Artemin Gallery is excited to announce our participation in EXPO CHICAGO. We are pleased to present Juli Baker and Summer’s latest solo exhibition at booth 425, taking place from April 9 to April 12 at Navy Pier.

This new presentation continues the artist’s exploration of womanhood, memory, and the quiet yet powerful influence of literature. Drawing from Thai folktales, school texts, and beloved novels, Juli Baker and Summer reimagines female figures through painting and sculpture, situating them within contemporary social and political contexts. Her works unfold as intimate yet charged spaces where personal narrative intersects with broader cultural constructs, reflecting both attachment to and resistance against inherited ideals of femininity.

Rendered in her signature vivid palette, the figures in this series appear both vulnerable and self possessed, bodies that resist definition while holding emotional weight. Through these works, the artist invites viewers to reconsider how stories shape identity, and how fiction lingers within lived experience.

Exhibition Statement

When I was in second grade, I was made to dress as Sita for my school’s sports day parade, a female character from The Ramakien, a literary canon mandated by the Thai Ministry of Education. How was a seven-year-old girl supposed to relate to a woman required to prove her purity by walking through fire? The crown on my head was beautiful, but unbearably heavy.

Only later did I begin to understand how ideas of womanhood are quietly assembled through the women I encountered in books. Their stories seeped into my body and shaped how I learned to become a woman.

There was Sita, repeatedly asked to prove her virtue. There was Violet Baudelaire from A Series of Unfortunate Events, brave and resourceful in relentless adversity. There were Amy and Jo from Little Women, where I find myself somewhere between both. These figures stretched across Thai young adult fiction, British teenage novels like Girls in Love, and The Illustrated Mum, with its chaotic and troubling mother.

Some of these books were assigned by school, others found through family shelves, school libraries, or bookstores. Together, they formed a parallel education that existed alongside, and sometimes against, the official curriculum. These women may be fictional, yet they function like spirits, carrying expectations, desires, and contradictions. They shaped both my attachment to and resistance against prescribed femininity.

Access to literature in Thailand remains unequal. The daily minimum wage, around 300 baht, is roughly the price of a single book. Public libraries are scarce and concentrated in Bangkok, while access elsewhere remains limited.

This painting series revisits Thai literature, folktales, school-assigned readings, and other books I read growing up, reimagining female characters through painting and sculpture within today’s social and political context.

Venue
Booth 425, EXPO CHICAGO 2026, Navy Pier Festival Hall, 600 E Grand Ave, Chicago IL 60611

Artists
Juli Baker and Summer

Exhibition Dates
9 – 12 April, 2026

Website
http://www.artemingallery.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/artemin.gallery/

Contact
info@artemingallery.com

(Text and images courtesy of Artemin Gallery )

About the artist | Juli Baker and Summer

Juli Baker and Summer (b. 1993, Bangkok, Thailand), also known as “Phaan” Chanaradee Chatrakul Na Ayudhya, is an artist, writer, and traveler whose creative journey began with aspirations in fashion design. After studying Fashion and Textiles at Chulalongkorn University, she discovered her true passion for painting and embraced the path of an artist. Since launching her professional career in 2015, she has become known for vibrant, sun-soaked color palettes and depictions of young women with strange, almost abstract bodies, sprawled at ease and suffused with emotion.

Her work is deeply rooted in lived experience, personal memories, everyday conversations, travels, favorite books, pop culture, society, and politics all inform her practice. Beyond her artistic endeavors, Juli is committed to feminism and actively engages in the fight for freedom of expression through her art, treating painting as a larger form of journaling. Many of her works feature fragments of her handwriting, underscoring her identity as both storyteller and diarist.

(Text and images courtesy of Artemin Gallery )