RGB Colour Painting: Supawich Weesapen in Conversation with Roger Nelson

This talk was part of SEAspotlight Talks during S.E.A. Focus 2023. Click here to watch the recording of this talk online.

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What is the future of metaphor? How do digital natives see colour and feel time? Will reading a poem guide us into a painting? Supawich Weesapen makes luminous, eerie and sublime oil paintings that entangle the intersections of theory, poetry, and what he calls “metaphoring”. In this conversation presented by Nova Contemporary, the artist will share his revelatory insights on his process, and its relationship to contemporary experience.

Speaker

Supawich Weesapen, Artist, Nova Contemporary

Supawich Weesapen (b. 1997, Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand​) is at the forefront of a new generation of artists exploring the enduring relevance of technical skills in today’s hyper-digital environments. He works with oil on canvas, making vividly hued images using the RGB colour mode, which is usually used for digital screen displays. He also writes poetry in English and Thai, to explore the philosophical, sublime and metaphorical possibilities that his paintings propose. A graduate of Silpakorn University Bangkok (2020), Supawich’s exhibitions include Liste Art Fair Basel (2021), and Sanamchandra Palace Library, Nakhon Pathom (2019). He is represented by Nova Contemporary, Bangkok.

Moderator

Roger Nelson, Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, currently Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Roger was previously Curator at National Gallery Singapore, where he co-curated Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia. He is author of Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z (2019), co-editor of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s I Am An Artist (He Said) (2022), and co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by NUS Press.