an artist to find new ways to portray and experience it. In our current digital era the void left behind by these artists has been filled with the sublime of giant computer networks and artificial intelligence.

The recent development of quantum computers that are many times more powerful than our current computer systems increase the possibility that we are moving towards a technological singularity. This is a moment in time when artificial intelligence becomes truly autonomous, surpassing humanity's mental capabilities and rendering us obsolete.

The sublime experience we undergo when we encounter these unbound technological entities reminds us of our finite existence as biological creatures, which shows parallels to the themes of my research topic related to Theravada Buddhism, the main religion of Thailand.

Thai art and culture has developed in isolation from the west for a long time. My home country has never been colonized by western states and it still has its cultural heritage and religion to this day. More than ninety four percent of the Thai population still identifies as Buddhist and Thailand's golden Buddhist temples and altars such as the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and Wat Pho are still visited daily by the Thai population to pray, meditate and make offerings in order to escape the cycle of reincarnation and release them from their material self.

The art created for these holy sites is used to symbolize the sublime of the Buddha and his teachings. The releasing of the self implied in Buddhist philosophy shows strong parallels with the experience of the sublime in the western aesthetic context. Due to globalization, Thai traditions and culture have increasingly mixed with Western ones. Where for example shopping malls have merged with buddhist altars and traditional Thai houses are joined by skyscrapers. In my artistic practice I try to look at the intersections of these two cultures to imagine new ways they could co-exist.

The works that are created through my research are generative sculptural installations that abstract Thai forms, objects and traditions. These projects are based on self generating processes and rudimentary materials set into motion by motors, pumps and software and form themselves over time to create abstractions of Thai cultural iconography. The self-generating quality in my installations bears a strong resemblance to the cycle of reincarnation in Buddhism that humans undergo on the path to enlightenment, shifting and changing over time. I want to see if these works utilizing western methods of art production and basic materials have the potential to fulfill the same role as the Buddhist symbols and traditions on which they are based.