Past Solo Exhibition
Pinaree Sanpitak: Fragmented Bodies: The Personal and The Public 25.09.2019 — 01.11.2019
Information
Event has ended
25 September to 3 November 2019
About The Exhibition
“My works are correlated with one another – they are ideations from previous works, continuously evolving. It’s not just about the woman; a lot of it is about being human, sharing a space, and how we interact with each other.” – Pinaree Sanpitak
This September, STPI unveils a new body of work by Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak in a solo presentation, “Fragmented Bodies: The Personal and The Public”, arising from Sanpitak’s artist residency at STPI which began in May 2018. The works present themselves as a series of playful provocations that bridge a sustained exploration of print and paper techniques such as collagraphy, etching, monoprint and collage with new spatial and formal concerns. The ‘breast-stupa’ motif, for which Sanpitak is renowned, re-emerges in rich permutations and treatments, allowing reconsiderations of age-old symbols that have held both sacred and earthly significances across histories.
Taking on a range of new discursive forms in the exhibition, the breast-stupa is reoriented to elicit various responses, suggesting the openness of an alms bowl in one iteration and gender ambiguity in another. Resisting linear references to femininity, motherhood and religion, Sanpitak seeks to draw viewers into sensorial and affective relations with her work. The repetition of motifs on view is generative and expansive, locating wider, universal cultural referents that complicate narrow interpretations of deceptively familiar imagery.
Following its major debut at the Encounters section of Art Basel Hong Kong in March this year, the maze-like installation The Walls (2018-19) activates STPI’s central gallery space in a new labyrinthine reconfiguration. The work’s skin-like paper textures and light suspension imbue it with a porosity and bodily presence that threaten the regularity of the grid format, invoking an anthropomorphic quality and movement directly informed by the bodies of visitors weaving through it. The textured panels of the installation, along with other print and paper works on view, bring visitors into contemplative moments of proximity and connectivity.
“Fragmented Bodies: The Personal and The Public” suggests a constant negotiation and reconciliation between the self, cultural conditions and the environment, enabling contingency and fluidity to surface in the tracing of territories on both personal and planetary scales. Creating empathetic gestures in response to the vagaries of humanity and lived experiences, Sanpitak’s work brings us into deeper engagement with the world we inhabit.
About the artist
Pinaree Sanpitak
Residencies in 2018, 2025
Pinaree Sanpitak (1961, born and based in Bangkok, Thailand) creates works that explores how the human body, shaped by its lived experiences, sensuously inhabits physical and metaphorical spaces. Working across painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture and collaborative culinary art, she is part of the generation of Thai contemporary artists that pioneered the use of mixed media multimedia and conceptual approaches in the 1980s and 1990s.
Influenced by her own journey of motherhood, Sanpitak is best known for abstracting the female form into elemental parts such as vessels, eggs and curvatures. The female breast, in particular, is a recurring motif. Coined as the ‘breast-stupa’, the form of the vessel and mound simultaneously resembles a Buddhist shrine and an alms bowl. This reorients the viewer’s perception of the female body through combining ideas of the sacred and the sexualised. In Noon-nom (2001–2002), an interactive installation with a title that means both “support” and “breast milk” in Thai, the artist invites viewers to rest within a sea of soft, flesh-toned breast-stupa sculptures. The work references Buddha’s ability to multiply himself a thousandfold, bringing together associations to the spiritual and bodily, the sensitive and playful.
Sanpitak obtained her BFA at the University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki in 1986. Her work can be found in major collections worldwide including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham; Toledo Museum of Art; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; Singapore Art Museum; and the Ministry of Culture, Thailand.
Notable exhibitions include Ocean in Us (2024), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, Kaohsiung; Connecting Bodies (2024), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Wild (2024), Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Manila; New Large Scale Artworks (2023), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Collection 1: Vessels (2022), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; The House is Crumbling (2018), National Gallery Singapore; and Problem-Wisdom (2017), Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. The artist has also participated in major international festivals including CHAOS : CALM (2022), 4th Bangkok Art Biennale; The Milk of Dreams (2022), 59th Venice Biennale, Venice; Restoration of the Sea (2019), 4th Setouchi Triennale, Honjima; JIWA (2017), 17th Jakarta Biennale; All Our Relations (2012): 18th Biennale of Sydney; So Close Yet So Far Away (2009), 2nd Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale; Expenditure (2008), 4th Busan Biennale; Art Circus (2005), 2nd Yokohama Triennale.
The artist has had two residencies at the STPI Workshop in 2018 and 2025; the former culminated in the exhibition Fragmented Bodies: The Personal and the Public (2019).
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