KITTAYA POOLSAWATDI

BIOGRAPHY
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2015 – Characteristic
Kittaya Poolsawatdi began his career in the fashion industry, where he became interested in how beauty, appearance, and social expectations shape the way people are perceived. This experience became the foundation of his first solo exhibition, Characteristic (2015), which examined stereotypes and questioned conventional ideals of beauty and identity through a fashion-informed visual language.
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2018 – Across the Bridge
His second solo exhibition, Across the Bridge (2018), marked a deeper engagement with the history of Western painting. Inspired by the portrait tradition, he began exploring richer painterly surfaces, atmosphere, light, and psychological presence, expanding both the technical and emotional range of his work.
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2019 – East Meets West
Supported by the success of his early exhibitions, he traveled throughout Europe and Japan in search of new artistic experiences. He immersed himself in museums, studying brushwork, light, composition, and the visual language of academic painting, while deepening his interest in Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism. These journeys gradually led him to bridge Eastern and Western visual traditions, finding their fullest expression in his third solo exhibition (2019)


2021 – Domesticated

2021 marked a turning point in Kittaya Poolsawatdi's practice. Between 2019 and 2021, Thailand saw a nationwide uprising against military rule. As one of the participants, witnessing young protesters violently attacked by military forces transformed him from an observer of history into someone living through it. Domesticated(2021) carries the spirit of that resistance. 
In this exhibition, he questioned how the idea of "Thainess" is constructed and repeatedly employed as a tool of ideological control. While retaining the structural language of Western academic painting, he introduced vivid color palettes and Thai cultural symbols as visual metaphors for power, obedience, and political mythology.

 
2023 – Gag to Gesture
In 2023, Kittaya Poolsawatdi relocated to New York, where his work underwent a radical shift in visual language. After years of working under censorship and restrictions on free speech in Thailand, he moved away from coded allegory and academic refinement toward raw, gestural mark-making.
This period marked a turning point in which suppressed speech and the memory of resistance became painterly force. That same year, he exhibited his work in Chelsea, New York, and received recognition from the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition.