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[title]‘It didn't start with a grand philosophy,’ he says.
‘I had already experimented with drawing so many different things, and at some point, I just wanted to look closer at what was right in front of me.’
What was right in front of him turned out to be enough. A spoonful of nam pla prik. A condiment tray. The kind of thing you’d barely notice at lunch. O Terawat noticed. Years later, those everyday objects have become some of his most recognisable works. The Bangkok-based artist and design director – known simply as O – has spent years turning the vocabulary of the Thai table into a body of work that operates somewhere between still life painting and visual poetry. Not hyperrealism, he'd insist, though the precision is undeniable. Not quite commercial illustration either, though his client list suggests otherwise. He's done both, often at the same time. These days, he no longer worries about the distinction.
‘Aesthetics shouldn't require a passport to cross between commercial and fine art,’
he says.
‘I used to doubt myself back in the day, trying to figure out which side of the fence I belonged on. But I've moved past that. Ultimately, I'm just someone who loves drawing.’
That love goes back as far as he can remember. Drawing was always the first instinct – the thing that happened when something caught his eye. ‘Whenever I saw something beautiful, I just felt this intense urge to figure out how to draw it.’ Over time that instinct found a focus, one that makes obvious sense the more you think about it: food is the most intimate, available, universally charged subject there is. It asks nothing of you conceptually and gives everything back emotionally.
But O is careful not to over-romanticise what he does. His paintings succeed, he believes, when they trigger a genuine memory of taste and texture – not his own memories specifically, but something more transferable. ‘I'm looking for something more universal,’ he says. ‘Something that everyone can connect with.’ The dish on the canvas is less a personal confession than a shared prompt. The viewer brings the rest.
That quality of connection – quiet, direct, unhurried – is what has driven his practice out of Bangkok and into rooms he probably didn't plan to be in. International collectors found him. Brands came calling. ‘I didn't set out with a global strategy,’ he says. ‘I just focused on creating work that felt authentic to me. It was a beautiful surprise to see that a shared love for art and visual culture truly transcends borders.’ There's no false modesty in it. He seems genuinely to mean it.
The Hermès collaboration – a Maison & Maison scarf inspired by masan, the traditional woven horse motifs found in Thai basketry and folk craft – could have been the outlier, the commission that demanded a different register. But O sees it as continuous with everything else. ‘Just like food, masan is an everyday object hidden in plain sight,’ he says.
‘Whether it's an artisan or a chef, the effort and discipline are identical.’ His process, wherever it's applied, is essentially the same: find the thing hiding in plain sight, look at it properly, show other people what you saw.
With AngloThai, the London restaurant where half-Thai chef John Chantarasak reinterpreted Thai cuisine through British produce, the brief was more layered. (Read our interview with Chef John here.)
O wasn't being asked to paint Thai food – he was being asked to visualise a refraction of it, a cuisine in conversation with itself. ‘At that level, food becomes a universal language,’ he says.
‘The design became a reflection of that shared philosophy – where the focus is entirely on the soul of the dish rather than its geography.’
Back in Bangkok, the city itself moves fast enough to keep up with him. O grew up in a place that doesn't hold still, as we all know – ‘constantly shifting, evolving, yet never losing that sense of deep familiarity’ – and credits that particular texture of life, consciously or not, with something in his practice. The versatility, the ease across styles and mediums. ‘In a way,’ he says, ‘that mirrors the very nature of Bangkok itself.’ He sees the city's pace as evolution rather than loss. The chaotic mix of old and new is ‘a living, breathing landscape that forces you to keep creating.’
As for the paintings themselves – ask him what's hardest and he'll tell you it's fine particles. Icing sugar. Salt. The way light behaves on something microscopic. It's a technical answer, and it's telling. His investment is in the problem of rendering, not the problem of meaning. The meaning, he seems to believe, takes care of itself.
If he could leave behind a single painting – one Thai dish as his entire legacy – he knows exactly which one.
‘I would leave behind my drawing of Nam Pla Prik,’ he says.
‘It always surprises me how much people connect with it, but I guess that's because it's a daily companion on every Thai table. By capturing it with a sense of nostalgia, it bridges a shared cultural memory with my own visual identity.’
That's the line that stays with you. In the end, it comes back to Nam Pla Prik. A tiny bowl of fish sauce, a few chillies, a life spent at the edge of every Thai meal. There every day. Invisible until it isn't.
O Terawat's first official limited print collection launches June 5 at oterawat.com.