Pare Patcharapa Inchang

I’ve known Pare for a few years, and when I decided to start this portrait series, she became my first subject. I was in Chiang Mai at the time, and she invited me to her studio, a space I had never seen before. Several of her paintings were hanging around the room, while others were still being worked on.

Pare Patcharapa Inchang came to fine art relatively late. She studied at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang and spent years working as a graphic designer before beginning to paint seriously in her mid-thirties. Around 2020, while still working full-time, she began making digital drawings in response to the protests and the political situation in Thailand. When she was later invited to turn some of those ideas into paintings for an exhibition, she had barely worked with oil paint before. She taught herself while preparing the show, and after her first solo exhibition at Cartel Artspace in 2021, eventually left her full-time job to focus on art.

I had actually first noticed Pare’s work before that, when she was experimenting with video and cyanotype printing. I remember watching her practice gradually move towards painting, including the works she made around the 2020 protests. A few years later, I was standing inside her studio surrounded by increasingly large canvases. I ended up using one of them as the backdrop for her portrait.

At the time, I still wasn’t sure what direction this portrait project would take. I thought I was interested mainly in the people, perhaps more than the spaces around them. Looking back at Pare’s photographs now, I can already see something I would only understand later: how closely the makers I photograph are connected to the places in which they work. The person, the work and the space are much harder to separate than I first imagined.