Found Memories

Ames Yavuz is pleased to present Found Memories, a new exhibition in London by Thai-British artist Channatip Chanvipava, his first solo exhibition with the gallery following the announcement of his representation by Ames Yavuz. The presentation brings together five principal paintings, one monumental canvas, four companion canvases, and five intimate painted ‘memory boxes’ that operate as emotional appendices to the principal works. Treating memory as found object, they accumulate the ambient, non-narrative feeling-states that gather around the exhibition’s larger themes. Unfolding as a meditation on transition, identity and emotional reconstruction, the exhibition traces the months preceding the birth of the artist’s first child and the associated shift in selfhood. Through explorations of intimate life, surrogacy and cross-cultural experience, Found Memories uses memory as a generative process through which identity can be explored and understood.

Chanvipava transforms autobiographical fragments into psychologically charged environments where memory becomes both subject and material. Throughout the exhibition, domestic interiors, airport immigration halls, neighbourhood surroundings, and the artist’s studio emerge as emotional spaces through which he explores migration, queer family and the shifting politics of identity, belonging and boundaries. The imagery he uses evokes glimpses of specific ephemeral events; evening walks with his partner, sleepless nights, and inherited familial impulses from his grandfather, which alchemise into a highly-saturated visual language. His process is intuitive; Chanvipava’s gestural style deliberately employs layered textures that accumulate across the canvas into a constellation of recollection, where dense, pliant strokes dissolve into one another much like memory itself.Across the exhibition Chanvipava repeatedly returns to domestic objects and architectural fragments as repositories of psychological experience. Echoing the logic of the readymade, he treats memories as found, emotionally charged objects that, through reflection and the act of painting, are repositioned and reinterpreted, transforming past perceptions and experiences into renewed meaning.Found Memories positions painting as a sustained act of emotional reconfiguration. Chanvipava does not preserve memory as a structured archive but instead works it into material form, flattening, fragmenting and reassembling remembered spaces so that past and future, loss and affirmation, can coexist. The exhibition ultimately asks how identity is remade through movement, care and intimate labour, and how recollection can become a practice of survival and imaginative possibility.