Pinaree Sanpitak: ‘I always go back to paper’

Internationally-acclaimed Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak was busy in 2025, with two solo shows and two institutional group shows opening within months of each other.

Breast Stupa Cookery and Beyond at Jim Thompson Art Center and Jim Thompson House Museum in Bangkok (23 July – 10 August 2025), offered a 30-year survey of Sanpitak’s artistic practice, which moves freely across paintings, sculptures, installations, and collaborative culinary projects. The show focused on the artist’s iconic breast stupa form, a shape based on female anatomy and the dome-shaped Buddhist stupas containing sacred relics. Illuminating a practice connected to ideas of embodiment, creation and community, the ongoing Breast Stupa Cookery project acts as a focal point – inviting chefs to create menus inspired by the breast stupa and generating nourishing community rituals in the process.

Breast Stupa Cookery bridged the artist’s Bangkok survey with her first UK solo show, Gathering Tables, at Ames Yavuz in London (10 October – 7 November 2025), with ethereal, pastel-hued breast stupa collage paintings surrounding a hand-engraved stainless-steel table, a form Sanpitak has been developing for her culinary collaborations.

Between both shows, Sanpitak unveiled The House Is Crumbling (2017/2025), a new interactive commission of Thai khid pillows for the M+ Special Exhibition in Hong Kong, Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now (20 September 2025–18 January 2026). For the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s 30th anniversary show, Choreographies of the Everyday (23 August – 24 November 2025), she created The Mats and The Pillows (2025), an interactive grid of tatami mats and pillows on the floor.

Sanpitak discusses the origin and evolution of these works in this interview with STPI patron Margaret Wang, offering a glimpse into the mind of an artist who thrives on experimentation and collaboration. Sanpitak also discusses the importance of paper and print across her career, starting with a Japanese Government scholarship she describes as the foundation of her entire practice, and her first print residency as part of the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial in 2000, which led to a series of generative residencies at STPI.

Margaret Wang
Pinaree, in terms of how your work has evolved and the consistent themes that come through, there is a long thread. Where should we start?

Pinaree Sanpitak
We’re talking 30 to 40 years, and it’s definitely a thread! When I compiled my monograph in 2020, I started from 1985. I began with photography, using mixed media and handmade paper with my photographs, before turning to painting and exploring different materials. But while the work has evolved, there are themes that weave through. It's all about how we perceive things and how we can change attitudes. Not in an aggressive way, but in a resilient, consistent manner, because I cannot function when I’m angry. I become speechless. I try to keep my balance.

I can roughly divide my practice into two parts. Just me in the studio, which is attached to my home. I don’t have assistants so it’s my private space. Then I have these projects where I work with different masters: paper masters, printmakers, glass artists, chefs, weavers...

I enjoy collaborating with masters, because I don't have their knowledge or skill. Of course, it’s a challenge to work with other people and give them enough space to express their expertise and make it part of my work. I learn from them. For Breast Stupa Cookery, I don’t dictate how the chefs come up with the menu. It’s totally up to them, and that excites me, because I don't know what will happen. It depends on the chef, and then of course the guests, the site, the event.

Margaret Wang
It's a whole experience with everything together, which relates to your residencies at STPI, and how you experimented with print and papermaking there. Was your first residency in 2018?

Pinaree Sanpitak
My residency at STPI in 2018 was the second time I participated in a print workshop. The first time was in 1999 at Northern Territory University in Darwin, Australia, as part of a satellite program organised by the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial (APT3).

At APT3 I showed Womanly Bodies (1998), a hanging sculpture made of mulberry fibre, which is available in the north of Thailand, that I sewed into this torso shape. Specifically, I used the first pounding before mulberry fibre turns into pulp, which looks fragile but is very sturdy.

Basil Hall, director of Northern Editions at NTU at the time, looked at my work and said, “Let’s try everything.” So, after the opening of the exhibition, as part of that satellite program for APT3 artists organised all over Australia, I was sent to Darwin. For around two weeks, I stayed with my friend Judy Watson, an artist who was living in Darwin at the time, and made prints based on Womanly Bodies, with printmakers there. Northern Editions invites non-printmaking artists to collaborate, a lot of them First Nations women artists. After experimenting with different techniques, from collagraph to lithographs, I let the printers play with the plates I made.

Margaret Wang
That goes back to what you were saying about creative freedom. You don't know what your collaborators will create within your concept, and the result informs the next thing you develop…

Pinaree Sanpitak
Yes, because how can I tell them how to apply the ink on the plates?

Margaret Wang
That speaks to one thread that runs through your work, perspective, and how your practice offers a merger of different perspectives. It’s also interesting how paper and print have consistently returned to your practice in new ways.

Pinaree Sanpitak
I love paper, and I always go back to paper – whether it’s drawing or making sculptures. I was so excited when the opportunity to do a residency at STPI in 2018 came along. I wanted to use all the forms and symbols that I had created through the years and turn them into print and paper works. That was the idea, because STPI is so unique, with its paper mill and print workshop.

The residency was split into two sessions, two weeks at a time. I went into the paper mill right away, and we experimented with different pulps. I see them as organic paint bases. Then we tested things out and started making prints. By the time I left, I had everybody in the workshop doing something!

After the first session, I sent over dried indigo and ebony fruits from Thailand as STPI didn’t have natural black pigment. In Thailand, we use fresh ebony fruits to dye fabric, and that’s how the black came, and by mixing it with indigo we were able to create different tones of blacks.

In the pieces that I created during the STPI residency, there are different things happening, but it seems so blended because it’s done in the wet room. You cannot do that elsewhere, because it’s rare to find a paper mill and print workshop in one place!

Together, the workshop team and I discovered this technique of embedding. I was cutting up prints, collaging them with other materials, and embedding them into other kinds of paper – it’s like embossing, which is how you get this relief. We would pour a sheet of pulp and place print cutouts into it and pour another layer over: it was kind of a discovery for the team also, because while they specialise in different techniques, I was looking at it like from an outsider’s viewpoint, with unlimited possibilities.

Margaret Wang
The idea to stack paper, which is a thread in your work, came from your 2018 residency at STPI, too, right?

Pinaree Sanpitak
During that residency, I wanted to stack paper to make it into a wall, but it wasn’t quite right, so we made one hundred unique 127 by 127 cm sheets and hung them to make a maze that people could walk through and around. A paper divider, a fragile wall…

At that time, I was doing site-specific works and interacting with architectural sites, like The Roof at the Winter Garden in New York,with geometric designs canopies and The House is Crumbling at The National Gallery Singapore.

For the work at STPI, I was inspired by the walls of evacuation quarters in Japan – it’s about boundaries. How do we cross boundaries? How do we connect? How do we balance private and public?

The Walls (2018–2019) is still stored at STPI for now, and I’m looking forward to bringing it out to exhibit again – [it] relates to what I did for the Setouchi Triennale in 2019 on Honjima island. I discovered that the owner of the house I was given was the last carpenter from the Shiwaku Daiku school. Around the same time, I realised that the master who made the particular paper, Mohachi, that I had been using from Japan for so long, passed away with no successor.

To commemorate them both, I made these eight sculptures with hand-torn stacked paper in the shape of breast stupas, as an homage to both the wood master and the paper master, which was installed in the house’s tatami room. The project is called The Black and the Red House, also incorporating the khid pillows in the adjacent room.

Margaret Wang
Now that you mention it, you can see how the work you created for the Setouchi Triennale and the maze installation you created in 2018 at STPI inform each other...

Pinaree Sanpitak
You can say that the work for Setouchi Triennale 2019 is an extension of my STPI residency, so it’s a coincidence that these works are on view now: The Mats and The Pillows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and The House is Crumbling, which I’m showing as part of Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now at M+, with 3,500 khid pillows from Thailand, each with 16 strings attached, turning them into building blocks.

Margaret Wang
You also just went back to STPI for a residency in April 2025, and will go for a second session in February 2026. What are you working on?

Pinaree Sanpitak
I’m working on sculptural tables, which started because of Breast Stupa Cookery. The first table was made for Nova Contemporary in 2020, when we staged Breast Stupa Cookery during a COVID-free opening. The gallery didn’t have a kitchen, so we hired a food truck where Chef Joe Napol Jantraget and Chef Saki Hoshino cooked and turned the gallery into a dining hall.

I wanted to test whether this table could be placed outdoors or not. In the end, it didn’t work, so for the past 3 years I have been developing stainless steel tops with Studiomake, a design company here. I hand engrave on the table, a metal canvas. The bases are made from a variety of materials such as stainless steel, cast concrete and, for a table I made for Wonderfruit this year, natural stone.

At STPI, I’m proposing to make a tabletop with paper pulp and embedding different prints on them. I am also continuing with the embedded technique by collaging and creating textural weave-like paper from sasawashi – paper threads – I found in Tokyo. We had a great start, and I look forward to the second phase.

Margaret Wang
The process is so organic and fits so beautifully with this notion of gathering that you work with, whether its ideas, disciplines, or people.

Pinaree Sanpitak
Ideas go back and forth, over and under, because this is how I work: things crisscross and evolve. My show in London at Ames Yavuz is called Gathering Tables – it’s about the actual table you gather around, and the gathering of my thoughts: a site to convene, connect and exchange. We need to come to the table.

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World View distils conversations with leading artists from around the globe, to explore how they see the world through the prism of their life and art.