WITTAYA KAKHAM

Born in 1984, Witthaya Kakham grew up in a small rural town in Payao, Thailand. The peaceful scenery of the vast fields and overlapping mountains of Northern Thailand is a recurring imagery in Kakham’s work and stands for his lifelong yearning. His work depicts surreal landscapes usually in a hazy atmosphere symbolizing the unknown. The haziness, traditionally used to suggest that the depicted objects are moving or vibrating, also implies that change is around the corner. For Kakham, the darkness stands for the limitless possibility of transformation. Repetition of strokes and dots is another important dimension in his work. His use pf countless dots and lines is akin to a poet’s use of dots in literature to imply indescribable feelings. Kakham’s fascination with this perception beyond awareness has imbued his work with the competition between reality and dream.

Besides questioning the existence and non-existence of self, his work explores the tie that binds humans’ feelings and the world. While the world resembles a gigantic moving picture with multiple overlaying images, Kakham focuses on simplicity and the ordinary in nature. He believes that humans’ lives, no matter how complex, are made up of these ordinary stories through the observation of the surrounding world, traversing into an inner world of their own, recordinging, writing, and reading. We search for the specific composition that connects or fills the space in our minds. This composition becomes the yearning that interacts with and dictates our feelings.