Until We Meet Again (Sources)
Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt
Opening Saturday 11 April, 2 pm
With the artists in conversation with Dr Yvonne Low
Exhibition runs 11 April to 9 May 2026
The Cross Art Projects
Conversation: Dr Yvonne Low with artists Helen Grace & Phatpawan Suwannakudi, 11 April 2026.
"It's no easy feat, nor a mere coincidence, for two people to meet, be destined to meet again, and then to truly do so. But will it be only a fleeting event, or merely something briefly noted in a diary?"
Until We Meet Again (Sources) is a dialogue between Helen Grace and Phaptawan Suwannakudt that charts shifts in gender roles across cultures — Australia, Thailand and Hong Kong — over a period of fifty years. This exhibition is a celebratory revisiting of Until We Meet Again จนกว่าเราจะพบกันอีก held at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) in 2025.
The exhibition is an installation-sculpture, composed of memory traces over these decades. The artists have each lived through wars and motherhood; destruction and creation. They are guided by serendipity and synchronicity and real and imagined intersections as they explore the times and spaces that have shaped their lives and their art practices.
The installation draws partly on these spatial experiences and partly on the stories of small lived moments set beside world histories and regional histories, that span Thailand, Australia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The artists dream of borderless worlds, just before fear and darkness begin to obscure the openness they seek. This historical and panoramic narrative is realised through spatial composition – comprising video screens and painted screens.
This new work emerged through a process of dialogue and exchange that included circulating images and translations as well as site visits. The narratives touch on the influence of popular culture and the flows of time and water—the Chao Phraya beside which Phaptawan was born in Bangkok Noi, and the aquaculture systems of Gunditjmara Country, where Helen was born.
On Gunditjmara Country, the artists visited cultural landscapes, meeting with elders and encountering aspects of Country together for the first tune in this volcanic plain, where ancient aquaculture systems were engineered for eel trapping and crop cultivation over millennia, they were immediately struck by a geological feature — Mount Elephant, a scoria cone formed by a volcanic eruption more than 30,000 years ago. The elephant in the landscape speaks to those who live with it, although many European setters failed to recognise the intricacy of Indigenous engineering present all along, in plain sight.
Both artists have returned to the landscapes of their childhood, accompanied by one another walking familiar paths and undertaking imagined water journeys to reimagine their origins. In Bangkok No and in Western Victoria, they reconnect with ancestors, landscapes, stories, and dreams. This exhibition brings together the practices of two established senior women artists, allowing them to extend their work in new directions. A return to source is always the beginning of renewal.
Until We Meet Again, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, August to November 2025
Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
Helen Grace, Bang Pa-In, Thailand, 1975 (vintage silver gelatin work print)
Helen Grace, Thailand, 1975 (vintage silver gelatin work print)
Helen Grace, Thailand, 1975 (vintage silver gelatin work print)
(Still from) Helen Grace, Five Tales of Future Dreams, Video Installation, 5 channels, 7 mins duration each. Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
(Still from) Helen Grace, Five Tales of Future Dreams, Video Installation, 5 channels, 7 mins duration each. Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
Until We Meet Again: Helen Grace & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), 2025.
ARTISTS
Phaptawan Suwannakudt
Suwannakudt (b. Thailand,1959) is based in Sydney. She trained as a classical mural painter at her father’s side and, after his death, led a team of painters from the 1980s to 1990s, working on Buddhist temples throughout Thailand. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, Thailand and internationally including at the 18th Biennale of Sydney; Bangkok Art Biennale, Thailand 2018; Asia TOPA, Art Centre Melbourne 2020; The National at the Art Gallery of New South Wales 2021; Jakarta Biennale 2021, Line Work: The River of the Basin, Penrith Regional Gallery 2021 and project Leave it and Break no Hearts, 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok.
She is a member of the curatorial group Womanifesto – which exhibited at The Cross Art Projects in 2023 as The Womanifesto Way, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Resources
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Mural project for Tan Kudt Wat Theppon, Bangkok 2024-2025
Inheriting the Brush, Bangkok Post, March 2026
Fear No Power: Five Fearless Women, National Gallery Singapore, January-November 2026. More information.
Women Imagining Otherwise | Conversation with “Fear No Power” Artists, National Gallery Singapore.
Artists website https://www.phaptawansuwannakudt.com/
Helen Grace
Grace is an award-winning filmmaker, new media producer, artist, writer and teacher, based in Sydney (Wangal Country) and (formerly) Hong Kong. For more than four decades Grace’s documentary photographs have served as a critical archive, capturing the evolution of feminism and queer politics in Australia. Chronicling the social and political context of some of modern Australia’s most impactful protest, or activist movements, Grace’s work is enduringly relevant.
Her recent projects include Biennale of Sydney, 2026, Until We Meet Again, (with Phaptawan Suwannakudt), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2025, Justice for Violet and Bruce, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, 2022, The Housing Question (with Narelle Jubelin), Penrith Regional Galleries, Home of the Lewers Bequest, 2019.
Resources
Until We Meet Again, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre
25th Biennale of Sydney: Rememory, Helen Grace, 2026
Artist’s website: https://www.helengraceprojects.com/about
Yvonne Low
Yvonne is an art historian whose research centres on Southeast Asian art, Chinese diaspora cultures, and women’s artistic practice. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney where she teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Asian modernities, gender and sexuality in Asian art, and curating. Her work brings together decolonial, feminist, and digital approaches to reframe canonical art histories.
Since 2016, Yvonne has collaborated with Thai-Australian artist Phaptawan Suwannakudt on several infoprojects. She co-curated the exhibition Retold-Untold Stories: Phaptawan Suwannakudt (SCA Gallery, University of Sydney, 2016) and co-organised The Womanifesto Way: Sydney Gathers (4A centre for contemporary asian art, 2023). These exhibitions were prefigured in her scholarly work with and on the Womanifesto collective, a Bangkok-based feminist art initiative of which the artist is a key member: Archiving Womanifesto: An International Art Exchange, 1990s – Present (2019, Curators: Varsha Nair, Nitaya Ueareeworakul, Phaptawan Suwannakudt at The Cross Art Projects.)
Yvonne Low has written on Phaptawan Suwannakudt ‘s practice, including a chapter in the Routledge volume Iconic Works by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces (2021), a biographical entry for AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (2025), and a published conversation with the artist in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (2025). She serves on the editorial committee of the forthcoming Womanifesto Online Anthology (Power Publications), and on the editorial board of Southeast of Now journal.