Feifei

Two years before the shoot, when the Thattong Sound music video dropped, my students would not stop talking about it. The video felt like a chaotic love letter to Bangkok youth culture, mixing street style, early-2000s nostalgia and Thai pop imagery into a loud, colourful hip-hop spectacle. It eventually became the music video of the year. I never imagined that two years later I would be sitting across from Feifei, its director, in her house-office discussing her work.

She had just moved in. The townhouse used to be a massage place, and some decorations left behind by the previous owner still feel like something out of Terminal 21. On her desk sat a colourful book documenting her 2016 thesis film, The Sweetest Sin, a surreal short mixing Thai mythology with a playful neo-Thainess aesthetic, an approach that still runs through much of her work today.

Her connection to hip-hop came after graduating, when she applied for an editing job at RAP IS NOW, one of Thailand’s most influential hip-hop platforms. There she met YOUNGOHM, with whom she has now directed many music videos. For Feifei, hip-hop may come from the West, but Thai artists reshape it through language and poetic forms like kap and klon. In many ways, she feels her visual work follows the same logic, blending older cultural symbols with new visual languages.

When I asked about her process, she said the hardest part is always the beginning. Once the core idea is clear, the rest unfolds, with the team pushing the project further than she might imagine alone. Sometimes everything starts from a concept, sometimes simply from an object.

Upstairs, Feifei has a small Muay Thai gym set up in what used to be a Moroccan-inspired massage room. Nearby sat a peacock-decorated lottery-ticket suitcase she once used as a prop. It quickly found its way into our shoot. In the bathroom, a golden rhino stared back at me. “It was already there when I moved in,” she laughed. After a few final shots with her cat Orachun, I packed my gear.

On my way out, I took a final look at her place. Behind her desk hung a Monrak Transistor poster, one of Feifei’s favourite films. A quiet reminder of her next project: her own feature.