Niran Chanhom

My name is Niran Chanhom. I am a Thai artist living and working in Rawai, on the southern tip of Phuket, where the sea is never far and the jungle meets the shore. For me, this place is not a backdrop - it is the source.
My work spans painting and sculpture, but it is the masks that tell the most honest story. Each one begins with wood that the ocean has already shaped- driftwood pulled from the sea, worn by salt and time and distance. I don't know where it has been. That mystery is part of what I work with.
I am also a volunteer in local mangrove conservation programs - collecting plastic waste from the shoreline, protecting the coastal forests that filter the water and shelter the wildlife of this island. What the ocean gives me in material, I try to give back in care.
My paintings speak a different language - simplified, almost archetypal figures against fields of raw colour. A fisherman holding his catch. A woman whose face is half ocean, with fish swimming where her thoughts should be. I am drawn to what is essential: the body, the sea, the creature, the act of living close to nature.
The masks carry something else - humour, spirit, a certain wildness. They are not tribal artifacts. They are characters. Each one has something ...