Pemika Wongsurakarn (Sadsadgirl)

For some of my shoots, I have to literally go the extra mile to reach the people I photograph. This time, a short train ride took me towards Samut Sakhon, along Rama II, to meet Pemika Wongsurakarn.

Known as Poi, or through her artist persona Sadness, Pemika moves quite freely between different worlds: artist, model, actress, former tattoo artist and Shibari performer. Her work and visual identity often sit somewhere between punk and goth culture, cuteness and something much darker. Years later, she would also appear as Milli in Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s 6ixtynin9: The Series.

She was living with her boyfriend in a house tucked inside a gated community. With her dyed hair, piercings and punk look, Poi seemed almost in contrast with her surroundings. When I first stepped inside, the downstairs could have been the home of any fairly ordinary Thai middle-class family.

Then, after chatting for a while, she took me upstairs.

In a tiny bedroom she had created a completely different world for herself. The room had become her studio and creative hideaway, with paintings covering the walls and filling the space around us. They were strange mixtures of cute manga-like characters, gore and darker imagery, the same contradictions that seemed to run through much of her visual identity.

We spent quite a while there talking about life, while she was casually smoking cigarettes on her bed, describing the Bangkok night scene and the different paths her own life had taken. Her partner was around during the shoot but discreetly kept the attention on her. He chose not to appear in the photographs, although he occasionally stepped in to help me with the lighting.

When I think about it, these are the moments I enjoy most about making this project. The photographs matter, of course, but I enjoy just as much the slice-of-life conversations that happen between pressing the shutter: the small things people tell me, the rooms they invite me into, and the parts of themselves I would never have discovered otherwise.