Pinaree Sanpitak: Fragmented Bodies: The Personal and The Public at STPI Singapore

27 Sep 2019

In September 2019, STPI unveiled a new body of work by Pinaree Sanpitak in a solo presentation, Fragmented Bodies: The Personal and The Public, arising from Sanpitak’s artist residency at STPI which began in May 2018. The works present themselves as a series of playful provocations that bridge a sustained exploration of print and paper techniques such as collagraphy, etching, monoprint and collage with new spatial and formal concerns. The ‘breast-stupa’ motif, for which Sanpitak is renowned, re-emerges in rich permutations and treatments, allowing reconsiderations of age-old symbols that have held both sacred and earthly significances across histories.

Taking on a range of new discursive forms in the exhibition, the breast-stupa is reoriented to elicit various responses, suggesting the openness of an alms bowl in one iteration and gender ambiguity in another. Resisting linear references to femininity, motherhood and religion, Sanpitak seeks to draw viewers into sensorial and affective relations with her work. The repetition of motifs on view is generative and expansive, locating wider, universal cultural referents that complicate narrow interpretations of deceptively familiar imagery.

Image and text courtesy of STPI Singapore.