Thai artists Naraphat Sakarthornsap and Mary Pakinee approach art from different directions, but both are interested in what happens when personal experiences meet the histories, expectations and interpretations of others.

BANGKOK, THAILAND – Flowers are rarely neutral objects in the work of Thai artists Naraphat Sakarthornsap and Mary Pakinee. Familiar, delicate and immediately appealing, they can also carry memories, cultural associations and meanings that are not always apparent at first glance. Yet the two artists approach this shared visual language from strikingly different positions. Naraphat uses flowers to expose the social structures that can hide behind beauty, addressing gender, class, inequality and the histories of labour. Mary begins with personal memories and images but deliberately leaves their meaning open, allowing viewers to discover their own connections. Both will present work as part of Bangkok Art Biennale 2026, running from 29 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, and both are interested in the distance between what an artist intends and what an audience eventually sees.

That distance is where their practices become especially revealing. An artwork may begin with an intensely personal experience, but once it enters an exhibition, it encounters people whose lives and histories differ from those of its maker. The work can become a form of recognition, an uncomfortable challenge or something entirely unexpected. For Naraphat and Mary, this is not a problem to be eliminated through explanation. It is part of what makes art worth making.

For Naraphat, flowers have been a language of self-discovery since childhood. He remembers encountering a flower crown as a young boy and wanting to be a princess, an early moment that connected the familiar beauty of flowers with his own developing sense of identity. During school holidays at his aunt’s house, he would spend hours studying botanical books, memorising the names and forms of different species. Eventually, he could recognise flowers at the market that he had never encountered in person. What began as fascination became something more personal, a way of finding images through which he could understand and communicate his experience. “Flowers became more than objects,” he explains. “They became deeply personal symbols and an essential language through which I continue to telling my story.”

His early work used that language to explore gender and the experience of coming out. Over time, however, the focus has expanded. Rather than treating flowers solely as symbols of his own identity, Naraphat has become increasingly interested in the people and social systems surrounding them. The history of floral arrangements, the labour involved in producing garlands and the class distinctions embedded in seemingly familiar customs all offer ways to consider who is valued, who remains invisible and whose work is taken for granted.

“In the past, you can see that I keep talking about my gender. I try to come out, something like that,” he says. “But at this time, I try to talk about the class, the history of the flower, the history of the flower arrangement that try to separate people. So I feel like I just want to make it wider to include the people who I want to talk about the subject. So it’s not about myself anymore, but it’s about the people in my community.”

This movement from personal experience towards collective experience is central to the work he is developing for the biennale. At the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), Naraphat plans to expand a flower chandelier installation previously presented in Singapore into a considerably larger work. Through the history of flowers and their arrangements, including the labour of workers who produce flower garlands, the installation will explore the social distinctions that can be concealed within objects commonly associated with celebration, devotion and beauty. “It’s about the people between the upper class and the lowest class, the people in between,” he says.

The choice of flowers is deliberate. Naraphat is drawn not to rare or exotic specimens but to ordinary flowers that people encounter in their daily lives, particularly those commonly used in Thailand. Their familiarity makes them accessible, yet the stories attached to them can remain largely unnoticed. A flower might be admired for its colour or arrangement without prompting anyone to consider who cultivated it, who assembled it or what social meanings have accumulated around its use.

“They are not trying to focus on the story or the meaning behind it,” he says. “So when I keep talking about it, I’m bolding it.” By drawing attention to what is usually overlooked, he hopes to create a point of entry into more complicated conversations about labour, hierarchy and social value. “I just want the people from everywhere or every family or every class can understand my work easily.”

The desire to communicate across social boundaries is also personal. Naraphat’s relationship with art was shaped by periods when he found it difficult to discuss what was happening in his life. When his father lost his job while Naraphat was around 13, the family became financially vulnerable and his mother was under considerable stress. She continued to support his drawing and painting, but he learned not to add his own problems to the family’s existing difficulties. “When you don’t have anyone to talking about something or situation in your life, it’s so painful,” he says.

Art eventually became a place where he could speak about experiences that were otherwise difficult to articulate. After graduating from Chulalongkorn University, he presented his first solo exhibition, which included a flower work incorporating a nude figure. Rather than making a formal announcement about his sexuality, he allowed the artwork to communicate something that had previously been difficult to say directly.

“People start to understand me that I am gay,” he recalls. “When I keep working with my artwork, I feel like, okay, I’m brave enough to talking that I’m gay. And then after that, the artwork become like the living proof for me to talking about myself.”

The work offered a way to be understood without requiring him to explain or defend every aspect of his identity. It also demonstrated that images could create connections where direct conversation might feel too exposing. That experience continues to inform the way Naraphat thinks about audiences, particularly younger people who contact him through Instagram. When followers message him about their own lives, he makes a point of responding, recognising how much it can matter simply to find someone willing to listen. “I always reply them because I just want to talk about everything that they want to talk.”

He describes the exchange as a form of mutual openness. By sharing something of himself, he hopes to create a space in which others feel comfortable doing the same. “I feel like they feel like I am a safe space for them to talk about it because I start to open my heart first,” he says. “When I open my heart to talking about myself, they will always open their heart to talking about themselves too.”

For Naraphat, the personal story is therefore not an endpoint. It can become an invitation for someone else to speak, a way of turning an individual experience into a shared encounter. The same impulse informs his work with flowers: a familiar object becomes the beginning of a conversation about experiences and social realities that might otherwise remain hidden.

Yet the flowers themselves are never merely illustrations of an argument. Naraphat is interested in their physical lives as much as their symbolic meanings. In his installations, he deliberately uses fresh flowers and allows audiences to witness their transformation over the course of an exhibition. The work changes as the flowers bloom, fade and eventually decay, making visible a process that is often removed from the idealised images through which flowers are presented.

“If we can admire a flower at the moment it blooms, why shouldn’t we also witness it when it returns, fades, and eventually returns to the earth?” he asks. “Both moments are equally honest.”

The flower at its most beautiful and the flower beginning to deteriorate belong to the same cycle. For Naraphat, that process offers a way to question why people so often privilege appearances associated with perfection, success and vitality while overlooking vulnerability and decline. Beauty is not something to reject, but neither should it be allowed to obscure the rest of the story.

“Our world has always had a way of disguising pain with beauty,” he says. “We see it in propaganda, in history, we want to appear glorious.” His work asks audiences to resist being comforted by beauty alone, while recognising that what lies beneath the surface can be difficult, complicated or uncomfortable.

Mary Pakinee approaches the relationship between beauty and meaning from a different direction. Her paintings also draw on flowers and personal experience, but she does not necessarily want viewers to look beyond their visual appeal. Where Naraphat uses beauty to reveal social realities that might otherwise remain unseen, Mary is equally interested in allowing an image to remain pleasurable and open to interpretation.

“If they just see the flowers, I think that’s completely fine for me,” she says. “I love something that can relax ourselves, relax myself. But it might be a bonus for me if people can find the hidden layers or another layer in my work.”

Mary does not regard the audience’s failure to discover an intended meaning as a failure of the work. A viewer might find the paintings calming, remember a colour or image, or recognise something of their own experience in a detail that the artist never considered especially significant. Each response can coexist with the others.

Her participation in BAB 2026 is particularly meaningful because she has had relatively few opportunities to exhibit her work in Thailand. The biennale offers a chance to share a new body of work with a wider Thai audience, but it also introduces a question about what happens when personal memories are encountered by people who may share some of the cultural context from which they emerged.

“I’m really excited to be a part of Bangkok Art Biennale because I have not had many opportunities to exhibit my work in Thailand that much,” she says. “This made me feel very special to me. It gives me a chance to share and to communicate my new body of work with the wider Thai audience.”

For Mary, the possibility of that encounter is closely connected to her understanding of storytelling. A memory may belong to one person, but the emotions it contains can be recognised by someone else. The resulting connection does not require the two people to have experienced the same events. It emerges from the recognition of something shared within an otherwise individual story.

“A private memory becomes a shared story when someone else can see the part of themselves in the story,” she says. “We are social beings and even though our experiences are personal, I think we are never really alone in what we go through.”

The connection, she believes, can make people feel less alone. It is one reason she sees value in sharing personal perspectives rather than presenting a single, authoritative version of experience. Her paintings create an opportunity for that exchange without requiring viewers to disclose anything about themselves. Someone can encounter a work privately, recognise a feeling or memory and carry that response away, even if the artist never knows what it was.

Mary is conscious, too, of the difficulties surrounding the sharing of personal stories in Thailand. “I think in Thailand, it’s very difficult to share personal stories,” she says. Social media has created new opportunities for connection, and she believes Thailand has developed a strong online community. “Nowadays, we can connect through the internet, through social media, more than in the past. I think in Thailand, we have a very strong community online.”

An exhibition offers a different kind of encounter. Rather than communicating through a screen, viewers stand in front of an image, in a physical space, alongside other people who may be experiencing the same work in entirely different ways. Personal stories can be recognised indirectly, through colour, composition or association, without needing to be explained in words.

This openness is also linked to Mary’s understanding of reality itself. She is interested in the fact that what people believe to be true is often shaped by who is telling a story and which perspectives they encounter. “People are becoming more aware that there isn’t just one version of reality,” she says. “The way we understand reality often depends on who is telling the story.”

The speed and volume of contemporary information make that awareness increasingly important. “Today, we are surrounded by more and more information, and it has moved so fast. I think it has become important to stay aware of how this narrative shapes the way we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us.”

The idea is not that every interpretation is necessarily equivalent, but that the perspective through which people encounter a story influences what they understand. Mary is interested in making space for that difference rather than attempting to control it. “I intentionally leave the story as an unfinished story,” she says. “I don’t think it’s possible to make everyone believe the same thing as me.”

One experience at the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion demonstrated how far those interpretations can travel. Mary presented a video-game-like work in which visitors could move through an open-world environment. Korean visitors began connecting the work with their own experiences of living with the reality of the South Korean–North Korean border. Their interpretation had not been something she had specifically intended, but it immediately demonstrated the potential of allowing an artwork to encounter a history beyond her own. “That’s really exciting for me. People bring their own memories and history and perspective to my work. I think it’s fascinating to feel that sometimes they discover meaning that I never expected.”

The work had become a meeting point between different experiences. Its meaning was no longer limited to the memories that informed its creation, because viewers were able to bring their own histories into the encounter. Rather than seeing those unexpected responses as misunderstandings, Mary welcomed them as evidence that the work could continue to generate new associations.

That is why she is reluctant to prescribe a particular message or dictate how an audience should respond. “I don’t want to create a space where there’s no room for people to think or move,” she says. She is happy to have conversations with viewers, whether their responses are positive or negative, because their perspectives offer something she could not have discovered by remaining within her own interpretation. “I can learn more and more.”

The context in which an artwork is presented adds another dimension to this process. Mary’s observations about exhibition spaces are particularly relevant to a biennale that places work in locations as varied as temples, museums, shopping centres and cultural institutions. “Context has a huge influence on how people experience a work,” she says.

Once a work is presented as art, viewers begin to interpret not only the image or object itself but the environment surrounding it: the architecture, lighting, scale and atmosphere. The building becomes part of the encounter, influencing the expectations people bring with them and the details they notice. A work presented at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre may be experienced differently from one installed in a shopping centre or a historic religious site, even if the work itself remains unchanged.

For both artists, this relationship between the artwork and its audience makes the Bangkok Art Biennale a particularly interesting setting. Running from 29 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, the fifth edition will bring contemporary art into locations across Bangkok, including the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, One Bangkok, Wat Arun, Wat Pho, Wat Prayoon, Museum Siam, centralwOrld, Siam Paragon, the National Museum Bangkok and the Silpakorn Art Centre. The variety of these settings means that visitors will encounter work within different social and architectural contexts, sometimes deliberately seeking it out and sometimes discovering it by chance.

Naraphat’s approach invites viewers to reconsider what they think they already know. The flower that seems decorative or familiar may contain a history of labour, hierarchy or exclusion. Its beauty is not false, but it is incomplete as an explanation of the object and the world around it. Mary, meanwhile, is willing to let viewers stop at the beauty, while remaining open to whatever other associations might emerge. Her work does not demand that everyone reach the same understanding.

The difference between them is instructive. Naraphat asks people to look beyond what is immediately visible; Mary asks them to recognise that what they see will inevitably be shaped by who they are. One exposes what a familiar image can conceal, while the other allows an image to become a space for meanings that cannot be entirely anticipated.

Both positions resist the idea that art should provide a single, finished answer. For Naraphat, the changing life of a flower reminds us that beauty and decay, vulnerability and strength, are inseparable parts of experience. For Mary, an unfinished story allows different people to recognise different things without requiring one interpretation to replace all the others.

Mary’s hopes for audiences are deliberately modest. “I don’t hope they will walk away with one specific message,” she says. If a work stays with someone as a feeling, a memory, a visual impression of a red flower or even a question, she considers that enough. Then she adds, with a touch of humour, “I might hope they remember my name as well.”

The remark brings a human note to a practice concerned with the complicated relationships between memory, interpretation and the stories people tell about themselves. An artwork does not need to change the world to matter. It might simply create a moment of recognition, prompt an unexpected conversation or leave behind an image that resurfaces days later.

Naraphat’s hope is similarly rooted in the possibility of a changed perspective. His flowers encourage audiences to look beyond appearances and consider the people, histories and structures that beauty can obscure. Yet the work also insists that those realities deserve to be seen in their complexity, rather than reduced to a simple opposition between good and bad, beautiful and ugly, visible and invisible.

In Bangkok this autumn, the two artists will contribute to a biennale that places contemporary art within the city’s sacred, historical, cultural and commercial spaces. Their approaches differ, but both begin with the belief that an artwork’s meaning does not end with its creation. It continues through the people who encounter it, the memories they bring and the questions they carry away.

Some visitors may leave Naraphat’s installations thinking about the labour behind a flower garland; others may remember the flowers themselves. Some may find layers of personal memory in Mary’s paintings, while others may simply enjoy their colour and atmosphere. Neither artist needs every viewer to arrive at the same destination.

Perhaps that is the more generous possibility offered by art: not that it will make everyone see the world in the same way, but that it can create the conditions for people to see something differently, or to recognise a part of themselves in someone else’s experience. Between the beauty of a flower and the history it carries, between a memory and the story another person finds within it, there remains room for interpretation.

And sometimes, as Mary suggests, a feeling, an image or a question is enough.

Photo Credit: Bangkok Art Biennale

Bangkok Art Biennale 2026 runs from 29th October 2026 to 28th February 2027. More information available here