Contemporary Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook has spent more than four decades exploring some very big questions through very ordinary things: flowers, beds, words, the human body, and everyday encounters. Her work can be playful, strange, intimate, and sometimes quite confronting, as she considers subjects like desire, mortality and what it means to be human. Now, for the first time, a solo exhibition of her work is being presented in Malaysia. The Bouquet and the Wreath (Rebirth) brings together works from across Araya’s 45-year practice, including early pieces alongside more recent works, in an intimate exhibition at ILHAM Gallery. To tell us more about the artist, the exhibition, and his own long collaboration with Araya, we speak to the exhibition's curator, Roger Nelson, who is also an art historian and an Assistant Professor of Art History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Image Credit: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Has Girl Lost Her Memory? (1994/2025), courtesy of Ilham Gallery