SIRIPOJ CHAMROENVIDHYA
BETWEEN WORLDS
Siripoj Chamroenvidhya was born in Bangkok on 17 July 1957 to a Thai father and a Singaporean mother. His artistic and personal journey has unfolded across Thailand, Ethiopia, England and Switzerland, shaping a practice situated between cultures, materials and different ways of perceiving the world.
After beginning his artistic education in Thailand, he continued his studies at the Ethiopian Fine Arts School and the Italian Institute in Addis Ababa. Encountering African art alongside European modernism opened his understanding of the image beyond a single cultural tradition. He later studied in England before settling in Geneva in 1980. From 1980 to 1984, he attended the École supérieure d’art visuel de Genève, where he studied in the studio of Nanette Bussat.
Geneva gradually became a second home, but his relationship with Thailand remained essential. This experience of living between places has never resulted in a simple opposition between East and West. Instead, it has created a territory of passage in which cultural memory, displacement and observation continually transform one another.
Chamroenvidhya’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting, analogue and digital photography, installation and artists’ books. He has worked with charcoal, watercolour, acrylic, oil and lacquer on paper, canvas, wood, cardboard and unconventional surfaces such as bubble wrap. Rather than treating technique as a means of controlling the final image, he allows materials, gestures, pressure, repetition and accident to participate actively in its formation.
Landscape occupies an important place in his work, although it rarely functions as a direct representation of a particular site. Mountains, horizons, nocturnal spaces, water, vegetation and urban environments are gradually transformed through memory and material processes. The resulting works inhabit an uncertain zone between observation and abstraction, exterior reality and mental landscape.
Drawing and photography form two closely connected axes within this research. In his charcoal works, black is not simply a colour or an absence of light: it becomes a material depth from which forms may emerge or disappear. In his analogue photography, developed and printed by the artist in the darkroom, exposure, grain, contrast, superimposition and photographic accidents disturb the stability of the visible. The photograph becomes less a document than an event of perception—a place where seeing and remembering intersect.
Since 2009, Chamroenvidhya has also played an active role as a curator and initiator of artistic exchanges. He co-founded CRAC — Centre de recherches en art contemporain in Geneva, a nonprofit association created by visual artists and poets to bring contemporary art into dialogue with literature and poetry through exhibitions, conferences, readings and artists’ books.
His curatorial projects include How Do You See Thailand? (2010); Contemporary Art with Politics and Ecology (2017), initiated by Siripoj Chamroenvidhya and developed in collaboration with Karine Tissot; Air Mail (2017); and Danses sans territoire (2018). These projects have brought together artists and cultural perspectives from Thailand, Switzerland and elsewhere.
In 2019, he initiated BIG PAINTING, a bilateral exhibition project connecting Thailand and Switzerland. The project was presented at Galerie François Fontaine in Satigny, with a continuation planned at the National Gallery in Bangkok. This subsequent stage could not be realised because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This commitment continues with IMAGO SENSIBILIS / IMAGE MENTALE, a bilateral project involving artists from Thailand and Switzerland and examining the threshold between the external image and the image formed within the mind.
Since 2017, Chamroenvidhya has collaborated with the Swiss-Armenian poet Vahé Godel on limited-edition artists’ books and leporellos. Their work establishes a dialogue in which image and poem neither illustrate nor explain one another. Each remains autonomous while opening an intermediate space where visual perception and poetic language can resonate.
Chamroenvidhya is a member of Visarte Suisse. His work has been presented in Switzerland and Thailand and is held in the collections of the Fonds municipal d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève and the National Gallery in Bangkok.