MANGO ART FESTIVAL 2026

What It Was Really Like

I went in thinking my work was about color and composition. I came back knowing it was about something else entirely.

I'll be honest — I wasn't sure what to expect. Showing AS WE ARE publicly for the first time felt different from anything I'd done before, and not just because of the scale. It was the subject matter. You can spend months painting shame in private — and then one day you carry those paintings into a room full of strangers and realize: this is the moment I find out if it was real, or just something I told myself.

The days leading up to it were nerve-wracking. Not the logistics — the vulnerability. There's a specific kind of exposure that comes with being a Bali-based figurative artist putting work about shame on a white wall in a public fair. The work isn't decorative. It asks something of the viewer. And I genuinely didn't know, before Bangkok, if people would meet it there.

What surprised me about the city itself was how seriously it takes art. I mean it in the way you feel it when you're actually there. Bangkok has a genuinely vibrant emerging art scene, and you could sense that this wasn't happening by accident. The government's support for cultural events like Mango is visible; it shapes the vibrance of the whole thing. Art here isn't cordoned off from the rest of the city's energy — it feeds into tourism, into civic identity, into the idea of what Bangkok is becoming. For me that's rare. And it made the context of showing work there feel more alive, more consequential, than I expected.

The conversations were what I'll remember most. Not because of the sales — though yes, paintings sold, and I won't pretend that doesn't matter — but the conversations in front of the work. Strangers stopping, looking longer then saying something personal. Something they probably hadn't planned to say out loud before.

People talked about shame in their own lives. About the version of themselves trained to be presentable, and the cost of that. About seeing themselves in the figures. AS WE ARE is subtitled "unlearning shame" — I understood that intellectually when I made the collection. In Bangkok, I understood it as something other people were also living through. That's a different thing entirely.

One visitor described looking at a portrait and feeling like the painting had made space for something they'd been carrying without a name for it. I didn't engineer that. I just painted what felt true. But hearing it land that way -quietly -was one of the most significant things that's happened to me as an artist.

Before Bangkok, I held a private uncertainty about this series. Too personal, too decorative. I thought the visual language — the expressionism, the distortion, the color that refuses to behave — might keep people at arm's length from the emotional content.

I was wrong. The visual language isn't the barrier — it's the entry point. People don't need to understand what expressionism is to feel what the work is doing, but to be honest.

I came back still processing. Not with answers — more with a clearer sense of what the work is for. It's not for walls. It's for the people who stop in front of it and suddenly have permission to feel something they'd been holding very carefully. That's what AS WE ARE turned out to be. And I didn't know that until Bangkok showed me.