Bussaraporn Thongchai

(she/her)
b 1985, Nakhon Phanom, Thailand
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

In Bussaraporn Thongchai’s drawings, misshapen and highly stylised figures are rendered in charcoal gradations of black and white. Here appears the ghostly form of a woman, cocooned in a bulbous mass of breasts. Teetering between the grotesque and the erotic, The Dress mourns the burden of maternity and of sexual reproduction which, quite literally, weighs down on the body of the mother, obscuring and disfiguring the woman beneath the dress. Painfully aware of the sorrow and unhappy sacrifices of motherhood, Thongchai, who created the work as a reflection upon her own mother’s life, writes: ‘the smell under my mother’s breast [is] the strange and bitter smell of tears, sweat, milk and blood, [one] that I never want to have on my own body.’

The Dress 2013
crayon and acrylic on paper
145 x 75 cm