Gabriel Camelin - Video and Photography

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Gabriel Camelin - Video and Photography Motion & Stills
Live visuals, photography, video and motion graphics. Based in Bangkok

During the first Covid wave, my students and I were confined at home. I was trying to figure out how to teach photograph...
20/10/2026

During the first Covid wave, my students and I were confined at home. I was trying to figure out how to teach photography online, while they figured out what kind of final project they could make. Some photographed the empty streets of Bangkok through their car windows; Fueng turned random online conversations with friends into surreal self-portraits. For her, social distancing seemed to create a strange kind of closeness.

I had noticed Fueng’s work since her first year, but I really saw her develop after she chose the Photography and Film major. She was already getting commissions and exhibiting photographs, but I also noticed another side of her practice in the colourful storyboards she drew for a music video. Towards the end of her studies, those two sides began to meet. Her photographs became increasingly intimate, sometimes even violent, while her drawings moved towards a more surreal, dreamlike world.

After I left Silpakorn University, we kept in touch, and I started seeing more of Fueng’s illustrations appear in my feed. Soon, she was participating in Bangkok Illustration Fair as an artist.

Drawing had never really been the “career” part of her practice. She had always sketched privately, almost as a form of therapy, and never imagined it becoming commercial. Yet slowly it did, with illustration commissions and book covers. As she put it, “I’m more amazed by how I could manage to do it commercially while still keeping it sacred and therapeutic as it has always been.”

When it came time to photograph her, Fueng chose the Hua Mak area. I was curious why. She regularly takes the canal boat from her suburban home towards the city centre. For her, Hua Mak is a threshold, the point where the suburbs become the city. “When I pass that area I always feel like, ‘I’m now in the city!’” she told me.

As we walked beneath the Airport Rail Link and concrete flyovers, and along the canals, it started to make sense as a place to photograph her. These are spaces most people pass through without stopping or looking. The surroundings might not enter her work directly, but these journeys are where she spends much of her time thinking about it. Would her work be different if she lived downtown?

It made me wonder: how much of the places we pass through ends up in what we make?

I was back at Silpakorn University, near the Grand Palace, where I worked 15 years ago. I was sipping a coffee, looking ...
18/10/2026

I was back at Silpakorn University, near the Grand Palace, where I worked 15 years ago. I was sipping a coffee, looking at the statue of Silpa Bhirasri. Surrounded by the comforting trees and the menacing yet friendly presence of the university’s founder, I was quietly waiting for Sirawit, known as Pun, to pick me up.

A former Silpakorn student, Pun still had access to a studio. A few days later, he was due to leave the premises, so it felt like good timing to meet. He took me upstairs, above the Faculty of Fine Arts, into a studio he shared with two other artists. It was my first time entering the studios. Most of his paintings were already stacked and packed away, but he was still working on one of his large canvases, filled with angels, one of the recurring figures in his work.

On his table, I noticed a Nang Kwak, the Thai goddess of prosperity and luck. I have many at home, and I used them in my own art too, but sadly luck is taking its time. We had to include her in the shoot. Pun went through his stack of paintings and pulled out a work built from repeated Nang Kwak talismans, part of his 2023 exhibition Endless Prayer.

Pun wants viewers “to sense that they have seen something before, but to feel that something is slightly out of place”. The exhibition looked at the uneasy relationship between spiritual belief and capitalism in Thailand, and at how prayers for money and prosperity can become a way of coping with economic insecurity. When that desire for financial security never quite ends, neither does the prayer.

He sat down with the little Nang Kwak in his hand and the repeated talismans behind him. Despite his deadpan look, Pun, like his name, actually has a good sense of humour. We kept shooting around the studio and in the corridors outside. The sun was going down, and it was time to head to FAZAL Unlimited. We jumped into a tuk-tuk and made our way to the gallery.

FAZAL was where I first came across Pun’s work. A year earlier, I had photographed Shereen, one of the owners, who chose to pose in front of one of his paintings. I didn’t know Pun then. It was a day off, so we had the gallery to ourselves.

On the walls were images drawn from The King and I, part of Pun’s exhibition Gentle Ghosts With Eyes as Fair. The show questioned how Western popular culture has shaped the way Thailand and its history have been seen from outside. Pun told me he was more interested in questioning identity than defining what Thai identity is.

I was more concerned, at that moment, with figuring out where to photograph him. The gallery was dark. On one of the floors, an artwork was surrounded by red curtains that made me think of Twin Peaks. On another floor, one of his paintings had a line written like a movie subtitle: “I will be there in your dreams, as you will be in mine.” It couldn’t be more Lynchian than that, except it’s from The King and I.

In one of those old-school apartment complexes near Phra Khanong, I was done photographing Eiji Sumi and packing up my e...
11/10/2026

In one of those old-school apartment complexes near Phra Khanong, I was done photographing Eiji Sumi and packing up my equipment.

“Where’s Leo’s apartment?” I asked him.

Eiji took me to an elevator in another building, pointed me in the right direction and waved goodbye. A few moments later, Leo opened his door and greeted me.

Eiji and Leo are friends, and I had seen Leo around at exhibitions and concerts. He is difficult to miss, partly because of his height, but we had never really spoken. Maybe I was a little shy too. He took me first to his mancave: his workbench. Shelves covered the walls, filled with components, tools, labelled drawers and prototypes.

Describing what Leo does is not easy, and he seems to have the same problem. He has moved between engineering, design, invention and art for much of his life, never quite at home under any one label. “I usually just say that I’m an artist and an engineer.”

Making seems to be the constant. Leo traces some of that back to his father, who could fix and build almost anything. As a boy, he would stay by his side and watch him work. That relationship with objects stayed with him: something you build yourself carries a different attachment from something you simply buy.

I understood that better when Leo took me into one of his storage rooms. Boxes were stacked almost to the ceiling, labelled with parts, materials and remnants of old projects. The accumulation suddenly made sense. Leo admitted that making things also makes them much harder to throw away, but that the attachment comes with a particular kind of pleasure when you use something you created yourself.

Curiosity keeps that cycle going. Some experiments demand an effort completely disproportionate to the reward, simply because an idea has caught his attention. But curiosity isn’t the only thing pushing him. “There’s also quite a bit of ego involved: that thought of, ‘Oh, I could probably do that better,’ which is often silly, but it’s a fun place to start.”

From the storage room, Leo took me somewhere almost opposite. The walls were bare; little occupied the space besides a desk and computer. He shares the room with his partner, and they had agreed to keep it neutral, free from the accumulation elsewhere.

On his screens were circuit boards, engineering drawings and 3D models. He showed me a prototype involving ultrasound. As he has grown older, Leo says necessity and purpose matter less, replaced by a greater focus on process. After a lifetime of making, he seems less concerned with where each thing will lead.
“You focus on enjoying the process and the journey and let go of the idea of outcome.”

His words could just as easily describe this project. For now, the process is what I enjoy most. God knows what the outcome will be.

During Bukruk in 2013, I was documenting the street art festival with my students around Ratchathewi. Late one evening, ...
25/09/2026

During Bukruk in 2013, I was documenting the street art festival with my students around Ratchathewi. Late one evening, I met Alex for the first time. A young father then, he was smiling, and we had a good chat before he climbed into a cherry picker to add another of the three-eyed children that had already become his signature across Bangkok.

When I visited him again in April 2026, I met the same man, with the same smile. Alex and Mardi, his daughter, greeted my partner and me at their home, a bright, spacious place with large windows and an almost Californian atmosphere, where the house and studio sit apart from one another. It felt quite different from the streets of Ratchathewi. The energy was still there, but Alex seemed to have found a different rhythm.

Unlike in the past, when he worked mostly late at night, Alex now tries to make the most of daylight and rest at night, a rhythm that also allows him to spend more time with his family. As we walked through his studio, he explained that he uses the space mostly for larger works and spray painting, but he also enjoys painting and sketching inside the house, where the light is softer and family life is close by.

As a cyclist myself, I kept noticing bicycles all around the house. Cycling has become an important part of Alex’s life, although the connection goes back much further. As a child, he would ride around his neighbourhood with his younger brother; later, the bicycle became exercise, then a way of travelling longer distances. In 2025, he cycled from Bangkok to Penang, drawing and making work along the way, eventually exhibiting it there. For Alex, cycling offers a particular kind of freedom: the heat, hills, wind and physical exhaustion bring him back to his own thoughts, while the slower pace allows him to notice landscapes and the ways people live. Alex dreams of taking longer cycling trips, perhaps one day even across continents, something I dream of too.�

Back in the living room, Mardi was sketching at her desk. Alex told me that they sometimes make art together, another way for them to exchange ideas and for him to see things through the perspective of a different generation. The connection between father and daughter also runs through the three-eyed child that has accompanied his work for so many years. Inspired by Mardi, the figure has continued to evolve as she has grown and as Alex himself has changed. Watching her grow has also made him more conscious of the world around her, with both excitement and concern. Today, the character seems to carry some of those feelings with it, including his own anxiety about the future. It has changed with the years, absorbing something of each stage of his life. Perhaps, like Alex himself, the character has never really stood still.

I had photographed several collectives before, so I expected SOFAISM to be four or five people. We met at Thua Category,...
22/09/2026

I had photographed several collectives before, so I expected SOFAISM to be four or five people. We met at Thua Category, a café run by two of the group’s senior members. When I arrived, fourteen of them were waiting inside. Most were in their early twenties, many still studying at Khon Kaen University. They came from different faculties and worked across art, design, photography, film, architecture and other practices. I realised this was going to be a very different kind of group portrait.

Photographing 14 people felt a little like directing a flashmob. How do you fill the frame? There was a kind of organised chaos to it, like a flock of birds of different shapes, sizes and colours, constantly rearranging themselves. That looseness somehow seemed to summarise the essence of SOFAISM itself.

The name SOFAISM grew partly from their interest in Memphis Milano. One member told me he was drawn to its anti-design attitude: the idea that something did not always need to justify itself through function.

The sofa also became a symbol: a place to sit, talk and spend time together. That sense of leisure fits their manifesto’s idea of “having fun with art”. It also carries into the way they work, with disciplines overlapping and projects taking shape without much fixed structure.

As everyone wanted an individual portrait, I asked Kee and Stamp, who run Thua Category, if they had a sofa. They produced a tiny pink one, and with the café about to close, I photographed the members one after another, almost like a small portrait factory. Thua Category is one of SOFAISM’s regular meeting places. Next door is ALIEN Artspace, run by Sina and Milk, whom I had photographed earlier on the trip. SOFAISM also spoke about friendships and collaborations as an important part of how the group grows, with those connections leading to projects with other artists, spaces and collectives in Khon Kaen and beyond. For such a young and loosely organised collective, those relationships may be what allows it to keep growing and evolving.

What happens next is less certain. Many of them are still students, and when I asked what might happen to SOFAISM as people graduate, move away or begin their own careers, they admitted they were still wrestling with that question themselves. But when I asked what they wanted to keep, the answer was simple: the sense of fun. After spending the afternoon trying to organise fourteen of them into a frame, that felt about right.

The KULTX team told me to meet them at MAIELIE, the well-known Khon Kaen gallery on the edge of Bueng Kaen Nakhon. When ...
19/09/2026

The KULTX team told me to meet them at MAIELIE, the well-known Khon Kaen gallery on the edge of Bueng Kaen Nakhon. When I arrived, several members were helping to prepare Proto-historic, an exhibition by Panachai Chaijirarat that was due to open the following week. While I sipped my coffee, I realised I was already getting a glimpse of how KULTX works, and of its place within the local and wider Thai art ecosystem.

The team voted and decided we should shoot where the giant dinosaur sat, on the other side of the lake, in a section of the public park that was under renovation. Dinosaurs are everywhere in Khon Kaen, in malls, temples and public spaces; they have become part of the city's visual identity, so I wasn't too surprised by the choice. The area was also close to where the original KULTX space used to be.

Out of the six members of the collective, four were in town. Four motorbikes started up and, carrying all my gear, I jumped on the back of Manaporn Robroo's. Manaporn is one of KULTX's co-founders, alongside artist and photography lecturer Ugrid Jomyim. With us were Ammie Saenpo, artist and general manager; Cambodian artist Kong Siden; and Prapatsorn Sukot, who takes care of much of the coordination and administration. Ugrid and KULTX partner Sirinart Sodprasert were both away that day. The titles make the organisation sound more orderly than it really is. In practice, everyone seems to end up doing a bit of everything.

KULTX began in 2021 as a space for contemporary art in Khon Kaen, but over time it grew into something broader. Alongside exhibitions, they organise residencies, festivals and projects with artists and communities, increasingly seeing themselves as part of a wider art ecosystem rather than simply a gallery.

Keeping that ecosystem alive involves a lot of work that rarely becomes visible. An exhibition can start one or two years before anything reaches the wall, while projects with communities often begin simply by spending time there, listening and building relationships.

Working from Khon Kaen also means working outside Thailand’s main art centre. KULTX doesn’t reject Bangkok, but they don’t want it to be the only route to visibility or opportunity for artists from Isan.

Instead, they put a lot of energy into building connections between spaces, artists and organisations closer to home. Places such as MAIELIE are not seen as competitors, but as part of the same local ecology, sharing people, knowledge and audiences. That network is now beginning to stretch beyond Khon Kaen, across Isan and towards the Mekong region.
For KULTX, the challenge is not only to create exhibitions, but to make it possible for artists to stay, work and build a practice in the region. Standing beside that half-abandoned dinosaur, in a park still being rebuilt, KULTX seemed to fit naturally into a landscape whose future was not yet decided.

In my early Bangkok days, I was often walking around with my long hair and a laptop, doing live visuals for local bands ...
14/09/2026

In my early Bangkok days, I was often walking around with my long hair and a laptop, doing live visuals for local bands in small bars and venues. It was at one of those nights at Cosmic Cafe that I first spoke with Little. She was a music teacher at the time, helping a friend organise the event and slowly finding her way into a scene that would eventually shape her own musical life.
Fifteen years later, while planning a trip to Khon Kaen, one of my former students suggested her name. It took me a little while to connect the dots, and a few days later, I was sitting with a coffee at Columbo Craft Village, waiting for her to arrive.
In this green, lush, and cosy pocket near Khon Kaen University, Little opened Little Miss Something, a small shop filled with crochet and handmade items. It felt a world away from the Bangkok nightlife where I remembered her.
COVID-19 had a profound impact on many musicians, and for Little it became a turning point. When live performances stopped, she returned to Khon Kaen with her partner to catch her breath, and what began as a pause gradually became a different way of living. For the first time in years, she had time to slow down, set up a small recording studio at home, grow vegetables and make things with her hands. A stray cat came to give birth at the house too. Today, she and her partner share their home with ten cats.
Crochet, something her mother had taught her as a child, became part of this new rhythm and eventually another way of sustaining herself. What had always existed alongside music slowly took up more space in her everyday life.
As she walked me through the shop, she led me to a small room at the back. Tucked away behind the crochet and handmade objects was a piano. Sitting on her stool, Little told me that making music with Two Pills After Meal, the duo she formed with Ohm, remains the part of her creative life that represents her most completely. She still travels between Khon Kaen and Bangkok for performances, but now music seems to live alongside everything else. And in that quiet room at the back of the shop, the piano is always there.

I first met Olivier Chow a few months ago over dinner at Brian Curtin’s place. He had already been in Bangkok for a litt...
06/09/2026

I first met Olivier Chow a few months ago over dinner at Brian Curtin’s place. He had already been in Bangkok for a little while and was building what would become Adult Material, his gallery and home in Chinatown.
Last month, I went to see him. Our conversation soon shifted into French as he took me upstairs to his living quarters. African furniture, books and artworks filled the rooms, some carried over from Foreign Agent, the gallery he previously ran in Lausanne.
But the gallery was only one of Olivier’s previous lives.
Before working in art full time, he spent many years with the International Committee of the Red Cross, in war zones and detention settings, working around torture and enforced disappearances. He worked with survivors and perpetrators, and told me that he is a survivor himself.
His academic research in art history also explored the aesthetics of cruelty. For Olivier, the connection was not accidental. Art offered another way of approaching experiences that had been very real to him, and of thinking about violence, memory and what can or cannot be represented.
After closing Foreign Agent, Olivier began looking for somewhere new. Bangkok stood out for its energy, affordability and openness towards q***r people and q***r art. When he found the shophouse in Chinatown, things fell into place. Being half Chinese, he told me, the neighbourhood also felt familiar.
Adult Material focuses principally on q***r artists, but Olivier does not see it as a closed space. He wants art, design, craft and books to coexist, and the gallery to connect Bangkok with artists elsewhere while remaining rooted in its neighbourhood.
As a dark cloud passed over the shophouse, we took refuge inside and waited out the rain. When it eased, I suggested we make a few photographs in the street.
Olivier picked up a pink stool, pierced by a metal ring, and carried it outside. He crossed the street and sat down casually, facing his gallery, as if the object had always belonged there.
I made my last photograph there.

Adult Material’s next exhibition, Intimate Elsewhere, opens on 10 September, bringing together five artists, including four from Southeast Asia.

I was finishing a coffee at MAIELIE, waiting for the rest of the KULTX team to arrive. Ammie, one of its younger members...
04/09/2026

I was finishing a coffee at MAIELIE, waiting for the rest of the KULTX team to arrive. Ammie, one of its younger members, was already there, so I asked whether she would like a few portraits for her profile.
She led me across the road into Bueng Kaen Nakhon Park, a place she liked for its flowers. As I photographed her, she repeated gestures from Remind Me Of You, a performance combining bougainvillea with fragments of family history, including the story of her grandfather, who fought in the Vietnam War.
Ammie grew up in rural Roi Et. Her grandparents performed Mor Lam, while her father, an English teacher, loved art and design. With little access to contemporary art, her first steps were largely self-taught, experimenting with Microsoft Paint before moving to Bangkok to study sculpture. There, she sometimes felt less capable because she came from Isan. It was only when the pandemic brought her home that she began to see this feeling as structural: art education, institutions and opportunities were concentrated in Bangkok.
Joining KULTX through its Gold Rush residency in 2022 showed her that an artistic life could also be built in Isan. She later returned as an artist assistant and member of the team, describing KULTX as another kind of art school. The collective offers her a space to learn through experience, make mistakes and connect with artists beyond the region.
Her practice now examines the social structures people learn to accept as normal, from poorly constructed rural roads and top-down agricultural policies to overlooked family histories. Working across performance, video, installation and sculpture, she uses art to make these structures visible rather than provide simple answers.
At the centre of her work lies a paradox: Isan has a vibrant culture that deserves greater recognition, yet its artists receive little support in a system that remains heavily centralised. This leaves Ammie with one question: “How can I create the conditions that allow me to continue making art here?”

Siden wanted to be photographed somewhere green, in the middle of Khon Kaen University. We met at a nearby coffee shop a...
03/09/2026

Siden wanted to be photographed somewhere green, in the middle of Khon Kaen University. We met at a nearby coffee shop and walked from there, looking for the place he had in mind. It was not our first encounter: I had photographed him a few days earlier with the KULTX collective, but this time it was all about him.
He chose this location because he often comes here to walk and meditate. The greenery gives him a sense of peace, and he wanted the photographs to capture something of that state of mind. There is also something familiar about this landscape. Khon Kaen reminds him of Kampot, and of the Phnom Penh of his childhood, when the city was still surrounded by nature rather than towers.
Siden grew up in Phnom Penh and initially studied interior design. A photography class during university changed his direction, leading him towards contemporary art and eventually Sa Sa Art Projects, where he became a student, intern and member.
His relationship with Khon Kaen began in 2023, when he came for S.O.E. We Trade Everything, organised by KULTX. A one-week visit led to a residency the following year, and then to a longer stay. Over almost two years, he became part of KULTX, taught at Khon Kaen University and gradually made a place for himself in the city.
Siden works across photography, video and installation, often using light, found materials and elements of the landscape itself. His work was already concerned with environmental change and the effects of development, but living in Khon Kaen gave him another place through which to explore those ideas. He sees parallels with Phnom Penh: two cities changing quickly, where buildings, waterways and green spaces can disappear along the way.
When we met, Siden was getting ready to leave Khon Kaen. After almost two years, he felt he had been there long enough and wanted to take what he had experienced back to Phnom Penh. I made one last portrait of him by the roadside, against a tree, on a campus where green space still dominates the landscape, at least for now.

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