Ploypim
Visual Art
Bangkok · August 2024
Ploypim, is a painter and mixed-media artist known for bold brushwork and dream-like, colour-soaked figures that channel personal themes of anxiety, joy and female agency. She first gained notice in the group show “Individual minds.. Individual signs” (Bangkok, 2023). Recent projects include “Two of Us”, a dual exhibition with photographer Jaygrapher at 6060 Arts Space (Dec 2024), where she combined oil impasto, spray paint and fabric collage to create large-scale scenes that blur Thai pop iconography with surreal humour.
Ploypim's studio, Bangkok, August 2024
Photographs and story, step by step
I met Ponsiyarin Nitimetaprapat, or Ploypim, at Asia Pillars Art Connection. We were both fairly introverted, and somehow that made it easy to connect. We ended up spending quite a bit of time together during the event, talking away from the busier parts of the programme.
Ploypim is an independent expressionist artist whose paintings explore emotion through distorted figures, bold colours and loose, energetic brushstrokes. Much of the work comes from personal experiences with anxiety and depression. In 2023, she presented Missing Faces, her first solo exhibition at The Fig Lobby, continuing an exploration of the more difficult and sometimes less visible parts of our emotional lives.
For the portrait, I visited her home in On Nut. Her studio was tucked away at the very top of the townhouse, inside a small room filled with paintings and works in progress. In the hot room, I took several of her portraits. One of the canvases had a hole in it, so she poked her head through with the same serious expression she had carried through most of the shoot. Then, somehow, Ploypim smiled at me, and that was already the end of the session.