A 9-month, 2-part exhibition featuring monumental self-portrait paintings from a new series of 2014-2015; selected, rarely exhibited paintings and sculpture; never-exhibited drawings and sketches; guest-documentary photography and video

Debut of the Chatchai Puipia Archive, chronicling the artist’s life and work within a new archival database,  sponsored by 100 Tonson Gallery in creative collaboration with Thai Art Archives, Bangkok.

Chatchai Puipia (born 1964) has distinguished himself for over two decades as one of his generation’s most sophisticated and prodigious painters, indeed ever since graduating in the late 1980s from Silpakorn University, Thailand’s premier art academy. After an early foray into abstract assemblage, Puipia has painted prodigiously for over two decades in an idiom that might loosely be termed, “Thai Magic Realism.” Culling images from everyday life and his creative imagination—self-portrait, still-life, allegorical mise-en-scène, Puipia’s paintings (and more recently, sculpture) are powerful sites of self-reflection, creative solitude, and social critique that not only lend lasting form to an artist’s dogged search for self-identity, but allude to his society’s simultaneous grappling with its own existential condition at an unprecedented historical threshold, as hallowed traditions emphasizing personal modesty, self-sufficiency, and spiritual cultivation have been increasingly losing ground to 21st century consumerism and trans-global pop culture (much of which has been fueled worldwide by the Internet, the debut and development of which has paralleled Puipia’s own artistic coming of age).

Opening Reception:  9 April, 7:00–9:00 P.m