15 Years After
Adisak Somkong
Bringing together a new body of work created during the artist’s residency at MATDOT in March 2026, the exhibition explores the complex relationship between time, memory, perception, and existence through a visual language that combines photography with contemporary painterly processes.
In this series, Adisak Somkong revisits a collection of black-and-white photographs produced from original film negatives he captured fifteen years ago. Printed onto aluminium composite panels, the images are subsequently transformed through mixed-media painting techniques, creating richly layered surfaces that appear blurred, ambiguous, and at times detached from their original visual form. The resulting works challenge the viewer’s ability to identify the images with certainty, suspending them between recognition and obscurity.
For Adisak, photography serves not merely as a means of recording events or preserving memories. As the artist notes, “These photographs were not created fifteen years ago; they only came into being on the day they were seen.” This proposition shifts the centre of meaning away from the moment of exposure and towards the moment of perception. A photograph does not possess a fixed meaning from the outset; rather, it relies upon the viewer’s gaze to bring it fully into existence. In this sense, the photograph itself becomes an event—one that occurs repeatedly in the present. Looking is therefore not simply an act of receiving information from an image, but a process through which the image comes to exist. The same photograph may assume different lives according to the memories, experiences, and emotional states brought to it by each viewer and each encounter.
Through traces of the past reassembled in the present, “15 Years After” invites viewers to reflect upon the formation of memory, the act of recollection, and the continual transformation of meaning. In doing so, the exhibition encourages a deeper consideration of our own existence within the ceaseless flow of time that passes through every moment.
On view: 6 July – 12 August 2026
Opening reception: Monday 6 July, 18:00 h
Adisak Somkong has been drawn to art since he was a child, thanks to his grandfather’s paintings which introduced him to the aesthetics of art. Even though his parents had forbidden him from studying art, he had never given up. He is a self-taught artist who constantly working. His most recent works included “The Great Expansion” at MATDOT Art Center in 2024, expressed his inner-self gleaned from various points in his life, and they continue to do so. Through his artwork, he hopes to share his thoughts with others and engage in dialogues with them.
