Chanya Vitayakul

Chanya Vitayakul works with installation, design, and image-making to explore identity, embodiment, and in-betweenness. Drawing from personal experience, their work often focuses on how physical materials—like hair, doors, or spatial arrangements—can carry emotional and symbolic weight. Whether referencing cultural memory, gender expression, or dislocation, each piece opens up a space to reflect on what it means to live in transition. Their installations invite viewers not just to look, but to feel, through proximity, tension, or the quiet pull of familiarity.

Both Ends - Wood door 10 in candles, 2024

Q: What makes a personal experience feel ready to become part of your work?

A: When a personal experience lingers, when it refuses to fade into the background of memory and instead presses up against my skin, I know it's ready. It usually begins as discomfort or a question I can't quite name, and once that friction builds enough, it needs to take form. The work becomes a way to translate it—not to resolve it, but to hold it in another shape, one that others might recognize or feel through their own bodies. Making, in a way, is also a form of processing and healing for me.

Q: When your body becomes part of the piece, what changes in how you relate to the work?

A: When my body enters the work, the boundary between maker and object dissolves. It’s no longer something I’ve made—it’s something I’ve become. There’s a vulnerability there, but also a kind of clarity: the weight shifts from conceptual to lived. It reminds me that art is not neutral. It’s a space of exposure and offering. My body, with all its histories, contradictions, and fluidities, becomes a site of translation.

Q: Why does hair feel like the right material to explore identity in "Between Two Halves and One Whole"?

A: Hair is loaded—culturally, politically, emotionally. It’s a part of the body that continues to grow even in absence or loss. In "Between Two Halves and One Whole," the synthetic wigs mirror the duality in my own identity. The color split directly references my real hair and becomes a visual stand-in for the ways identity can feel fragmented, performed, or inherited. Hair is personal, yet it’s also external—both domestic and public. It holds traces of who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.

Q: In "Both Ends," the door becomes a barrier. What kind of threshold were you thinking about?

A: I was thinking about the thresholds of self-perception—moments when identity is on the cusp of shifting or rupturing. The door isn’t just a physical object; it becomes a metaphor for all the in-betweens: language, gender, belonging. "Both Ends" stages the push and pull between visibility and privacy, between what’s shut in and what tries to exit. A door can protect, but it can also confine. I was interested in that ambivalence.

Between Two Halves and One Whole - Synthetic wigs, 2024

Q: What does installation allow you to say that design or image-making alone can’t?

A: Installation allows me to invite the viewer into the logic of the work—not just visually, but spatially, physically, even emotionally. It becomes a shared environment for encounters. Design and image-making are powerful, but they often operate on a flat plane. Installation can rupture that surface. It activates the body of the viewer and draws them into the choreography of the space, the tension, the narrative. It’s less about depiction and more about immersion.

Q: How has living outside Thailand shaped the way you think about identity in your practice?

A: Being away from Thailand has made me hyper-aware of what I carry with me—of what gets lost or misread in translation. It’s given me distance, which can be painful but also centering. I think more about hybridity now, about the tension between assimilation and resistance. My work often lives in those liminal spaces, where nostalgia collides with dislocation, and where identity isn’t fixed but in constant negotiation.