SAC Gallery
A Solo Exhibition by Tashi Brauen
Curated by Miranda K. Metcalf
28 February – 9 May 2026
Front Room, SAC Gallery

Bangkok, 28 February 2026 – SAC Gallery, in collaboration with the Embassy of Switzerland in Thailand

Second Pass
The act of art making is fundamentally an act of transmutation. Objects and images are transformed and shifted in order to reveal new meaning, illuminate what was previously overlooked, and allow the artist’s voice to enter into conversation with the world. In Second Pass, Tashi Brauen invites viewers to look again, to slow down, pause, and reconsider the sublime potential of the everyday.

Brauen’s works encourage a second encounter with the mundane. They ask viewers to notice beauty not as spectacle, but as something embedded in shapes, colors, lines, and rhythms that surround us constantly, yet often remain invisible on first glance. There is a quiet insistence here that attentiveness itself is a form of generosity, and that meaning is not fixed but discovered through sustained looking.

The source materials for Second Pass include both original photographs and imagery drawn from vintage magazines found in markets in Bangkok. These printed pages, already marked by time, circulation, and cultural context, carry their own histories before Brauen intervenes. By working with images that have already passed through other hands and other moments, the artist further complicates ideas of authorship, memory, and reuse. The act of alteration becomes not an erasure, but an extension.

Many of the photographs and magazine images were collected during Brauen’s residency in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, cities dense with visual information, contradiction, and texture. These images are altered and adorned with the artist’s signature restraint and precision, balancing deliberate compositional choices with painterly gesture and chance outcomes drawn from monotype and printmaking processes. Paint and ink are added both directly and through transfer methods, with many of the works completed using the etching press at Hello, Print Friend Studios in Chiang Mai.

In the monotype process, ink is first applied to clear plastic, where it can be manipulated, adjusted, and refined according to the artist’s vision. The image, whether photographic or printed ephemera, is then carefully placed atop the inked surface and run through the press, fusing found material and painterly intervention into a single object. The press itself is an art making tool that has remained largely unchanged for over 500 years and becomes part of the conceptual fabric of the work. Through it, Brauen brings a distinctly contemporary eye to a historic process, informed by a deeply multicultural life and an ongoing curiosity about how people inhabit
space.

What emerges in Second Pass is neither purely photograph nor purely painting, but a layered conversation between mediums, time periods, and ways of seeing. Viewers are invited to encounter familiar forms anew, from baskets at the market to worn sidewalk tiles to repeated geometries pulled from printed pages. These transient, functional, and often overlooked structures become moments of quiet wonder and evidence that beauty does not demand grandeur, only attention.

Text: Miranda K Metcalf