Nova Contemporary

11/04/2026

Nova Contemporary wishes you a happy Songkran!

The gallery will be closed from April 12-20, 2026 for the Thai New Year holidays. We will resume regular opening hours on Tuesday, April 21, 2026.

Sawasdi Tantisuk
Rain, 1993
Watercolour on paper
73 x 90.5 cm (framed)

Prae Pupityastaporn
Friday became cool, 2014
Acrylic on canvas
50 x 42 cm

11/04/2026

Nova Contemporary will be closed for the public holiday from 12 - 20 April 2026. The gallery will be open as usual from on 21 April 2026.

If you have further requests, kindly contact us via [email protected]. Thank you.

โนวา คอนเทมโพรารี จะปิดทำการเนื่องในโอกาสเทศกาลสงกรานต์ ตั้งแต่วันที่ 12 – 20 เมษายน 2569 โดยจะแกลเลอรีจะเปิดให้เข้าชมตามปกติตั้งแต่วันที่ 21 เมษายน 2569

หากท่านต้องการติดต่อแกลเลอรี กรุณาส่งอีเมลมาที่ [email protected]. ขอบคุณค่ะ

09/04/2026

Nova Contemporary and Park Hyatt Bangkok are delighted to present a selection of works by Prae Pupityastaporn, on view throughout the hotel.

Working through a refined visual language of soft tonal shifts, veiled surfaces, and spatial ambiguity, Pupityastaporn creates paintings that resist immediate clarity. Subtle gestures, such as traces of light, horizon, or architecture, form compositions that remain open-ended, allowing perception to shift over time. What first appears indistinct settles into quiet familiarity.

Situated within Park Hyatt Bangkok, the works are become part of the hotel’s rhythms of passage, pause, and return. Their presence offers moments of quiet recalibration. Each encounter remains provisional, shifting with time and circumstance and allowing the works to be experienced anew with every return.

Images courtesy of the artist and Park Hyatt Bangkok

08/04/2026

“Emergent Figures” continues at the gallery this week, prior to our closing for the Thai New Year holidays. Included in the show is a work by national artist Prayoon Uluchadha (1920-2000).

Rather than a movement toward purification or transcendence, abstraction is a thickening. From this vantage, even artists closely associated with the mythos of Thai abstraction begin to look different. Prayoon Uluchada (1928–2000), better known by his penname Nor Na Paknam, built his reputation across both writing and painting on the authority of fieldwork and the liveness of having been there. Untitled (n.d.) is a turn away from such immediacy. The fidelity to site falls away, and in its place, we find gentle warm-cool interplays of saccharine pastels. The work underscores the artificialness of Prayoon’s palette, which belong as much to a color laboratory as to any identifiable outdoors.

— Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, “Emergent Figures: The Thai Modern, Three Wayward Takes”

Prayoon Uluchadha
Untitled
Oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm

07/04/2026

“Emergent Figures” continues at the gallery this week, prior to our closing for the Thai New Year holidays. Included in the show is Kanya Charoensupkul’s Cloud Above the Mountain (2005).

The work’s title invites us to search for orientation in space, a ground to stand on, or at least, if we are flying above the mountains, some sense of which direction gravity works. But the image refuses any spaciousness that can be inhabited, any distance that can be traversed. What we get are surface effects. The finely layered washes yield a murky appearance whose metaphors shift register: meteorological, as in condensation and haze; geological, as in mineral skeins and strata; botanical, as we reach toward the pinks and yellows of flower and sunray. It appears, in the end, as though no transcendent view from above is on offer at all. We are submerged in a blooming fog, a turbid liquescence, in the very tactility of color itself. This atmospheric viscosity speaks to Kanya’s grasp of painting, but it is equally a testament to her training as a printmaker. This alertness to the grammar of stratification, to pressure and smear, to the trace left when one surface yields to another, are all central to the poetics of printmaking.  

Foregrounding Kanya reframes what abstraction does. Rather than a movement toward purification or transcendence, abstraction is a thickening. From this vantage, even artists closely associated with the mythos of Thai abstraction begin to look different.

— Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, “Emergent Figures: The Thai Modern, Three Wayward Takes”

Kanya Charoensupkul
Cloud above the mountain, 2005
Acrylic on canvas
80 x 120 cm

03/04/2026

Cole Lu’s monumental installation “The Engineers,” which has now entered the permanent collection of Dib Bangkok, is included in the Bangkok Kunsthalle and Khao Yai Art Forest Archive Book (2024–2025).

In partnership with Nova Contemporary, Bangkok Kunsthalle hosted Lu as artist in residence in October 2024. Rooted in a literary upbringing, Lu’s practice engages deeply with text, memory, and material transformation. His use of pyrography—burning wood panels and linen—echoes themes of trauma, renewal, and history, resonating with the fire-marked past of the Watana Panich building where the work was developed.

The residency culminated in a site-specific installation at the Museum & Library of Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, presented as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024: Nurture Gaia (24 October 2024 – 25 February 2025). The project also included a conversation with Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific (supported by Asymmetry at Tate and co-curator of Thailand Biennale Phuket 2025: Eternal [Kalpa]), exploring Lu’s engagement with materiality, alchemical processes, and writing, alongside themes of portals, travel, exile, diaspora, and history.

The exhibition was generously supported by the Culture Division of the Taipei Economic and Culture Office, and Holiday Tours.

02/04/2026

On view in “Emergent Figures”:

Pratuang Emcharoen (1935-2022) is one of the best known “self-taught” artist-activists of his generation. His most famous paintings elevate elemental matter to a mythic register. Streams of water, tendrils of fire, rays of sun swirl and condense into cosmic spectacle. These monumental works rely on visual dynamism to evoke a battle of manichean forces. They were popularly taken up as allegories of historical rupture and renewal in the wake of the political upheavals of 1976. But it is his quieter works that most sharply illuminate the stakes of his visual grammar inquiry.

In Grain of Virtue No. 1 (1979), a single grain of rice floats, made larger than life. It invokes the nation, or the even grander concept of “humanity” (manusayachat), inscribed upon its surface. While the overt symbolism of rice and land verges on the didactic, the work’s generative force lies elsewhere. The image operates equally as an abstract color field: expanses of grey and green, yellow and blue held in suspension. What insists upon attention, once noticed, is the interval where sky and field meet, where the naturalism of landscape gives way to the slivers of blue and dark green on the horizon that seem to hold all the potential energy. Attuned to the smallness of this zone, we are reminded, as with Pratuang’s other paintings, that the impact of the work is in the sense of revelation that they portend.

Pratuang Emcharoen (1935-2022)
Grain of Virtue No.1, 1979
Oil on canvas
135 x 111 cm

01/04/2026

James Prapaithong’s debut solo exhibition in the US is now on view at Timothy Taylor New York until April 18.

“So We Won’t Forget” brings together a group of paintings that consider how particular qualities of light can trigger involuntary memory. Here, light becomes both subject and agent-obscuring, abstracting, revealing, and intensifying what it touches. In these works, light recasts familiar surfaces and scenes, giving them an otherworldly quality.

Images courtesy of Timothy Taylor and the artist.

31/03/2026

Nova Contemporary is pleased to announce the acquisition of works by Prae Pupityastaporn, Supawich Weesapen, and Cole Lu by Dib Bangkok.

Bringing together three distinct practices, the acquisition highlights the diversity of contemporary art from the region and Asian diaspora, from Pupityastaporn’s dreamlike reflections on memory, to Weesapen’s luminous intersections of the spiritual and digital, and Lu’s site-specific exploration of mythology and belief.

The inclusion of these works within Dib Bangkok’s collection marks an important moment in the continued dialogue between artists and institutions shaping contemporary art in Southeast Asia and beyond. Through this acquisition, Dib Bangkok further expands its commitment to supporting artists whose practices offer nuanced reflections on the social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of the present.

Prae Pupityastaporn, In 2.3 milions light years, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 180 cm.

Supawich Weesapen, Starlink above the Waterfall and a String in the Hands of the Spider, 2024, oil on linen and pastel on reflective fabric, two-sided painting, 210 x 15 cm.

Cole Lu, The Engineers, 2024, burnt neem and burnt linen, 280 x 290 x 120 cm, edition of 1 plus 1 artists proof.

20/03/2026

Our 10 year anniversary show, “Emergent Figures”, curated by Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, opens tomorrow.

The show includes an early work by celebrated Thai master Chakrabhand Posayakrit (b.1943), best known for his paintings of Thai courtly beauty and his depictions of Khon, Thailand’s classical masked dance drama.

“Opening Emergent Figures is an untitled painting from 1967, executed during his senior year at Silpakorn. The work carries the experimental charge of that moment. A figure sits, posing. What defines this figure is less anatomy—male or female, young or old—than performance. The raised arms recall the exposure of a classical n**e, while the crossed legs suggest withheld seduction. And yet, the habit of the gaze is thwarted by the very brute materiality of paint. The head dissolves into a pool of black ink. The torso is disrupted by a fleshy appendage, barely legible as human form in its flat patterning. Executed in tempera and rice water on paper—a medium typically reserved for decorous temple murals—the work contaminates inherited technique. Whatever beauty the subject and medium might imply is threaded with grotesque violence. We are implicated in the scene by a surrogate onlooker, rendered bloody.”

— Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, “Emergent Figures: The Thai Modern, Three Wayward Takes”

19/03/2026

14/03/2026

Nova Contemporary is delighted to present Emergent Figures, an exhibition of Thai modern and contemporary works curated by Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol.

Emergent Figures brings together artists widely regarded in Thailand as “masters,” yet many still seldom seen internationally. The exhibition makes the case for a closer look. Their works share a striking preoccupation: figures caught between abstraction and landscape, between presence and absence. It is at this threshold of emergence that the artists’ most compelling contributions come into view.

Presented on the occasion of our 10th anniversary, the exhibition celebrates the gallery’s commitment to the contemporary as an attitude of exploration, a lens through which both emerging and established practices can be encountered with a sense of possibility.
Featured Artists:
Sawasdi Tantisuk (1925-2009)
Prayoon Uluchada (1928-2000)
Chamruang Vichienket (1931-2021)
Sompot Upa-In (1934-2014)
Pratuang Emcharoen (1935-2022)
Lawan Upa-In (1935-)
Chakrabhand Posayakrit (1943-)
Kiettisak Chanonnart (1943-)
Kanya Charoensupkul (1947-)
Montien Boonma (1953-2000)
Sakarin Krue-On (1965-)
Kanchana Cholsuwat (1972-)