Image: The Mats and The Pillows Jim Thompson Farm (2018)Photo: Phahonchai Premjai Courtesy Jim Thompson Farm

Pinaree Sanpitak: How We Hold What's Possible

Unfolding across three 'movements', How We Hold What’s Possible is an artistic and curatorial collaboration from 2026 to 2028 between acclaimed Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak and Artspace, led by Executive Director Victor Wang.

Movement I

Above: How We Hold What's Possible – Movement I: Pinaree Sanpitak in conversation with Victor Wang, September 2026. Photo: Lucy Parakhina

Pinaree Sanpitak in Conversation with Victor Wang
Artspace, Sydney — September 2026

How We Hold What’s Possible — Movement I began at Artspace, Sydney, in September 2026 as a public workshop and open forum with Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak and Artspace Executive Director Victor Wang. Rather than a conventional artist talk or retrospective, the gathering invited audiences to collectively revisit more than four decades of Sanpitak’s practice, tracing the works, materials, relationships and encounters that have shaped her artistic language. As the first chapter of a three-year collaboration, the conversation established a shared research process informing Movement II in Singapore in 2027 and a major solo exhibition at Artspace in 2028.

Beginning with Sanpitak’s formative years in Japan and Bangkok, the discussion explored the informal artistic communities of the 1990s, where friendship, self-organisation, conversation and food became essential to artistic production. It traced her longstanding relationship with Australia, from ARX 1989 in Perth, her first international exhibition, through Confess and Concealed at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (1993), APT3 (1999) and experiments with printmaking at Northern Editions in Darwin. These encounters revealed how networks between Australia, Thailand, Japan and Singapore helped shape an Asia-Pacific artistic ecology through exchange and collaboration.

Above: How We Hold What's Possible – Movement I: Pinaree Sanpitak in conversation with Victor Wang, September 2026. Photo: Lucy Parakhina

Moving through works including The Smiling Body, Womanly Bodies, Vessels and Mounds, Noon-Nom (2001–02), Temporary Insanity (2004), Breast Stupa Cookery (2005–) and Anything Can Break (2012), the conversation followed the gradual opening of Sanpitak’s practice through the senses. Beginning with the personal and reproductive body, her forms expanded into fruit, seeds, vessels and stupas, then into scent, candlelight, heat, touch, rest, sound, movement and taste. Sculpture increasingly became something to be touched, inhabited and activated through the presence of others.

A recurring thread was Sanpitak’s understanding of collage, from early experiments with paper and photography to installations bringing together mats, pillows, fibres, paintings, architecture and bodies. Her observation, “I always go back to paper and collage,” offered a way of understanding installation itself as an evolving composition of materials, histories and relationships.

Above: How We Hold What's Possible – Movement I: Pinaree Sanpitak in conversation with Victor Wang, September 2026. Photo: Lucy Parakhina

These discussions informed Movement II, which transforms a former rice warehouse in Singapore into a living environment. Works selected from different periods of Sanpitak’s practice will come together through specially designed display structures, alongside food, plants, performances and gatherings. The exploration of sensory participation informs the inclusion of Noon-Nom, while conversations about hospitality and shared authorship extend into Breast Stupa Cookery, activated with Chef Ivan Brehm of Nouri Restaurant. Collage expands into architecture, allowing the exhibition to evolve through the people who inhabit it.

Throughout Movement I, audiences were invited to contribute their own questions, reflections and perspectives, making the gathering a collective process of research and exchange. This openness continues into Movement II, which will serve as a testing ground for spatial, sensory and social possibilities. The encounters, collaborations and experiments developed in Singapore will, in turn, inform Movement III at Artspace in 2028.

Across its three movements, How We Hold What’s Possible unfolds not as a predetermined sequence of exhibitions, but as an accumulating conversation in which each place, participant and encounter reshapes what might become possible next.

Movement II

Artspace Offsite – Singapore Art Week
72-13, Singapore — 21–30 January 2027
Presented in collaboration with ART SG

In January 2027, the collaboration continues in Singapore with How We Hold What’s Possible — Movement II, an 11-day immersive exhibition presented by Artspace and ART SG at 72-13 during Singapore Art Week.

For Singapore, Sanpitak takes the former rice warehouse at 72-13 as a source of energy and inspiration, finding resonance in the Thai expression Nai Nam Mee Pla, Nai Na Mee Khao—“In the water there are fish; in the fields there is rice.” Making tangible a landscape of sustenance, the phrase connects the building’s history of storing and circulating food with Sanpitak’s longstanding exploration of the body, nourishment and gathering.

The warehouse becomes a living, inhabited environment, where artworks coexist with plants, scent, food, performance, conversation and collective activity, transforming a place once organised around storage into one of rest, encounter and exchange. As Sanpitak has said of her practice, “It’s not just about the woman – a lot of it is about being human, sharing space, and how we interact with each other.”

Across more than four decades, Sanpitak has developed an expansive vocabulary of forms through the body: breasts, vessels, stupas, fruits, mounds, pillows, clouds, tables and architectural structures. Beginning with experiences of the personal and reproductive body, these forms gradually opened towards sensory perception and the presence of others. In Singapore, works including Noon-Nom (2025–2026), the ongoing Ma-lai series, Gathering Tables, elements related to The Mats and The Pillows (2017–), paintings, Breast Stupa vessels and shelf-based constellations are brought together as an evolving spatial collage. The installation extends a method that has remained fundamental to Sanpitak since her earliest works. “I always go back to paper and collage,” she has said; elsewhere, describing her spatial arrangements, “When I set up these things — also in Singapore — it’s like a collage. This is collage for me.”

Image:Pinaree Sanpitak: Gathering Table Gathers, 2026. Photo: Aroon Permponsopol

Extending this spatial collage into living materials, elements of the environment are being developed in collaboration with Singapore-based botanical design studio This Humid House. Beneath the warehouse staircase, bulbs and roots are envisioned emerging from darkness, absorbing stored energy to produce new life. Exploring the relationship between dormancy and growth, concealment and revelation, these botanical interventions recall the building's former function as a place of storage, while introducing another cycle of transformation and renewal.

Food is central to this transformation. The exhibition will open with a new activation of Sanpitak’s ongoing Breast Stupa Cookery (2005–) with Chef Ivan Brehm of Nouri Restaurant, continuing a project in which chefs interpret Sanpitak’s Breast Stupa form and concept through their own ingredients, culinary traditions and cultural histories. From the intimacy of touch and the lingering presence of scent to the pleasures of taste, Sanpitak’s sensory explorations find new expression in the preparation and sharing of food. In Sanpitak’s words, “Food becomes the art medium and connection.” Over time, Breast Stupa Cookery has allowed cooking to become part of the artwork itself.

Throughout the exhibition, a curated series of performances and conversations will continually remake the space. Sanpitak’s works become propositions for how people might spend time together—sitting, eating, listening, speaking, resting and encountering one another. This emphasis on gathering has deep roots in Sanpitak’s practice. Recalling Bangkok’s artist-led community of the 1990s, she describes a cultural ecology made through friendship and self-organisation: “We didn’t need to strive to get into the gallery system. We just did what we wanted.” And, more simply, “It was friends — and always food, and food, yes.”

How We Hold What’s Possible asks what an artwork, and an art space, might hold. A body can hold another body; a vessel can hold food; a table can hold a gathering; architecture can hold bodies, and encounters. In Singapore, these forms come together as a temporary ecology assembled through hospitality and shared time.

The full, free program will be announced closer to January 2027. Learn more >

Movement III

Major exhibition
Artspace, Sydney – 2028

The collaboration culminates in a major exhibition at Artspace in Sydney in 2028, bringing the ideas, relationships and exchanges developed across the preceding movements into a new context. Building on the conversations in Sydney and the immersive activation in Singapore, the exhibition will mark a further chapter in Sanpitak’s ongoing dialogue with Artspace and the region.

Victor Wang, Executive Director, Artspace, said:
'I’ve always believed that the most meaningful collaborations with artists are built over time. Built on trust and a shared curiosity, we are embarking on a three-year journey with Pinaree Sanpitak that will unfold across Sydney and Singapore. Sanpitak’s practice carries decades of connection across Australia, Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific, and this project is a way of honouring those histories while creating new ones. For me, international collaboration means staying with artists, connecting communities and allowing relationships to deepen across places.'

Across the three movements, How We Hold What’s Possible considers the exhibition not as a fixed destination, but as something that accumulates over time through conversation, collaboration, hospitality and return. Ideas, relationships and artistic exchange unfold across places and encounters, allowing each movement to build on what comes before and creating the conditions for new forms of connection and understanding.

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About the Artist

Born 1961, Bangkok, Thailand.
Lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand.

Pinaree Sanpitak is one of Asia’s most important contemporary artists. In the 1990s, her ground-breaking exhibition Breast Works marked the start of the artist’s reference to an emergent and defining iconography: the women’s breast, which Sanpitak has become renowned for.

Over the last four decades, she has explored her sense of being in the world, drawing inspiration from her experiences and the woman’s body. Engaging with the concept of the body in its many dimensions–individual, communal, spiritual–she has developed an enigmatic inventory of symbols distilling the woman’s body to its most elemental parts, expressed variously through vessels, breasts, eggs, fruits and subtly curved profiles. Often abstracting the body into a form of a vessel, Sanpitak presents it as a container of lived experience, perception and emotion that reflect on themes of womanhood, the self and spirituality. Her sensorial inquiries also reveal a keen sensitivity towards a range of materials, and she has produced an expansive and compelling body of work across diverse media and techniques ranging from drawings, large-scale installations, sculpture and collaborative cooking projects.

Sanpitak’s works have been shown in numerous museums and biennales. Her recent exhibitions include: (In)visible Presence, Dib Bangkok, Bangkok, 2025; Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s-Now, curated by Andrea Lissoni, Marina Pugliese, and Russell Storer, M+, Hong Kong, 2025; Choreographies of the Everyday, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan, 2025; Making their Mark, curated by Cecilia Alemani, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and The Shah Garg Foundation, USA, 2024–26; Un Ciel intérieur (An Inner Sky), Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, France, 2025; Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, 2024; Ocean in Us, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2024; New Large Scale Artworks, Asian Art Museum, USA, 2024; Bangkok Art Biennale, Thailand, 2023; The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, 59th Venice Biennale, Italy, 2022; amongst many others.

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