Phannapast Taychamaythakool is a Thai contemporary artist and designer born and raised in Bangkok. With a background in fashion design, her practice has evolved across painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, textiles, and installation, exploring the relationship between personal memory, imagination, symbolism, and the human experience.

Her works often transform unseen emotions into dreamlike visual narratives populated by symbolic figures, creatures, and elements drawn from nature and cultural memory. Moving fluidly between fine art, craft, and design, Phannapast has developed an artistic language that extends from intimate works on paper to large-scale installations and international collaborations.

At the heart of her practice is an ongoing curiosity about the inner world and how art can give form to feelings that words cannot always express.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I grew up as an only child, so drawing became one of the ways I played and created my own world. I think many children like to build a little house out of cardboard and stay inside it. Mine was made from paper and coloured pencils. Drawing gave me a place where I could create my own characters, stories and companions. In many ways, I think I am still doing the same thing today.

Later, I studied Fashion Design at Chulalongkorn University. During one semester, I took a creative class called Wearable Art, and it really changed my perspective. It made me realise that art does not have to exist only on a canvas or inside a gallery. Art can be anything that surrounds us. It depends on our perspective and how we choose to see it.

When I started working in fashion, I was always very focused on inspiration and how a story could be told through a collection. Later, when I became a creative director, I had more freedom to explore this. I treated each collection almost like wearable art translated into ready-to-wear silhouettes, with a strong focus on storytelling and prints. I never wanted a collection to be only clothes. I wanted it to become a kind of time capsule, something that could hold the thoughts, emotions and stories of that particular moment.

So for me, moving into art was not really about leaving fashion behind. I was simply curious to explore other mediums. I moved from fabric to paper, canvas, clay and different materials, and each one allowed me to discover something different within myself. I believe every medium has the ability to bring out feelings that may be hidden inside us. We just need to give ourselves enough time to listen and learn how to communicate with it. For me, working with a material is a little like building a relationship. The longer you spend time with it, the more you begin to understand each other.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

When I was younger, it was quite difficult for me to explain my feelings through words. It was not only difficult to explain them to other people, but also to myself. Because of that, there were many moments when I did not fully understand what I was feeling.

As I grew older, I started to realise that words have limitations. Some feelings are too complicated to describe directly, especially emotions that sit somewhere between fear, desire, memory, intuition and things we cannot clearly name.

For me, making art became a way to visualise those unseen feelings. It is almost like creating my own language to slowly untie a knot or release the tension inside myself. I understand it step by step through images, symbols, characters and materials.

I sometimes think of it as a kind of body language. When we cannot find the right words, our body can still communicate something. My artwork works in a similar way, but with emotions that are more complex. The image becomes a gesture, and through that gesture I can begin to understand what is happening inside me.

Because of this, many of my works move between reality and imagination. The creatures, figures and symbolic worlds in my work are not always meant to tell a fixed story. They often appear as a way for me to give a form to something invisible, so I can spend time with it and begin to understand it.

What are some of your biggest artistic and personal influences?

I think my biggest influences come from my own experiences and from the people around me, especially my parents. Sometimes I only realise much later how deeply something from my childhood has stayed with me.

A few months ago, I was talking with my mother about a pair of nude ceramic figurines of Chinese goddesses that she gave me many years ago. I had seen these two goddesses since I was a child, and somehow I always felt that their faces looked like my mother. Over the years, I have seen many Chinese ceramic goddesses, but I have never found another pair as beautiful as these.

During our conversation, my mother told me their story for the first time. When she was young, she saw the figurines and immediately fell in love with them, so she bought them. One day, her aunt saw them at my grandmother’s house and told her that a good lady should not keep something like this in her home because the figures were nude.

I had always assumed that the ceramics I grew up around belonged to my grandmother, but that day I discovered they were actually my mother’s collection. When she married and moved into a new home, this pair was the only one she chose to bring with her.

It suddenly made me think about her differently. When my mother wanted to marry my father, many people around her disagreed because she was eight years older than him. But again, she trusted her own feelings and made her own choice.

My mother never explained any of these things to me as lessons. She never told me, “You have to trust yourself.” She simply lived that way, and somehow those values were passed to me quietly.

My aunt once told me that I reminded her of my mother when she was young. I laughed because I thought we looked completely different. But she said, “I don’t mean your appearance. I mean your energy and the feeling you give.”

I think influence can work like this. It does not always come from something we consciously study. Sometimes it is already living around us through people, objects, memories and small choices. We carry these things for years before we understand what they have given us. I often discover that something I thought came entirely from my imagination has a much older story behind it.

Can you share a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

Rather than one particular artwork, I think I would choose my collage practice. Collage became very important to me at a time when I was learning how to understand my own feelings and, especially, how to trust in time.

The process is quite intuitive. I collect fragments and images without always knowing immediately why I am drawn to them. I bring them together, move them around, take them apart and sometimes leave them for a while. I try not to force an answer from them.

Even now, whenever a question or a feeling of uncertainty comes back into my life, I often return to collage to explore myself again. Sometimes the meaning becomes clear while I am working, but sometimes I only understand what I have made much later.

I think of it almost like cultivating something. You sow the seed of a feeling without knowing exactly what it will become. You give it space, care for it, and allow time to do its work. Eventually it grows enough for you to see its form more clearly.

Collage taught me that I don’t always need to understand everything immediately. Sometimes we need to let a feeling live with us before we can recognise what it is trying to tell us. That lesson has stayed with me far beyond collage and continues to influence the way I approach other materials and my life as well.

How do you balance artistic integrity with commercial considerations?

When I create work for myself, it usually begins entirely from my own experiences and feelings. I can go very deeply inward without thinking about whether someone else needs to understand it in the same way.

Working with a brand is different because it is no longer only about me. I also think about what I want to give to the people who will eventually experience the work. There may be thousands of people wearing it, carrying it, seeing it in a public space or bringing an object into their home. I like to think about what kind of feeling or meaning I can leave with them.

Many times, the starting point still comes from something I genuinely feel about the world or society around me. I don’t want to create something simply because it looks beautiful or because it follows a commercial direction. There still needs to be a thought or emotion that I believe in.

The interesting part is learning how to communicate that thought through both my own visual language and the language of the brand. I don’t see them as two sides fighting against each other.

For me, collaboration is about finding the place where those two languages can meet and create a new conversation.

Maybe that is how I think about artistic integrity. It doesn’t mean that everything has to look or function exactly as it would in my personal work. It means that somewhere inside the work, I can still recognise the feeling that made me want to create it in the first place.

Do you collaborate with other artists or creators, and how does collaboration influence your work?

Yes, and collaboration has become something I really enjoy. Recently, I have had opportunities to work with different artists and studios, from etching with C.A.P. Studio and lithography with Hello Print Friend, to creating ceramic sculptures and a teapot set with Trevor Foster Studio.

For me, a good collaboration always begins with passion and respect for each other’s knowledge. I may come with my own story, imagery and sense of beauty, but each person I work with has a deep understanding of their own medium. Throughout the process, we discuss a lot, experiment together, and I always want to hear their suggestions because they understand possibilities in the material that I may not see yet.

I don’t want collaboration to be only about asking someone to execute what I already have in my mind. I think the beautiful part happens when our different experiences and senses of beauty come together and something unexpected begins to appear.

I also find it very inspiring to be around people who are deeply dedicated to what they do. When I see someone working with so much passion, patience and love for their craft, I can really feel that energy.

Somehow it comes back to me as new inspiration and gives me more energy to create. Maybe this is what I enjoy most about collaboration. I enter the process wanting to learn about another medium, but I often leave with new ways of seeing my own work.

What are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

I am not sure that people need to expect anything from my future. Everyone has their own life to live, and I am also learning not to expect too much from mine.

We live in a world surrounded by messages telling us to become better and better, to achieve more, to move faster, and to keep reaching for unlimited goals. I think I am becoming more interested in moving in the opposite direction.

I want to see things more slowly. At this point in my life, I want to give myself enough time to experience things fully, to discover more about myself, and to really feel what is happening around me. I want to appreciate the ordinary moments of my life and have time for the people I love.

I think my work will naturally grow from those experiences. I don’t know exactly what form it will take, and I don’t really want to know yet. Just like with my collage practice, I would rather sow the seeds, take care of them, and give them time to reveal what they want to become.

So perhaps what comes next is not about becoming bigger or doing more. I hope it is about looking more closely, feeling more deeply, and allowing whatever I create next to arrive in its own time.

Text and photo courtesy of Phannapast Taychamaythakool

Website: https://phannapast.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phannapast/