Nova Contemporary is pleased to present Supawich Weesapen's works presented in Liste Art Fair Basel, Switzerland. It is his first solo exhibition SUPAWICH WEESAPEN. To support the government's policy, the viewing will be by appointment.
Originally from northeast Thailand, Supawich Weesapen (b. 1997) lives and works in Nakornpathom province, adjacent to the capital, Bangkok. He graduated from Faculty of Painting Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University. Weesapen is interested in the connection between the human senses and that which creates visually subjective phenomena. His work explores the various realities of such phenomena through the medium of oil painting.
Since he can remember, Weesapen has continued a daily practice of painting and drawing, however, it was only once he had been exposed to the more formal artistic traditions at university in Bangkok, was he inspired to ask himself why he paints, what the meaning of painting is, and how—in transferring the three-dimensional to canvas—painting captures the invisible, the in-between? In his explorations, Weesapen is inspired by the ideology of Surrealism, the value it places on the unconscious, its disdain for the established artistic tradition, and its elements of non sequitur.
In trying to overturn human experience through his work, Weesapen—with photographic precision—recreates elusive hallucinations of ordinary objects in video-gamefic colours. His exaggerated forms and peculiar juxtapositions become the agency by which Weesapen can explore systems of nature, rather than the system that he currently lives in and deals with.
Nature’s temporal and transient phenomena—such as, lightening, the energy of the electric field, and light’s reflection through ice and crystal—all become catalysts of inspiration for Weesapen, who tries to suspend them in time and space. In doing so, he gives himself, and the viewer, time to become a part of these split-seconds acts of nature; to be uplifted, to be empowered, and to feel free. Weesapen’s approach in painting reflects the anarchistic thoughts of younger people towards the existing sociocultural and sociopolitical structure and situation in Thailand. Weesapen’s photographic and gamefic approach in his paintings vividly resonate the thoughts and feeling loss of young generations.
