Fashion editor Daneenart Burakasikorn turns painter for Tang Contemporary’s show on identity

For years Daneenart Burakasikorn’s work was deciding how other people should look. As one of Thailand’s best-known fashion directors she shaped the visual identities of artists, actors and models. Her paintings do the opposite. A canvas is painted, scraped back, obscured and painted again, until what remains is less an image than a record of its own revisions. That reversal, from the polished surface to the reworked one, is the clearest key to Between Memory and Becoming, the group show that pairs her with Lewis Lee and Julia Phetra Oborne at Tang Contemporary Art’s Bangkok space.

Curated by Cynthia Liu, the exhibition gathers three painters whose lives have crossed cultures and professions but who now all live and work in Thailand. Its proposition: identity is not a fixed inheritance but something assembled from memory, history and place, and then assembled again. In the announcement, the gallery describes multicultural experience as “a process of continual translation” rather than a matter of standing in several worlds at once.

Burakasikorn’s canvases make that translation physical. In What Remains 1, a long oil on canvas, a pale field of thick, combed paint carries drifting clusters of brown marks, as if a landscape or a handwriting had been buried and only partly resurfaced. According to the gallery’s biography, she trained in fine art at Monash University in Melbourne and is editor-in-chief of L’Officiel Thailand and Men’s Folio Thailand; painting, in this telling, is a return rather than a debut.

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Lewis Lee looks outward. Born in Hong Kong, raised between there and Shenzhen and now based in Bangkok, he paints the borderlands of the territory he grew up in, terrain where family memory meets colonial history, migration and rapid urban change. The decisive material choice is the support: Golden Hour is painted in oil on Lanna textile, the woven cloth of northern Thailand, so a landscape suspended between the remembered and the invented is laid, quite literally, over the fabric of his adopted country. A yellow sky, a wind-bent tree and a palm above banded hills: surreal, but never solemn.

Julia Phetra Oborne, a British-Thai painter who works between Bangkok and London and studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, builds her pictures from gardens and woodlands, cultural objects, Thai myths and fairytales. Her recent canvases set a grid of squares or tiles behind fragmented scenes, a structure that both holds the picture together and interrupts it. In Full Moon, figures in washes of green, blue and ochre dissolve into one another against that tiled ground, a memory that refuses to settle into a single scene.

What the three share is not a style but a method of layering: accumulation and erasure in Burakasikorn and Oborne, ancestry folded into present-day terrain in Lee. The show’s wager is that a painting can catch identity mid-formation, still being translated.

Between Memory and Becoming opens with a reception at 4 pm on 24 October and runs until 6 December 2026 at Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok, on the second floor of River City Bangkok in Talad Noi.

For an artist who spent a career perfecting how others appear, the boldest gesture on view may be the decision to leave the surface unresolved.

Tags: contemporary paintings, Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok, Between Memory and Becoming, Cynthia Liu, Daneenart Burakasikorn, Julia Phetra Oborne

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