Jim Thompson Art Center

The Jim Thompson Art Center is proud to present Breast Stupa Cookery and Beyond, a presentation of works by Pinaree Sanpitak. This long-awaited return to the Art Center, the first solo show here since 2004, offers an expansive survey of Sanpitak’s practice, spanning over thirty years of deeply personal and transformative work. This exhibition is part of the James H.W. Thompson Foundation’s 50th anniversary celebration, marking a milestone in both the artist’s career and the institution’s ongoing commitment to contemporary art in Thailand.

Drawing upon her lived experience and longstanding interest in the body, Sanpitak has developed a distinctive visual language that is at once intimate, abstract, and universal. Her iconic “breast stupa” form, evoking both the nurturing female breast and the sacred Buddhist stupa, serves as a recurring symbol across paintings, sculptures, installations, and collaborative culinary projects.

At the heart of the exhibition is Breast Stupa Cookery, an ongoing participatory work in which Sanpitak invites chefs and collaborators to interpret the breast stupa through food and dining which is also marked the beginning of the Breast Stupa Cookery journey. This unique installation reflects the artist’s broader concerns with nourishment, ritual, care, and the body as a vessel of lived experience.

From her 1995 painting Two Breasts to her recent sculptural combinations of found vessels and hand-torn mulberry paper, the works in Breast Stupa Cookery and Beyond trace Sanpitak’s evolution through form, material, and meaning. Across media, her practice reveals a profound sensitivity to the sensorial and the spiritual, drawing together the bodily, the floral, the culinary, the feminine, and the sacred into an ever-unfolding space of contemplation and connection.