A Breakout Portrait Artist Invested in Asian Representation

By Amanda Fortini

A little more than 14 years ago, the Thai-born, Lyon-based artist Jiab Prachakul went to the National Portrait Gallery in London to see a David Hockney show. In the second room of the exhibition, she stood before “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy” (1970-71) — Hockney’s famous painting of the fashion designer Ossie Clark, the textile designer Celia Birtwell and their pristine white cat — and had an epiphany. Prachakul, who had just left her job as a casting associate for an advertising production house, thought, “‘All the great artists, they are not great from the beginning. If you have the talent, you have to develop it.’ And that,” she recalls, when we meet via Zoom on a recent early morning in France and very early morning in America, “is when I thought, ‘I want to become an artist.’”

From left: Jiab Prachakul‘s “3 Brothers” (2020) and “An Opening” (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Friends Indeed Gallery

There is a pleasing narrative symmetry, then, to the fact that her first big career break also came by way of the National Portrait Gallery: Last May, Prachakul, who is 41 and entirely self-taught, won the BP Portrait Award, the annual portraiture competition held by the gallery, beating out 1,981 other entrants from 69 countries for the 35,000 pound top prize. (For the first time since 1997, the oil company was not involved in the judging.) We are speaking on the eve of her current show, “14 Years” — the name, of course, a nod to the period of time during which she came into her own as a painter — which opened at San Francisco’s Friends Indeed Gallery on Feb. 1. It is her first solo show stateside, but also her first major show anywhere, as she had trouble finding gallery representation until she received the award...READ MORE

Cover Image: Jiab Prachakul sits in front of one of her paintings, “Portrait of Pieralvise” (2019), in the Lyon, France, apartment she shares with her husband. Credit Letizia Le Fur