Born 1986, Mae Suai, Thailand

Busui Ajaw is a member of the Akha ethnic group, a nomadic people from the highlands of southeast Asia. She was born in a small village in Myanmar, but in the violent unrest and military incursions along the border, her family fled to Thailand. Despite an insecure and often homeless childhood, Ajaw learned stories from her grandmother that had been passed down through generations of Akha people. A selftaught artist who began drawing and painting when she was fifteen, Ajaw’s technique of scumbled, textural surfaces and elongated figures recalls the German Expressionists, yet is a visual language entirely her own. Her work connects her experience of the modern world with ancestral folk tales and traditions, and with the dreams and fears of her own inner life.

The body of work shown in Other Possible Worlds represents The Five Precepts in Buddhism: no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no false speech and no intoxicants. Each painting is a cautionary tale, a vignette depicting the wages of sin with an almost gleeful depiction of blood and gore. The possibility of violence is ever present. The ambiguity of the imagery is intriguing – each work can be interpreted on multiple levels. In Musavada Weramani (Do not lie) (2022) three tall, thin male figures float against a background of white paint applied over a coloured ground. The central figure, with protruding tongue, is bleeding from one eye. He holds a knife – is his tongue to be cut out as a gruesome punishment? Gamesumiccha Weramani (Do not indulge a sexual misconduct) (2022) is a crowded, dramatic, violent image of illicit lovers caught in the act. A mysterious small figure crouches menacingly in one corner. With her idiosyncratic imagery and painterly, gestural brushwork Busui Ajaw connects the seen and unseen, the secular and the spiritual, joy and suffering, and the artist’s inner and outer worlds.