In 2020, Jiab Prachakul (b. 1979) became an overnight sensation, winning the prestigious BP Portrait Award from London’s National Portrait Gallery. The prize opened new avenues for the self-taught Thai artist, including her first solo museum show, “Sweet Solitude,” which is soon to conclude its run at the Contemporary Austin.

Prachakul is a product of the Asian diaspora, having spent much of her adult years in Europe—in London, Berlin, and now the town of Vannes in Brittany, France. It’s an experience that informs her work. Her double portrait Night Talk, which won her the BP Portrait Award, for instance, is a quiet and intimate scene of two young South Asians in a Berlin nightclub.

“Throughout the work in the exhibition is the deep, deep meaning of managing your loneliness,” Prachakul told me. “If you turn it into something beautiful, something creative, you can try to make something meaningful out of it.”

“‘Sweet solitude’ is how Jiab describes her feeling of being almost together alone, this idea of displacement while also trying to find new connections,” Contemporary Austin chief curator Alex Klein added. “Because no matter how long she may live in Europe, she can still sometimes feel like a tourist in her own town, or be perceived as one.
But on the flip side, there’s this idea of also finding a kind of solace or independence in being alone.”

Jiab Prachakul, Night Talk (2019). Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

A Long Road to Recognition

The artist had a long time to marinate in that sense of loneliness, dedicating 14 years to her practice before finally getting her first solo show, at San Francisco dealer Micki Meng’s Friends Indeed Gallery in 2021. (Prachakul has since had two outings with Timothy Taylor, a group show in London and a solo exhibition in New York.)

After studying filmography in college in Thailand, Prachakul worked for three years as a casting director for advertising campaigns for a production company in Bangkok.

It was a visit to the 2007 David Hockney show at the NPG, after a recent move to London, that sparked her interest in portraiture. And the budding artist soon found that her skills as a casting director, with its careful study of faces, served her quite well when it came to finding compelling subjects for her painting—and for creating works that tell a story, almost like a film still.

Prachakul won the BP prize on just her second try, trading near-total obscurity for a waitlist of collectors eager to snap up her stylish paintings.

“It is a kind of incredible story because you’re like, ‘Who does this actually happen to?’” Klein said, noting that the artist’s work is in such high demand from both private and public collections that there were paintings that weren’t available for the exhibition.

For her part, Prachakul was in disbelief that the museum was even interested—when Klein first proposed the idea, “I thought she was joking!” the artist admitted.

Jiab Prachakul, Jeonga (In Nia’s Eyes), 2023. Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

A Personal Story on a Global Scale

As she developed her own spin on hyperrealism, Prachakul gravitated toward painting those who were also part of the East Asian diaspora. Friends became muses as she painted the people she is closest to again and again. The resulting portraits serve as a representation of a community that has historically been overlooked in Western art, but also reflect her own identity.

“She’s kind of reversing some of the tropes of the 19th century, of Orientalism, and returning the gaze, centering Asian diasporic figures,” Klein said.

Jiab Prachakul, Girlfriends (2022). Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

Those themes continue in the Austin show, both in Prachakul’s portraiture and in an exploration of the landscape. Inspired by her childhood on the Mekong River, she has recently been painting scenes along the Brittany coastline, which had also been a favorite subject matter of the Impressionists.

“The waterways have been kind of almost like a vehicle for memory making for her,” Klein said. “And when she came to Austin, water is a huge part of the ethos—it sounds like a silly thing to say, but there are springs everywhere.
Barton Springs is almost like our Central Park. You’ll run into your neighbors swimming in the morning before work.
So Jiab found kind of a connection to Austin, and that was a way to tie the show together.”

Jiab Prachakul, Music of Silence (Diptych), 2024. Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

Prachakul renders these new landscapes, like the nighttime scene of her and two friends lounging on the coast of the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, with the same care she has always given to wallpaper, wooden paneling, and fabric in her interior portraits.

“She’s always been invested in texture, detail, and style,” Klein said.

Jiab Prachakul, Fantastic Night (2022). Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

And even when it wasn’t apparent that this approach would resonate with audiences, Prachakul stayed committed to her craft—advice she now offers to others.

“Just keep doing what you want to do,” Prachakul said. “Success really comes with hardship for some people; like for me, for example, it took a really long time!”

Installation view of “Jiab Prachakul: Sweet Solitude” at the Contemporary Austin. Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

Portraiture Through the Lens of the Camera

The BP win, from the very museum that inspired Prachakul’s career change, also brought her to the attention of Klein, who became eager to learn more about the artist.

“It was actually not that easy to see a lot of her work in person,” Klein recalled, noting it was only at the Timothy Taylor show in New York that the artist and curator connected. “This was an opportunity to bring work together that hadn’t been shown.”

For Prachakul, it was a good fit because Klein had previously worked in the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which the artist thought would help facilitate a better understanding of the work. (Venturing into the gallery world, Prachakul had appreciated that Meng’s early work in television production had given them a shared visual language.)

“Alex sees through my work totally, like under the skin of my work,” Prachakul, who made six new works for the show, said.

Jiab Prachakul, Lonesome Traveler (After a scene from Eric Rohmer’s film ‘ A Summer’s Tale’), 2022. Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

Her 2022 painting Lonesome Traveler (After a scene from Eric Rohmer’s film ‘ A Summer’s Tale’), for instance, features Prachakul’s friend and recurring subject Makoto, a Japanese man who has lived in Berlin for the last 12 years, sitting alone in a European café. But it’s very much about Prachakul’s own experiences as an Asian woman living in France, and her evolving relationship with the titular 1996 film that is the basis of the painting.

“In a lot of Jiab’s works, even though they may stem from a personal memory or depiction of a friend, she’s also using all these layers of photographs, references to real places, and also film stills,” Klein said. “So she’s tapping into these universal experiences.”

The Austin exhibition also explores a sense of loss that goes back to Prachakul’s childhood, and the death of her middle sister when the artist was only eight, and her mother the following year. She’s immortalized these early tragedies, and the spirit of resilience they helped engender, in touching paintings based on family snapshots of her parents, titled Love from Three Continents (NKP), and of herself with her two older sisters, titled Three Sisters.

Jiab Prachakul, Three Sisters (2021). Photo: courtesy of the Contemporary Austin.

As her career continues to grow, Prachakul, who is looking forward her first London solo show, at Timothy Taylor in the spring, hopes she can continue to capture her still-living subjects as they age, through each stage of their lives.

“I want to make sure that I follow the whole of their life, so at the end, we can look through the work and we can see the kind of trace of time,” she said, likening her practice to a film director who casts the same actors in different movies over the course of his or her career.

It’s an intimate vision that draws you in, Prachakul’s memories fused with the contemporary moment, rendered with the gloss of cinematic lighting, inviting the viewer to share in that sweet solitude.

“Jiab Prachakul: Sweet Solitude” is on view at the Contemporary Austin, 700 Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas, January 31–August 3, 2025.