This body of work is a journey into the core of a contested landscape—a space where history isn't just a record in a book, but a tangible, sometimes painful, presence in the soil and in our minds. Envision – A Fissure Perception is a multi-site, multi-media installation born from the profound feeling that the past—specifically the shared and then divided history of the Thai and Lao peoples—never truly leaves us. It remains, like a scar, shaping our identity and the very structures around us.
This project moves beyond simply documenting a border; it is an attempt to feel out and map how geopolitical lines, economic strain, and the relentless march of modernization are etched onto both the environment and the human spirit. It asks: How do the ancient myths and modern divisions of the nation-state become embedded in the landscape, and in us?
The initial energy of this project was channeled into two emotionally charged, site-specific locations: the former Krung Sri Bank in Nong Khai, which stands right on the Mekong River border with Laos, and the former Holiday Massage Parlor in Udon Thani. These places, thick with layered memory and function, were the perfect vessels to hold this story. The final iteration brings these separate echoes together into a single, cohesive exhibition in Khon Kaen.
In the original Nong Khai space—a room on the third floor facing the Thai-Lao divide—I wove together fragments of history. Photographs, video projections, thread stretched across the wall, and galvanized barbed wire all collaborated to narrate the stories of unity and the subsequent painful severance between Nong Khai and Vientiane.
Inspired by the physical boundary of the Mekong River, Silver Vine imagines a landscape fighting back. I use the harsh industrial nature of barbed wire juxtaposed with the softness of fishing lures and the quiet glow of solar lights to symbolize a political boundary that has been internalized—that feels as natural and inescapable as a winding vine. The wire is stretched restrictively, ceiling to floor, but its rigidity is broken by the gentle, percussive chime of silver bells, stirred by the slightest breeze. The earthworm lures, shimmering with emerald glitter like serpent scales, suggest a living, mythic energy intertwined with the restriction. This piece reclaims the border, not as a static line on a map, but as a living scar that is simultaneously a restriction and a silent pathway.
Mindfulness – A Fissure Perception, this video installation moves away from reality, projecting an abstraction of color, light, and movement. The scattering of light off the miniature acrylic mirrors is inspired by the constant, cyclical nature of our world: gathering, disintegrating, and fading. It’s composed of layers abstracted from hundreds of photographs collected across the region, blurring the specific and the general. The frenetic sound—a recreation of the dense chirping of hundreds of birds—audiates the raw process of evolution and adaptation. This beautiful, almost overwhelming, natural cycle evokes an equal measure of hope and sadness. It asks viewers to look beyond literal visuals, into the 'shadows of imagination,' to find their own relationship with change and inevitable loss.
The Strung Fissure, this piece uses color and material to locate the historical wound in the body of shared culture. The Red Thread is a direct reference to the Buddhist Protection Bracelet (Sai Sin)—a tradition meant to bind and protect life. Here, that shared, protective lifeline is deliberately stretched across the very elements of division, symbolizing a cultural tie held taut across a historical fracture. The Green Thread embodies the collective self, directly referencing the Emerald Buddha (Phra Kaew Morakot), a supreme symbol of state power and spiritual protection historically contested by both nations. By using these threads, the work makes a powerful claim: the deepest spiritual and national symbols are often the very points of our deepest historical conflict, embedding the contest for identity directly into the spiritual and physical self.
Temporary Skin presents lightboxes of deconstructed images of used clothes, beginning with the raw, tangible fact of discarded clothing—including faded denim jeans, an intimate bra, a sentimental pajama shirt with a white heart pattern, a T-shirt with Thai script, and a blue-and-red long-sleeve shirt—found at the Holiday Massage and Spa. These garments, once a "temporary skin" covering the human body, are utilized not merely as found objects but as silent witnesses to a profound historical severance.
The work translates these items into digitally isolated and vectorized forms, set against a charged palette where vivid blues and reds dominate, contrasting with the sober, light grey earth tones that anchor the narrative to the soil. The composition is structurally defined by a recurring barbed wire motif. Integrated into the forms and repeated across the background as a subtle, endless loop, this pattern transforms the imagery into a landscape of tension, symbolizing the persistent constraints of the past that weave through our present reality.
Envision – A Fissure Perception is ultimately an act of meditation on memory. By drawing on the physical residue of division—the bank, the massage parlor, the Mekong, the barbed wire—and then filtering it through the spiritual language of threads, bells, and light, the work seeks a kind of visual and emotional clarity. It acknowledges the persistent pain of a fractured history, yet offers a space for introspection. It suggests that while the scars of history are real and enduring, we have the capacity to reimagine and re-inhabit the contested landscape. The ultimate aim is not to heal the wound, but to understand its shape, recognize its beauty, and find the quiet, determined life that grows up around and through it.
