CHANYA VITAYAKUL

Chanya Vitayakul (they/them, b. 2003) is a multidisciplinary artist from Bangkok, Thailand, and a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a BFA in Graphic Design.

Their practice explores the feminized and non-binary body as a porous site: one that absorbs, resists, and reconfigures the languages projected onto it. Working across sculpture, installation, and graphic design, Chanya blends personal narrative with material investigation to examine how the body is written, held, and sometimes violated by external systems: gender, language, family, nationhood, medicine. They engage with materials like latex, hair, crochet, text, and found objects, each chosen for its relationship to touch, containment, or the aesthetics of care and control.

Chanya’s work is not about resolution, but about pressure, rupture, and reconstitution. Their work invites viewers into shared spaces of discomfort and tenderness, where clarity gives way to slippage, and where the body speaks in fragments, stains, and residues. In this space, authorship is complicated; distributed between artist, viewer, and the materials themselves. Chanya’s work poses a quiet but insistent question: What does it mean to be seen, and to survive that seeing?