Artemin Gallery Presents Fuengfah Factory, A Solo Exhibition By Juli Baker and Summer

Poster credit: Artemin Gallery

Artemin Gallery is thrilled to present the new exhibition, Fuengfah (Bougainvillea) Factory by Juli Baker and Summer, now on view. The exhibition is inspired by a 1975 documentary about the Hara Jean’s factory, which revealed the intense circumstances surrounding Thai female garment workers and the military-political climate of the time. During the period when the girls took over the factory, they continued to play music and read books, gestures that fostered a sense of hope and generated ripple effects that shaped the final outcome.

This exhibition serves as a thank-you letter from Juli to all the women who fought for themselves, and who also shaped her younger self as she searched for her identity through her own way of styling.

We are pleased to invite everyone to experience this journey and share in its joy.

A Lady Running Into the Wood, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 113 x 170 cm

Artist Statement:

I’ve always wanted to dress in a way that feels true to me. From childhood to my teenage years and into who I am today, fashion has been a way of exploring myself, trying on identities, emotions, and ways of being. Even when I imagine myself as an old woman in the future, I picture her through what she chooses to wear.

Studying fashion taught me that clothes are never just clothes. They carry labor, history, and the hands behind every seam. Clothes can comfort, reveal, hide, or resist.

Juli Baker And Summer at the exhibition

This exhibition was inspired by a documentary about Thai female garment workers (Hara jeans factory)in 1975, during a brief moment of political awakening, when student and worker movements challenged military power. Some of the women were only fourteen. They took over their factory, produced their own jeans for sale, played music, read books, and fought for fair pay. Watching it felt like a coming of age film, except the main characters were working class women and everything was real.

Fuengfah Factory is where these stories meet. A shared imaginary factory where dreams are woven, identities are tried on, and lives are formed between labor, resistance, and small little joys in life. Like bougainvillea growing along factory walls, bright, delicate yet resilient, it is made by the people, for the people.

This exhibition is a thank you letter to the workers who stitched the clothes that shaped me and to the younger versions of myself who learned who they were through what they wore.