A prelude into 2026: I Expected my first solo Show on Maternal Love to Come Naturally…
But no. Apparently I love the mothers in my life so much that painting about them does not come easily. They were everything: my guidance, comfort, strength & joy. They changed the way I see the world. Some days paintings about them feel feather light. Other days the thoughts sit on my chest like a palm sized stone.
Even the weather affects me. Light rain feels perfect, but sometimes somber. Heavy rain can shift the room into a completely different emotion. As I paint, the stories behind each piece start to rise & I find myself releasing memories I did not know I was still carrying. It is liberating. It is overwhelming. Letting those memories move through me can be incredibly hard.
I think about the way my ahma spent five hours preparing her weekly five hundred dollar sea cucumber pork rib soup & always saved a second portion for me after family dinners because she knew I was a hungry kid. Maybe that is why I have such good skin today. I think about my mother making a plate of my favourite chicken wings on a random Tuesday afternoon just because she knew it would make me happy. She brought me on weekly shopping trips so I could see the world beyond what my father allowed, & she taught me how to enjoy life while still living within my means. I remember hiding our haul so my father would not see it. It felt sad that I could not show them off at home, yet I could always do it proudly with my friends. My mother gave me that freedom.
I think about my Yai, even at seventy five, offering to bring me around the estate on her tricycle to run errands & eat mama moo sab at a small roadside stall. As she cycled quietly through the neighborhood everyone would greet her & call out “Good morning Tricycle Grandma. Oh your granddaughter is back, she is so big now!”
These tiny moments hit harder than the big stories. Their love has now become my treasure.
How could I ever express the physical effects of creating this series? My chest grows warm. My shoulders relax, but they also tense up when I make a mistake or feel something’s off. My hands slow down whenever I reach the last stretch of a piece. The details are the final 90% of my work & the part I look forward to most, yet also the part I wish would never end. My breath gets shallow when I stare at a finished piece that still feels unsettled.
This is probably one of the most personal, vulnerable & emotional themes I will ever work on. The mothers in my life feel like a part of who I am. I carried the weight of their fears, challenged their doubts & basked in their pride as I grew up. Even as an adult, I retell their stories openly. I have become a messenger of their motherhood.
Sometimes I wonder if carrying all their stories has made it harder for me to distinguish myself from their identities. Have I ever truly known myself? Is this who I really am? This theme is helping me examine my own principles & see myself through the eyes of the women whose hands cleaned me, fed me & even scolded me into becoming the person I am.
As an artist, I love using personal interpretations of cultural symbols to connect the narratives within each piece. It does not matter if others understand every symbol. I simply hope the warmth & ache behind each painting reaches someone who misses their mother or someone trying their best to become one.
Now that I am in the middle of completing this series, I felt it was important to write down the things that have been sitting on my heart. This is a raw pour of my journey into a show about the women who raised me. It is not only about Thai cultural values of obedience & respect for elders. The word “katanyu” to me represents respect through understanding the pain, sacrifices & beauty of it all. It holds something about love, something about grief & something about time passing.
It also carries the truth that I could not make it back in time for my ahma’s final moments because I was still on a flight returning from Europe. That experience made me realise that if I wanted to immortalise anything, it would be the memories I still have, while they are still fresh. So I have been trying to paint the versions of them I remember, as close as possible to the versions they were when I lived through those moments with them.
As I work on this series, I have learned to prioritise time with my mother, the woman who knows more than I do & who passes down memories through echoes, car rides & our impromptu suppers at three in the morning. One night, while we were eating yam woon sen at 3am, I realised mid conversation with my mother while she explained an old memory of me as a child that maternal love is not only about giving. It is about witnessing. I am honouring what I have witnessed in these women’s lives, because they witnessed me too. I can never fully give back what they gave me or how much they saw of me. But I can try to immortalise them & keep these memories alive. Better yet, I can share them with others.
Perhaps the hardest part of painting this series is the pressure to honour them correctly. I wanted to capture them in the way they would have wanted to be seen. I realised that the only way to do that was to be fearless of their judgment & paint them in my own way. Sometimes I worry that people may not feel what I feel when looking at these pieces. Sometimes I worry that others may not understand why I paint what I paint. But it does not matter. I made this show for myself & for the ones who understand the freedom of honouring their beloved in their own way.
People often ask me how I know when a piece is done. I think some assume I never finish anything. A few nights ago, I finished Monarch much faster than expected & caught myself thinking it was easy. But it was not easy. I finished it early because I had already thought through every detail long before I painted Yai & Ahma. The emotion had played in my mind over & over, so when I finally sat in front of the canvas, all I needed to do was assemble it. It felt calm, intentionally simple & faithfully captured the memory I had imagined. My mind felt clear, the weather was gentle even while I was painting in the midst of launching my new studio space.
