Unchalee (Lee) Anantawat’s works indulge in the weird and wonky. The combination of paintings and drawings presented here offers an insight into the artist’s approach to artmaking, full of tangents and unexpected insights into other and more vibrant worlds.

Since 2019, Anantawat has been practising the medium of soft pastel on paper as a means to something more delicate. This was in part a reaction to her character, which she sees as possessing a certain boldness. It moved her to consider what it might be like to create works that one would otherwise expect of a more soft-spoken person.

Fictional creatures and characters as well as more familiar gestures of the everyday emerge strangely out of the dappled quality of her soft pastel, gently blended by Anantawat with various makeup brushes. At the same time, she demonstrates the versatility of the medium with its capacity for building an unlikely boldness by playing with its application. For Anantawat, there is no pleasure in knowing the results of her experiments; many of these drawings derive from a 100-day challenge, during which she set herself the task of imagining a composition every day, a spontaneity that we see in the narrative leaps between each.

The larger paintings in the group represent Anantawat’s simultaneous exploration of airbrush painting across this period. These paintings are enlarged forms of her approach to soft pastel, magnifying the dance between the sharp and the blurry through which she builds form. It is here where Anantwat also discovered the possibility of lighting her works, an effect we see principally in the soft glow of her view of a petrol station.

Joy and humour anchor this wandering journey. The naivety of her subject matter and technique is an expression of her appreciation of the slightly weird and strange, a way of looking into the world that Anantawat extends to her audiences when we squint our eyes and float trustingly in their absurdity.