It is an unfortunate year to win the award, the achievement has been overshadowed by the physical event being cancelled and mounting criticism over BP still being the chief sponsor, the true experience of this painting lives only on our screens. Despite this, the portrait is still a joy to look at; it depicts two friends, clad in black, sat in a Berlin bar, framed by candle-lit ambient conversation. I wondered why a desire to paint became her career and life ambition.
“When I was working in advertising as a casting director, I felt guilty,” Jiab explains, “I had this guilty feeling swirling from inside, and I didn’t know what it was until I went to London. I was so touched the first time I saw the artwork there, in Thailand we don’t have that exhibition culture at all, and ever since then I felt like something was growing. 2 years later I decided to quit my job because I felt that there is something in me, potential, I didn’t know what it was…”
The capital was a tough place to do this, it is imposing and overwhelming at the best of times, not least leaving everything behind thousands of miles away.
‘Night Talk’, 2020 BP Portrait Award winner
“In London you feel like no one,” she says, “you feel like a piece of dust. I was working at a cafe learning English and all the status I had back in Thailand had collapsed. So, I started to dress up and go to drag queen parties in East London and to Boombox, and nothing fulfilled me until I went to the David Hockney exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I walked into the second room and everything was so sparkling, I had this instant realisation, if you have any artistic potential you really just have to keep going to create something that’s different from what other people are doing.”
The path to the illustrious BP award has been a long one for Jiab. 14 years of gaining skills, respect, and recognition. I ask what her experience of this journey had been.
“It took me 4 years to gain the skills to become an artist,” she replied, “people often ask why portraiture? Why figurative art? It’s to tell a story, it’s about digging into yourself, because without success or recognition you only have yourself to answer to. It took me 6 years to adapt the skills from catalogue books, once I have the skills you have to be asking ‘what kind of work is my work?’, you need to have your signature.”
ArrayHer work is characterised by a painterly freedom – it feels fresh, her confident yet tense line holds her best pictures together, namely Night Talk, Conversation with Apichatpong, and Treasure Hunter. Jiab wants to have her identity and history play out through her sitters and their environments.
“When I make an artwork it’s about communication, the way I communicate with the audience, with myself, and with the sitters. I want to create an emotional feeling, one of marching together, joining together. I see that part of me exists in other people as well, that other people feel the same things because we are all human beings.”
Asked about her current style and how she sees it progressing, she says that telling the story of her life and people like her is most important.
“I want to tell the story of an Asian person in Europe, the more we live in Europe the more we become far from Asia, but we become stronger in our Asian identity – we are of the Asians in Europe. I want to include myself and this identity in art history.”
One more point, she says, as this is the last question, to assert her trademark positivity and belief.
“It has taken me 14 years to get here. The answer is that you have to do your artwork because you want to do it – if you have to be poor, to show your art in a cafe, it doesn’t matter, do it, for it is your path.”
Jiab Prachakul
The 2020 BP Portrait Award can be viewed online here.
