Tang Contemporary Art presents Tracing Places, Weaving Times, curated by Cynthia Liu and Terry Chong, on exhibit from 17 January 2026 – 1 March 2026, in Bangkok.  This group exhibition brings together three Thai artists—Sornchai Pongsa, Butsapasila Wanjing, and Amalapon Robinson—whose practices explore how identity is formed at the intersection of place, culture, and memory. 

Whether bridging rural borderlands and urban density or myth and lived reality, the exhibition offers a multilayered portrait of Thailand as experienced through the next generation of artists born between the 1990s and 2000s.  Moving between the past and the present, between the personal and the collective, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how Thailand’s many stories are carried, reshaped, and reimagined across generations.  

Across Thailand’s diverse regions, cultural identities emerge not only from formal histories but from the intimate details of daily life—traditions passed on quietly, stories shared casually, materials handled out of habit and necessity. These nuances, often invisible from the outside, form the true texture of the Thai identity. Grounded in this idea, the featured artists draw from the spaces they grew up in—mountainous borders, northern villages, Bangkok’s layered urban sprawl—yet render their memories through contemporary visual languages. Each distinct, yet interconnected, their practices echo, diverge, and intersect, forming an open-ended narrative about belonging, change, and continuity. Together, they present Thailand not as a single story but as a complex and evolving constellation of histories, ethnicities, and lived realities.

Sornchai Pongsa: Diaspora, Displacement, Becoming

Hailing from a Mon community along Thailand’s Western border, Sornchai Pongsa’s work emerges from a lived experience shaped by cultural inheritance, displacement, and adaptation. His conceptual practice draws on the intertwined history of his family and people—stories marked by movement, negotiation, and survival. Drawing from familial stories, local histories, and the complexities of modern existence, Sornchai’s pieces evoke a sense of loss and adaptation, yet also resilience and redefinition.  Through powerful visual forms and mixed media artworks, he captures the simultaneous ache for what is left behind and the urgency to forge new identities and preservation of traditions in unfamiliar landscapes.  His pieces become vessels for memory—at once fragile and forceful—inviting viewers to witness the multi-layered experience of diaspora within the Thai context.

Building on his earlier work Mon Spirits Totem (2016), Pongsa presents a technologically infused meditation on “statelessness,” conceptualizing the body and territory as absent hardware and the spirit as enduring software. Through ethereal installations of suspended structures and volumes of light, he visualizes the migration of identity from the physical to the metaphysical, raising profound questions about the persistence of ritual and belief in a digitized era. His work emphasizes both loss and adaptation, showing how cultural memory endures even when physical borders are absent. 

Butsapasila Wanjing: Memory, Myth, and the Remaking of History

Butsapasila Wanjing approaches memory as something formed not only through official histories but through the informal stories embedded in everyday life. His practice draws from Lanna culture, folkloric and mystical beliefs, childhood memories of Chiang Mai, and raw materials collected from the northern landscapes he grew up in. His works—textured, layered, and enigmatic—entice viewers to look closer, searching for traces of narratives that have been transformed, suppressed, or forgotten.

A central focus of his recent work is the rewriting of historical memory spaces.  Butsapasila’s exploration extends beyond Thailand’s borders. His exploration of overland trade routes examines the longstanding cultural and economic relationships between Thailand and mainland China. From ancient exchanges of goods and knowledge along the Tea Horse Road—glazed ceramics, tea-making traditions, the role of horses—to their later integration into the vast Silk Road network, he traces how these routes shaped communal life in the borderlands.

In the present, he observes how the Belt and Road Initiative has reshaped these ancient corridors into pathways of capital, cross-border investment, and sometimes illicit or informal economies. What were once routes of cultural circulation have become sites where geopolitical power is contested and negotiated. Through paintings and mixed-media presentations, Butsapasila renders these overlapping histories visible—revealing the delicate interplay between memory, state power, regional identity, and the shifting forces that continue to shape northern Thailand.

Amalapon Robinson: Urban Light, Inner Loneliness

In contrast to the northern landscapes and border narratives of Sornchai and Butsapasila, Amalapon Robinson turns her gaze toward the dense urban rhythms of Bangkok—a city of constant illumination. Growing up between two cultures, Amalapon investigates identity and belonging within a metropolis defined by artificial light. Her hauntingly beautiful oil paintings capture intimate domestic scenes and everyday urban moments, using the interplay of radiance and shadow to reflect the emotional undercurrents of city life.

In her work, light becomes both a physical necessity and a metaphor for searching—searching for connection, clarity, or simply a sense of place amid the city’s overwhelming glare. While there is always light in darkness, Amalapon reveals how urban brightness can coexist with profound loneliness. Her paintings resonate with quiet intensity, suggesting that in a world saturated with illumination, the most meaningful forms of luminosity may be internal.

Together, these three artists illustrate the many ways Thai identity is shaped—by geography, by memory, by generations of cultural inheritance, and by the changing landscapes of modern life. Their works bridge past and present, local and national, rural and urban, inviting viewers to consider how individual stories intersect to form a broader cultural tapestry.

Tracing Places, Weaving Times does not offer a singular definition of Thai identity. Instead, it opens a space for reflection—on where we come from, what we carry, and how our surroundings continually shape who we are becoming. Through the perspectives of the next generation of Thai artists, the exhibition presents the Thai experience as a place of layered histories, evolving cultures, and rich, interconnected experiences.

Venue
Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok

Artists
Sornchai Phongsa, Butsapasila Wanjing, Amalapon Robinson

Exhibtion Dates
17 January – 1 March, 2026

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Sunday | 11 AM – 7 PM

Website
https://www.tangcontemporary.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/tangcontemporaryart/

Contact
bkk@tangcontemporary.com

About the Artists

SORNCHAI PHONGSA

b. 1991, Thailand

Sornchai Phongsa was born and raised within the Mon ethnic community in Thailand, an upbringing that shaped his engagement with migration, displacement, and hybrid identities in Southeast Asia. Drawing on his heritage and academic training and having graduated from Silpakorn University with a BFA in 2015 and an MFA in 2017, Phongsa develops a visual language that interweaves personal memory, collective history, and socio-political narratives.

Working across installation and mixed-media, he employs vernacular materials and performative spatial strategies to recontextualize spiritual traditions and interrogate the politics of belonging and territory. Key projects include Mon’s Spirits Totem (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2017), Montopia (Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, 2018), Le Flash (École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 2018), and Alien Capital for the Bangkok Art Biennale (2018).

Phongsa has participated in residencies at Tokyo Arts and Space and Cité Internationale des Arts, with works presented in exhibitions including Dogma Yard (Gallery Seescape, Chiang Mai) and MythMakers—Spectrosynthesis III 神話製造者——光.合作用 III (Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2023).

In 2025, he presented his solo exhibition Diaspora at River City Bangkok, investigating displacement and hybrid identities among marginalized communities. He continues to develop research-driven projects exploring memory, migration, and the shifting cartographies of place and identity, extending his critical engagement with contemporary social and cultural transformations.

BUTSAPASILA WANJING

b. 2000, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Butsapasila Wanjing graduated from Silpakorn University in 2022 with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts.  His work delves into the historical and cultural landscapes of Thailand, addressing political, social, and environmental themes.

Butsapasila is interested in the processes through which collective memory of the past transforms over time, leaving traces and effects that persist into the present. His practice draws on diverse sources, including historical narratives shaped by conspiracy theories found in blogs and online media, supernatural beliefs transmitted through oral traditions, and local myths and fragmented histories that cannot be fully integrated into dominant, centralized historical narratives. 

By also examining personal memory, he seeks to connect individual experience with broader social and cultural dynamics, reflecting on how the past is continually reinterpreted from multiple perspectives in the present and how these shifting understandings shape contemporary perceptions of history and identity.

AMALAPON ROBINSON

b. 1995, USA

Born 1995, Thai-American artist, Amalapon Robinson graduated from Silpakorn University in 2019.  She has exhibited in group exhibitions in Thailand, at VS Gallery, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and Silapakorn University.  Working primarily in oil painting, her practice explores quiet emotional landscapes within urban night scenes, with a focus on artificial light from windows, street lamps, and interior spaces.

Raised in an apartment in Bangkok, Amalapon draws from long-term observation of dense urban environments. Her paintings often emerge from moments of looking at the city from a distance, through windows or during night-time travel where artificial light becomes a symbol of living and working, carrying traces of life, hope, and dreams within the city. Through muted palettes and softened contrasts, her work captures a sense of calm and stillness embedded in ordinary, often overlooked urban spaces.

Amalapon explores the interactions between light and darkness – investigating how we use and engage with artificial lights in our everyday lives, and how urban society is dependent on this use of light.  Though there is light in darkness physically, living in a city can result in a feeling of loneliness and isolation.  This juxtaposition between the physical use of light and its metaphorical meaning is represented in her works, as she seeks more luminosity within the city.

About Tang Contemporary Art

Since its founding in Bangkok in 1997, Tang Contemporary Art has opened 8 spaces in Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Seoul and Singapore to promote the development of experimental art in different regions. In the past 28 years, Tang Contemporary Art has organized groundbreaking exhibitions in its gallery spaces, and also cooperated with important art institutions in China and abroad to accomplish outstanding art projects. The gallery strives to initiate dialogue between artists, curators, collectors and institutions working both locally and internationally. A roster of groundbreaking exhibitions has earned Tang Contemporary Art internationally renowned recognition, establishing its status as a pioneer of the contemporary art scene in Asia. 

As one of China’s most influential contemporary art platforms, Tang Contemporary Art maintains a high standard of exhibition programming. Tang Contemporary Art represents or collaborates with leading figures in international contemporary art, including Ai Weiwei, Huang Yongping, Shen Yuan, Zhu Jinshi, Chen Danqing, Liu Qinghe, Liu Xiaodong, Chen Shaoxiong, Wang Yuping, Shen Ling, Shen Liang, Wu Yi, Xia Xiaowan, He Duoling, Mao Xuhui, Wang Huangsheng, Yang Jiechang, Tan Ping, Wang Du，Yan Lei, Yue Minjun, Wang Jianwei, Yangjiang Group, Zheng Guogu, Lin Yilin, Sun Yuan&Peng Yu, Qin Ga, Wang Qingsong, Yin Zhaoyang, Feng Yan, Guo Wei, Chen Wenbo, Ling Jian, Qin Qi, Yang Yong, Peng Wei, He An, Zhao Zhao, Xu Qu, Chen Yujun, Chen Yufan, Xue Feng, Cai Lei, Li Qing, Wang Sishun, Xu Xiaoguo, Lí Wei, Liu Yujia, Wu Wei, Yang Bodu, You Yong, Li Erpeng, Jade Ching-yuk Ng, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Adel Abdessemed, Niki de Saint Phalle, AES+F , Michael Zelehosk, Jonas Burgert, Christian Lemmerz, Michael Kvium, Sakarin Krue-On, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Natee Utarit, Kitti Narod, Gongkan, Entang Wiharso, Heri Dono, Nam June Paik, Park Seungmo, Jae Yong Kim, Diren Lee, Dinh Q. Lê, Rodel Tapaya, Jigger Cruz, Ayka Go, Raffy Napay, H.H.Lim, Etsu Egami, etc.

(Text and images courtesy of Tang Contemporary Art)