Still Cute, Still Here

Solo Exhibition by Tarntara Sudaduangwill

🗓 29 June 2025 - 3 August 2025

📍Joyman Gallery, Bangkok

All are warmly invited to the opening reception on June 29 at 5:00 PM.

They didn’t grow up in a bright and hopeful world — but neither was it pure darkness. These girls came of age amid the remnants of a broken past — a world shaped, abandoned, and eroded by those who came before. The soil is tainted with chemicals, the air thick with toxic dust. Sugar is a luxury. Toys are fragments of a civilization that never fully made it through.

They did not “survive the apocalypse” like heroes in a movie — no dramatic lighting, no safe resolution. But they live — imperfectly.They breathe, even if the air is impure. They carve out spaces for themselves, even if none were planned. They craft clothes from what’s left. They form identities from what was never meant for them.

Wearing cat masks, gas masks, pastel rubber boots. Some grow flowers from wounds. Some hug monsters like plush toys. Some wield playthings like weapons.But none of them are trying to be villains or heroes.

The children in this series are not victims, nor conquerors. They are beings shaped by a world that has happened — and keeps happening. But they do not carry the past with bitterness. They have learned to live with it as it is.Sometimes, they try to fix things. Sometimes, they just smile and move on.

They don’t ask, “What should the world be?”They ask, “If this is the world we have — how do we live in it?”

And the answers aren’t grand philosophies. They are small lives — arranging a room until it feels just right. Wearing strange clothes that feel like home. Growing flowers out of cracks. Smiling, not brightly, but truthfully.

Even if the world is wrecked, even if it’s dirty, even if it’s unsafe — they still find something soft among the ruins. Something warm enough to keep in their pockets. Something that makes today bearable. And that’s what we are witnessing. Not the future of the world — but the art of living in a world already changed, in their own way: still here, still smiling, still cute.

The world collapsed in silence and chaos,Yet she blushes her cheeks as if not yet cute enough. Her hands are stained with soot. Flowers bloom beneath the dust.No one dares say she is not beautiful.

Artist statement Tarntara Sudaduang 2025