Artist: Channatip Chanvipava

Ames Yavuz presents Found Memories, a new exhibition in London by Thai-British artist Channatip Chanvipava, his first solo exhibition with the gallery following the announcement of his representation by Ames Yavuz. The presentation brings together five principal paintings, one monumental canvas, four companion canvases, and five intimate painted 'memory boxes’ that operate as emotional appendices to the principal works. Treating memory as found object, they accumulate the ambient, non-narrative feeling-states that gather around the exhibition's larger themes. Unfolding as a meditation on transition, identity and emotional reconstruction, the exhibition traces the months preceding the birth of the artist’s first child and the associated shift in selfhood. Through explorations of intimate life, surrogacy and cross-cultural experience, Found Memories uses memory as a generative process through which identity can be explored and understood.

Chanvipava transforms autobiographical fragments into psychologically charged environments where memory becomes both subject and material. Throughout the exhibition, domestic interiors, airport immigration halls, neighbourhood surroundings, and the artist’s studio emerge as emotional spaces through which he explores migration, queer family and the shifting politics of identity, belonging and boundaries. The imagery he uses evokes glimpses of specific ephemeral events; evening walks with his partner, sleepless nights, and inherited familial impulses from his grandfather, which alchemise into a highly-saturated visual language. His process is intuitive; Chanvipava’s gestural style deliberately employs layered textures that accumulate across the canvas into a constellation of recollection, where dense, pliant strokes dissolve into one another much like memory itself.

Across the exhibition Chanvipava repeatedly returns to domestic objects and architectural fragments as repositories of psychological experience. Echoing the logic of the readymade, he treats memories as found, emotionally charged objects that, through reflection and the act of painting, are repositioned and reinterpreted, transforming past perceptions and experiences into renewed meaning.

Found Memories positions painting as a sustained act of emotional reconfiguration. Chanvipava does not preserve memory as a structured archive but instead works it into material form, flattening, fragmenting and reassembling remembered spaces so that past and future, loss and affirmation, can coexist. The exhibition ultimately asks how identity is remade through movement, care and intimate labour, and how recollection can become a practice of survival and imaginative possibility.

Channatip Chanvipava (b. 1993, Thailand) is a Thai artist of Chinese descent, whose practice engages memory as both material and method, shaped by questions of identity and a quiet sense of spirituality. Born in Thailand to a Malaysian mother and a Burmese-Thai father, and now based in Bangkok, he spent two decades in the United Kingdom, a formative period that continues to inform his cross-cultural perspective and understanding of belonging.

Through autobiographical painting, he transforms lived experience into broader emotional and collective narratives, exploring resilience, intimacy, and change. He approaches painting as a process of inquiry and reflection, using memory as both method and subject as a way of locating the self across time and place. While painting remains central, he also develops installation- based works in which paintings are spatially activated, extending their psychological and experiential reach. Across his practice, personal memory becomes a site of renewal, expanding into a shared visual language that connects inner experience with a broader, almost spiritual sense of human continuity.

Informed by memories drawn from both the conscious and subconscious, Chanvipava’s work explores how recollection, repositioning and emotion shape one another, reflecting an ongoing search for identity and presence. Working intuitively and without preparatory sketches or images, he is drawn to the tension between abstraction and figuration that emerges on his surfaces through memory’s subjectivity, creating open narratives where remembered forms, figures, and spaces take on new meaning. The act of painting becomes a meditative ritual, where memory is revisited and reimagined. His bold brushstrokes and layered, sculptural textures reveal a dynamic interplay between control and spontaneity, intentionality and improvisation. Through paint, he gives memory a place in the present, infused with affirmation and possibility. Familiar places and figures emerge and dissolve, where colour carries fluid emotional and symbolic meaning, and abstraction and figuration shifts between clarity and ambiguity. His compositions often simplify forms and compress space, echoing how the mind filters what it holds, while also suggesting a more transient, interconnected reality.

Currently based in Bangkok, Chanvipava’s works have been exhibited across the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, Singapore, China and Thailand, including solo showcases such as: The Sound of Many Waters, presented by Roman Road at Dimora Ai Santi at the 60th Venice Biennale, Italy (2024); Wizards of Omaha, Ronchini Gallery, United Kingdom (2024); among others. He has undertaken residencies in France and the United Kingdom, and is collected by The London School of Economics & Political Sciences, United Kingdom, and the DC Collection, Thailand.