Soulscape

2022–ongoing

The series “Soulscape” by Tawatchai Somkong is a journey back to 1992, during the period when he was studying art at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India, to explore what he encountered and experienced at that time.

Once, while painting a watercolour of a mud house in a rural village, Tawatchai came across a small puppy wandering past. He quickly picked up black ink and sketched it on the drawing paper. This moment made him realise that even as he was deeply absorbed in a single action, the world and everything around him continued to move and unfold with countless stories within their own contexts. Each artwork in this series is therefore composed of at least two images, drawn from sketchbooks, art books, and works created during his time in Santiniketan.

The compositions range from landscapes, architecture, people, and animals, to abstract symbolic forms that reflect a vision of an ideal world where people of different faiths can coexist peacefully. These elements merge and overlap to form a landscape of the artist’s inner world. “Soulscape” thus serves both as a record of memory and as a profound expression of thought from a pivotal moment in his life.