Channatip Chanvipava
Parallel Worlds
29 May – 25 July 2026
Curated by Nick Koenigsknecht
BEK Forum, Schleifmühlgasse 6, 1040 Vienna
Parallel Worlds is Channatip Chanvipava’s first solo exhibition in Austria, where the artist has pushed his painting past the frame. Around the canvases, a painting-led installation and his first video draw the gallery into one continuous environment of memory, reflection, and spatial disorientation. Memory, in his hands, is neither a fixed record nor an exercise in nostalgia. It is volatile material, broken apart and put back together through image, repetition, and motion.
He paints only from memory, no photographs, no preparatory sketches. The method, as he describes it, is a kind of found memory, the Duchampian readymade turned inward: a recollection lifted out of its place, given color and form, and handed a new meaning. What emerges hangs between abstraction and figuration and never quite resolves, the way the things we remember rarely hold still.
Slow Dancing (2025) anchors the show and refuses to stay on its surface, throwing a distorted reflection across the floor. Black cables run through the rooms, wiring the spaces together like a nervous system and picking up the power lines that recur throughout his recent work. Standing in the reflection, the viewer is folded into an image without quite recognizing it. The two-channel video Parallel Worlds (2026) is projected not onto screens but primed canvases, so that the moving image stays, insistently, a painted surface. The Memory Box series (2025), painted partly in coffee and green tea with the bare wood left showing, compresses the same ambitions to the size of a keepsake.
“I am presenting my first video and a painting-led installation that I have long imagined — a show that allows these instinctive ideas to be realised for the first time.”
Channatip Chanvipava
At BEK Forum, these long-held ideas finally take shape. They also form a longer project: to extend painting through installation and the moving image, and to let each medium frame and test the others. For curator Nick Koenigsknecht, the exhibition arrives at a moment when the structures that once defined the world — a single inherited centre, a fixed “West” — no longer carry the same authority. Chanvipava’s own life between London and Bangkok, once operated as a parallel condition, becomes here a way of assembling a self with no fixed point to return to. The work does not resist that condition so much as think through it, keeping faith with painting all the while: with surface, with slowness, with an image that would rather not come to rest.
About the artist
Channatip Chanvipava (b. 1993) is a Thai-British artist of Chinese descent whose paintings and installations explore memory as a fluid psychological and emotional terrain. Born in Thailand and now based in Bangkok, he spent two decades in the United Kingdom, an experience that shapes his ongoing search for identity and presence. Self-taught as a painter and a graduate of the London School of Economics, he approaches painting as a process of recollection and emotional reconstruction, working intuitively without preparatory sketches or photographic references. Through gestural brushwork, layered surfaces, and shifting spatial compositions, he transforms autobiographical fragments into emotionally charged works that move between abstraction and figuration, positioning personal memory within broader social, cultural, and political frameworks.
Chanvipava has presented solo exhibitions at Roman Road, Venice and London; Ronchini Gallery, London; and Nova Contemporary, Bangkok, and will be included in the 2026 Bangkok Art Biennale.
Press kit & downloads
High-resolution installation images and the press release. For interviews or further material, contact the gallery.
Install views by Manuel Carreon Lopez. Please credit the photographer and BEK Forum on reproduction.