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Within asks what lives inside us
Paper is commonly treated as cheap, readily available and short-lived. Once it has served its purpose, it is often discarded.
I had the opportunity to visit Within at Maison JE Bangkok before its official public opening. The first thing I encountered after entering the gallery was not a major artwork or a lengthy wall text, but a small corner asking visitors a simple question: “WHAT LIVES WITHIN YOU?”
Sheets of paper are provided for visitors to write their answers and attach them to the wall. It is a modest gesture, but an effective introduction to the exhibition.
For the moment, I left my own paper blank, wondering what these works might reveal once attention moved beyond the image and towards the material itself.
When paper becomes more than a sketch or rehearsal
Within brings together eight artists from Thailand, South Korea, Japan, China and Spain: AAMY, Art Jeeno, Debbie Reda, Keito Tokoi, Noinah, Se Oh, Ting Yuan and Warhead.
The premise is simple, but it opens up a broad range of approaches. Paper is a material most of us have known since childhood, while in art it has often been associated with drawing, sketching and experimentation before an idea develops into another form.
Within places paper firmly at the centre. It is not simply the surface beneath an image, but part of how each work takes shape and communicates.
Walking through the exhibition, the question soon shifts from what each artist has drawn or painted to how each artist has used the material, and what that choice reveals about the ideas and feelings behind the work.
Se Oh, a South Korean artist who lives and works between Los Angeles and Seoul, moves through landscape and memory in gouache. His works bring together places from different moments of his life, allowing past and present to occupy the same image.
Japanese artist Keito Tokoi takes a quieter route. Working in oil pastel, she uses rooms, windows, light and shadow to explore spaces that sit somewhere between physical surroundings and personal perception.
Debbie Reda takes the exhibition in a more playful direction, presenting her cast of monsters in what she describes as “Childlike Neo-pop Art”. Works such as Luke Eh!, Luke Ah! and Luke Oh! rely on exaggerated expressions and simple, direct gestures that give the characters their distinctive personality.
Paper with a life before it became art
Noinah, a Thai artist, approaches the exhibition’s central material through used cardboard rather than new sheets of paper.
The choice immediately changes the way the surface is read. The cardboard retains visible traces of its previous use, including shipping labels, QR codes and the familiar white stickers carrying sender and recipient information that we normally see on parcels delivery.
Those details give the material a history before the painting even begins.
Before reaching the gallery wall, the cardboard had been a box. It had contained something and travelled from one place to another. Now its function has changed. A material once designed to carry objects has become a surface carrying figures, emotions and memories.
If Noinah makes us aware of where paper has been, AAMY turns attention towards what a sheet can conceal and reveal.
Japanese artist AAMY presents three works, True Feelings, Fragments of Memory and Reminiscence, using acrylic and pencil on paper.
AAMY’s works initially read as delicate images on paper, but a closer look at True Feelings, installed at the centre of the group, reveals a more physical use of the material.
Sections of the paper have been cut and folded inward, creating shallow depth within what would otherwise be a flat image.
The cut sections remain aligned with the original composition. Folded back into place, they would fit into the image almost exactly.
True Feelings deals with the moments when what we show outwardly does not match what we actually feel. AAMY describes this through the image of tying a ribbon in a color different from one’s true emotional state.
Seen in person, the cut and folded paper gives that idea a physical form. The painted surface presents one image, while the opening reveals another layer beneath it. Through a relatively simple intervention, the work turns the difference between outward appearance and private feeling into something we can actually see.
From paper to what stays within
Within does not need to make a case for paper as a finished artistic medium. What becomes more interesting across the exhibition is how the same material can take on very different meanings in different hands.
A sheet of paper can become a landscape, a room, a character, a record or a memory. Cardboard can arrive with evidence of a journey already written across its surface. A cut can turn a flat image into something with an inside and an outside.
Perhaps paper works particularly well for an exhibition called Within precisely because it is so ordinary.
It surrounds us every day, often without attracting much attention. Yet paper constantly records small traces of our lives, whether as a parcel label, a drawing, a note or something written down and kept for years.
By the time I returned to the starting point of the exhibition, it was finally time for Tae Art Man to answer the question on the wall : “WHAT LIVES WITHIN YOU?”
There was something I had carried within me for decades.
And it was…
Within: Exhibition Information
Within opens to the public at Maison JE Bangkok on August 25, 2026, and runs through October 11, 2026. The exhibition is open Tuesday to Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and is closed on Mondays. Admission is free.
Story and Photos: Tae Art Man / Tooh Athit
